by Allen Salkin
Jeff changed the name of Food News and Views to the sleeker In Food Today, and pushed the show to be more entertaining.
He defended some territory. George Babick’s team had been trying to sell advertisers on the network’s audience of women twenty-five to fifty-four years old. Ratings were showing that more than half of the audience were working women—except for one show, Molto Mario. Its audience was predominantly male. George would argue at every meeting: “Let’s not renew Mario. He’s not bringing the audience that we wanted.”
Jeff refused to cancel the show because he saw Mario as a larger-than-life media personality essential to the network’s brand. Regular people knew who Mario was. “Yeah, we’re not hitting the exact audience, but we’re getting a lot of buzz, and the guy’s got star potential,” he countered. He doubled down, approving the production of a commercial to improve Mario’s ratings. In it, Mario, still the head chef at Pó, was shown from behind stirring pots and then waving his arms as if he were a symphony conductor while an operatic song rang out, ending with:
Mario Batali
Is cooking now for youuuuu!
—
Reese had hired Steven Jon Whritner as head of marketing with the promise of a top-notch marketing team and a healthy budget, neither of which had ever materialized. On Whritner’s first day in August 1995, Reese had asked, “Okay, Mister Head of Marketing, what’s the first thing you are going to tackle?”
“I’m going to redesign that God-awful logo,” Whritner replied.
Reese flushed a bright shade of purple and managed to spit out, “I designed that logo.” He forbade his new hire from touching it.
But Jeff understood the importance of logos and brand names. The right logo can burrow into a customer’s brain and lodge itself there forever. “TVFN” did not exactly roll off the tongue, and the logo, designed to look like a cloche, a domed French serving platter, could easily be mistaken for a thin black rainbow with a fungus sprouting from the top. He allowed Whritner to ask the TVFN board for $250,000 to hire a West Coast design firm, Pittard Sullivan, to remake the logo. Reese—still a board member—fulminated that redesigning a perfectly serviceable logo was nonsense that wouldn’t help the bottom line, but he did not have enough sway to vote it down.
Whritner came back with several options for Jeff, all of which dropped “Television” from the network’s name. (The legal name remains Television Food Network.)
One weekend Jeff laid out the final choices on his dining room table and asked his wife, Beverly, to take a look. She was artsy and more the network’s target audience than he. She pointed to one in which the word “food” appeared in a slightly italicized, all lowercase font and “NETWORK” in tight caps stacked underneath it, the first two letters of each word set inside a circle. Beverly thought the design was feminine, classy, and simple. “I like that one the best,” she said. It remained the basic Food Network logo until 2013. It also came with a new slogan, suggested by Pittard Sullivan, “We’re Really Cooking,” replacing the original, rarely used “Everybody Eats.”
Next, in what was a key addition to the broadcast schedule, Jeff approved the network’s purchase of the rights to the British show Ready, Steady, Cook. Two chefs were paired with two amateurs, supplied with a grocery bag of food, and given twenty minutes to cook something. The finished dishes were shown to the studio audience, who then voted on the winning team based only on which plate looked more delicious.
It was an early foray into cooking as a competition sport and bridged the gap between home cooks and chefs, the underlying message being, see, you can be inventive at home with little time and cheap ingredients. Food Network Americanized the name to Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! and rented a studio large enough for an audience. Rounding up the crowd was not easy. Popular shows that taped in New York, such as The Ricki Lake Show and Late Night with David Letterman, had no trouble, but getting bodies in seats for a game show on a network few people watched was a challenge. Even after hiring audience-wrangling companies, they regularly came up short. One Food Network staffer often had to hit the sidewalks around the studio rounding up homeless people by promising them they could eat the food when shooting was done.
Robin Young hosted Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! during the first season. She would stand hip to hip with the competitors and engage them in banter while they tried to cook: “What’s your plan with that chicken?” “Is it tough cooking under this time pressure?” In a restaurant kitchen, the chef would have had a difficult time resisting the urge to prick Young’s carotid artery with a paring knife to stop her infernal banter. Still, seeing how precisely and safely real chefs could work under pressure was instructive and entertaining.
The show’s success marked a cultural breakthrough. On the 1996 Thanksgiving episode of Friends, then the top-rated NBC comedy, Chandler, who was feeling particularly attractive, bragged to Joey, “From now on I get the dates and you have to stay home on Saturday nights watching Ready . . . Set . . . Cook!”
The day after the episode aired, the Food Network staff greeted each other with three words: “Oh, my God!” followed by four more: “Can you believe it?” They’d been noticed by Hollywood!—even if their show was being used as a symbol of a pathetic life.
—
As the channel now known as Food Network passed its second birthday, its roster of enthusiastic chefs, writers, and academics who had devoted their lives to food was offering TVFN households throughout the country a peek into a special world they could join: Just follow Mario Batali’s advice and drizzle a little vinegar tableside on each portion of the guinea hen you’d just seared—don’t know what guinea hen is? Watch and learn. Adopt Jack McDavid’s you-can-do-it attitude and try Grilled Day Boat Scallops over Elderberry Wood with Peas and Apples in Grilled Red Pepper Sauce. Or wow your buddies by doing like Emeril and making fried pickles with spicy dipping sauce to munch while watching football. Beats Ruffles.
Because Food Network had hours to fill, it could take viewers into formerly obscure pockets of high and low cuisine no other channel had had the time, nor the brief, to mine. On an episode of the restaurant review show, Dining Around, the hosts, now the respected critic Alan Richman with Nina Griscom, passionately discussed the change of chefs at Manhattan’s legendary four-star French restaurant Lutèce. “When renowned chef André Soltner sold Lutèce in October 1994, everybody was worried . . .” Alan began. “And while the world held its breath waiting to see what would happen to one of the world’s most prestigious French restaurants, award-winning chef Eberhard Müller stepped right in. . . . It was like starting in center field after Mickey Mantle retired.”
Video from the restaurant showed the new chef and his staff preparing an appetizer of crabmeat over potatoes with black truffles and vinaigrette. In the studio, Nina and Alan dug into servings of the appetizer that had been carried across town from Lutèce. Nina weighed in on how Müller was stepping into Soltner’s shoes. “He is bringing this restaurant into contemporary days and putting his own name on it, and I think he can be the new Soltner,” she pronounced.
“There is no question about it,” concurred Alan. On a recent visit to Lutèce, he had sampled the guinea hen with cabbage. “He has all the skill. . . . If you do classic food perfectly, there is nothing better.”
In most of the towns and cities the network was reaching in 1996, very few viewers would have known the names of the chefs at their local restaurants, let alone the name of a foreigner who toiled with a boning knife in a cramped kitchen on the Upper East Side. But Food Network opened a window into a world where such things mattered. Everybody in the world of fine dining cared about Lutèce, and for the first time, you—anyone—could become one of those somebodies simply by tuning in.
Some viewers were clearly entranced by it. One night while Jeff was having dinner with Curtis Aikens at a Times Square hotel, a cab driver rushed into the restaurant and came up to the table.
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“Curtis! Curtis!” he yelled. “Hey, man, I just wanted to meet you! I just, I watch you all the time on the Food Network.”
“Who are you?” Jeff asked.
“I’m driving a cab! I was just driving by and I saw you two in the window!”
David Rosengarten had a similar experience in upstate New York when his six-year-old daughter insisted on stopping at McDonald’s. He pulled into a gas station in Monticello, a city with a cable company carrying Food Network, to ask where he could find one, and someone there, stunned, exclaimed: “David Rosengarten wants to go to McDonald’s!?”
By 1996, two New York restaurant publicists, Steven Hall and Karine Bakhoum, had become accustomed to receiving calls at 10 a.m. from TVFN producers such as Rochelle Brown and Lauren Bright asking if they had someone, anyone, they could send over to do a demo later that day on In Food Today or Talking Food. Steven realized he could attract new chefs as clients by promising them television. The owner of Cibo, a Tuscan-New American restaurant, hired Steven’s company and introduced him to their head chef, Tyler Florence. At twenty-five, Tyler was five years out of culinary school, having attended Johnson & Wales’s Charleston, South Carolina, campus. When Steven met Tyler, saw his wide shoulders, big hands, and farm-boy good looks, and heard the way he spoke with a clear but comfortable drawl, Steven knew he would be sending the hunk over to the TV channel soon.
Tyler was familiar with the TV business. Following his parents’ divorce, his mom had been the business manager of the NBC station in Greenville, South Carolina. Tyler and his older brother spent many after-school hours wandering the studio while the local news was done live. As a boy, he had helped his mother out at home by learning to cook. Nevertheless, after Steven had sent him to compose a salad with morel mushrooms for David Rosengarten and Donna Hanover’s daily food news show, Tyler walked off the set thinking he had botched it by sweating and mumbling the whole way through. But the show’s producer rushed up to him offstage, gushing, “That was really great! Can you come back again?”
Tyler was shocked. “Absolutely.” That night he was sitting at a desk in the basement of Cibo, barely able to move because the electricity inside him was so intense. As preparations for dinner were going on around him, Tyler thought that as uncomfortable as he’d been, he’d also felt at home in that tiny studio full of cameras and soundmen and cooking equipment.
“I knew that my life after that moment would be different somehow. It manifested in wanting it really, really bad. Wanting it really bad.”
—TYLER FLORENCE
Tyler had never realized before that he could be on TV cooking. It was gratifying to be cast as a teacher on TV and to be given an opportunity to propound a philosophy of cooking—his was that gathering around the table with friends or family to eat a homemade meal is important. Exposed to the possibility of such a career, Tyler did what thousands would do in the coming years—devoted everything he had to getting his own cooking show. He vowed to stay in touch with everyone he could at Food Network. He would invite the TV people to his restaurant, treat them like royalty, and always be ready and willing if producers needed a last-minute replacement for anything. He would know his lines and prep his own food and make it easy for them to have him back.
It’s a game, he told himself, and at this point it’s my game to win or lose.
—
While David, Curtis, and the Tamales were occasionally recognized on the street, Emeril had become the network’s most identifiable personality thanks to the popularity of Essence of Emeril. Keeping him happy was important. Shortly before Reese left in November 1995, he told Joe he had promised Emeril that the network would produce a special to promote his second cookbook, Louisiana Real and Rustic, due to be published the following fall.
But Joe, whose job title was head of production, had let months go by without doing anything. As the book’s publication date approached, he realized that he had received far more requests from friends and acquaintances to watch Essence of Emeril tapings than any other show. There was no room for a studio audience, so on the occasions when Joe let one or two people come to watch, they had to stand against a back wall. Joe would ask Emeril if it was okay and the chef would always say, “Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it.”
Emeril was still trying to shoot six or more episodes a day. By the fourth day, no amount of espresso could keep his energy level up. But Joe noticed that when there was a guest in the studio, especially a child, Emeril came alive. Once a twelve-year-old named Ross was a guest and Emeril kept asking him, “Ross, what do you think of that?” Joe realized that Emeril thrived when he had someone to talk to besides the regular crew.
“What if we did a show where we had a bunch of his fans in the studio?” Joe asked himself.
Bam!
He called Emeril and described the idea: an hourlong cooking show in front of a live audience.
“That sounds interesting,” Emeril said. “Let me call you back.” Emeril had been increasing his schedule of public appearances, including live cooking demos to promote his first restaurant in Las Vegas, Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House. His restaurant team, including his business manager, Tony Cruz, and his right-hand woman, Marti Dalton, noticed a side of Emeril they had not seen before. Emeril could be taciturn in private, gazing down at the ground or quietly working the sauté station at one of his restaurants. But with three years of television under his belt, he was starting to ham it up as a public performer, clearly enjoying the crowd’s loud responses.
Fifteen minutes after Joe had proposed the live special, Emeril called him back. “Let’s do it,” he said.
—
Joe knew he needed a good pitch in place before he asked Jeff for permission to do Emeril’s special. He had decided to shoot two of them, hoping at least one would turn out good enough to use as a pilot if it made sense to do a regular series. Once the Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! production delivered the necessary studio space, Joe presented the idea in money-saving terms. “Hey, Jeff,” Joe said. “We’re spending all this money to get the live audiences for Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! What do you think of trying a special show with Emeril over there?”
Jeff was game. “Shit, what the hell, might as well,” he said. “Emeril is such a ham.”
Joe, through a crucial barrier, wasted little time mobilizing. He told audience wranglers for Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! to put in extra effort finding an Emeril-friendly crowd to fill the bleachers on launch day. No homeless people! He rallied the kitchen staff, telling them it would be raucous, like a rock-and-roll gig. “Why can’t a food show,” he asked, “be concert-like?”
Before shoot day on the Emeril special, there was another change at the top. Jeff had agreed to work at the network for two months, and it had now been more than six. In that time, he had been working with Jack Clifford and others at ProJo to find a permanent president for Food Network. Jack stipulated two requirements: that it be a woman, who would better understand the target audience, and that she come from the advertising industry, since selling ads was the key to turning a profit.
One name that emerged was Erica Gruen, whom Jack, George, and Reese had known for years. As an executive at Saatchi & Saatchi, Erica had started the agency’s fledgling online advertising division and prepared a widely read annual report on the state of the cable industry, in which she reviewed every network, explained its programming, and noted its ratings and household penetration.
Her experience with the Internet made her an early Web guru. In February 1996, she had been hired away from Saatchi by Merkley Newman Harty, but George Babick had been pushing hard for her at Food Network. Within days of her move to Merkley, Jack contacted Erica to gauge her interest in becoming CEO. Running a television network was too tantalizing a challenge to pass up, and Erica leapt.
Jeff’s tenure had been brief but effective. He had streamlined the operation, brought sense to its mark
eting efforts, calmed nerves in Providence, and approved some crucial new programming. As he returned to Rhode Island, cable trade magazines reported the new hire and praised ProJo for choosing a woman to run a network. But before Erica showed up for her first official day of work, she upset those who had advocated for her. When she studied the network’s financials, she saw a rescue mission: Others disagreed but to her eyes, Reese had left a mess, Jeff had stoked it, and it was her job to clean it up. She thought Reese’s business plan was preposterous and that many of his hires had been F.O.R.s. Pat O’Gorman, his wife, was still working hard as a producer (and would continue to do so for years). Erica was particularly dismayed by a deal Jeff and others had put together for distribution of Food Network in Scandinavian countries. Projections showed it would make a bit of money, but she thought the projections underestimated how much it would cost to translate the programs into various languages. She considered the whole thing a boondoggle meant to assure ProJo executives all-expenses-paid business trips to the land of tall blond women. She told Jack the deal stank and should be killed. Jack insisted that as CEO she do it herself, which she did, instantly alienating her predecessor, Jeff.
There was also a cultural difference between the moneyed world of advertising and the gritty start-up culture at Food Network. Erica reported for work wearing formal, neutral-colored pantsuits, and after she took a look at the tiny office Reese and Jeff had worked out of, she decided it would not do. She took George’s bigger, more isolated, office, displacing the man who had been her strongest advocate, hired a decorator, and ordered a renovation complete with a feng shui consultant. With a new leather sofa, designer furniture, and drapes, it totaled around $80,000.
Betty, the CFO, tried to talk Erica out of the office redo, saying, “Look, we don’t really have a budget for redecorating. I mean, we’re fighting for survival and you’re going to start buying all this expensive furniture for your office?”