by Allen Salkin
Eileen tried to widen Mario’s appeal. She spent some of her increased programming budget sending Mario to Nice, Barcelona, and Valencia for a food travel show, Mediterranean Mario. She changed the set of Molto Mario, adding three stools to the kitchen so three guests—friends, food experts, journalists—could taste what he cooked and fire off questions for the maestro.
On one of the new Molto episodes, the three stools were occupied by Bill Buford, who was writing a book about his experiences working in Mario’s kitchen called Heat; Ed Levine, a food writer; and Anthony Bourdain, the head chef at New York’s Les Halles bistro and an aspiring author.
“My friends Bill, Ed, and Tony are here,” said Mario at the top of the half hour. Bill and Ed managed to fire off questions amidst Mario’s cascading patter of stories and instructions. Tony did not get a word in edgewise.
“They were just my friends. People I could count on. People I knew would show up. They would also not vomit when they ate tripe at eight o’clock in the morning.”
—MARIO BATALI
Even with the warmth of the new format, Mario and Erica Gruen battled when it came time to negotiate a new contract for Molto. Tired of answering to the network’s whims, Mario wanted full creative control. Erica refused and ended production. The shows kept running on the air, but for a time he was out.
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The network staff remained worried about the changes Scripps might make, but tried to function normally. There had been so many ownership changes in such a short time that coping amid flux came relatively easy.
To promote the forthcoming season to advertisers and journalists, Heidi produced a sharp-looking promotional book. The cover had images of the network’s universe of stars: Jennifer of Two Fat Ladies in a hunting cap, pointing a rifle at the viewer; David Rosengarten and Donna Hanover; Robin Leach in a tiki shirt touting Gourmet Getaways; Sara Moulton; Mario Batali in a pineapple-print Hawaiian shirt holding a fishing rod with a sausage and a tomato baited onto the hook; Emeril; Curtis Aikens; the Too Hot Tamales; and Sissy Biggers.
The copy began, “Feel it. Taste it. Smell it. See it . . . Anyway you sense it, Food Network is sizzling with success.” There was a “lift and sniff” tab covering the image of a cup of coffee. A strip of packing bubbles was glued over the image of an ear of corn. “Press,” the instructions went, “to hear the corn pop.”
Food Network was the second-fastest-growing cable network, lagging behind only HGTV, the promotional book bragged. Its audience was wealthy, married, and had young children and plenty of expendable income, the sort of people one would expect to be drawn to information about fine food. Research from Nielsen and Mediamark found that, compared to other networks, Food’s viewers were more likely to be part of couples with two incomes over $50,000 a year than any other network, and were far more likely to own a luxury imported car. Internet traffic was way up: 11,000 unique visitors a day in 1997 to 44,000 in 1998. Daily page views had risen from 131,000 to 422,000. Heidi dialed up her media assault. In an article in the Los Angeles Times in February 1998, she noted that men made up 40 percent of the audience, a surprise to some who viewed cooking as women’s work. She created a clever phrase to explain it: “I think men have childhood memories of their families gathering in the kitchen, or maybe it’s a nostalgic thing with their mothers preparing meals for the family. I call it the edible complex.”
The article reported that Food Network was attracting “blue chip advertisers” like American Express, Toyota, and General Mills, but noted that some were asking the same questions the men of ProJo had faced when they first pitched the network to investors: Was food too narrow a subject to thrive 24/7 and would “viewers eventually . . . tire of such narrowly focused programming?”
If being criticized is a sign of respect, Food was given an Everest of respect in November 1998, a few weeks from its fifth anniversary, when Amanda Hesser, an influential dining reporter at The New York Times, paid a visit to Emeril Live. The resulting article was a butchery lesson. The reporter was passed a turkey sandwich Emeril had made for the cameras: “I took a bite,” Hesser wrote. “It was a bad turkey sandwich. A very bad turkey sandwich. The bread was greasy, the turkey was dry, and the orange mystery cheese wasn’t even melted.”
She called Emeril “more jester than cook,” “a zookeeper,” and “the antithesis of the thoughtful, methodical Ms. Child.” She quoted food-world luminaries, including Michael Batterberry, the founder of Food Arts magazine, who said: “A lot of professional foodies are a bit dismayed at the tone of the program. It really smacks a little bit of the wrestling ring or the roller derby.”
Someday, such criticisms of Food Network chefs would be numbingly familiar and glance off toughened flesh, but this was a cutlass gash across the tender belly of the young network.
At a book signing in Chicago two weeks after Hesser’s article, Emeril, hurt, told a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, “Just because I have fun don’t mean I’m not serious. I take my reputation seriously. I’ve been working on mine for twenty-eight years.” His show did have a useful message, he said. “You should have fun in the kitchen. . . . That’s who I am. Most people get it, some don’t.”
Hesser had written that Emeril’s shows were reaching up to 294,000 households a day in 1998, far more than Julia Child in her heyday. Erica was still hoping Julia could be lured to make more appearances on Food Network, and that her halo of food world credibility might keep critics like Hesser at bay. But it was Erica’s decision to get rid of Sue Huffman that cost the network a few more years of Julia’s semiregular presence. Shortly after Sue left, Julia’s assistant sent a letter to the network canceling a Thanksgiving special she had been contemplating.
Julia remained interested in the fate of the network, however. In 1998, she wrote to Erica complaining that she couldn’t see Food Network at her home in Cambridge or in Santa Barbara, California, where she had begun spending winters. The cable providers in those cities did not yet carry it.
On April 9, 1998, Erica wrote to inform her that Cox Cable was adding Food Network to the channel lineup in Santa Barbara, where Julia would be able to watch her own classic PBS shows Monday through Saturday at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday at noon.
“We’ll get to Cambridge someday! The network is doing very well, though—we’ll be in thirty-five million by year’s end. . . .” Later that year, Erica wrote another letter, almost pleading, “Thank you for your constant support and inspiration. We’d so love to see you here again on your next New York visit.”
Erica believed that she had accomplished much at Food Network, steering it toward a new era in which the entertainment value of shows was higher and the personalities of the stars memorable. She’d brought veteran talent into the executive ranks. She’d recognized the promise of Emeril Live and helped shape it. She’d stemmed the financial losses and managed to keep things going well enough through a period of turmoil that a solid company like Scripps was willing to buy it. During her reign, the channel’s distribution had grown from sixteen million homes to thirty-four million, and its prime-time ratings had tripled.
It wasn’t losing Julia, by then in her mid-eighties, that cost Erica her position at the top of the network, or Reese’s disdain for what he saw as her overspending ways and fumbling of valuable marketing opportunities. In Reese’s 2001 book, Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN, which was largely focused on his years at CNN, he never mentioned Erica by name but referred to her as “a disastrous president,” and remarked that after he left, the network lost Julia.
Even if she had somehow forbidden Amanda Hesser from ever visiting the Emeril set and never hired a feng shui consultant, it was very unlikely that Erica would have kept her job for long once Scripps became the majority owner. Ken needed his own person in there.
“The idea was just to settle the place down a little bit. Eric was used to dealing with chaotic newsroom
s and there was a feistiness at Food. It was too intense.”
—KEN LOWE
Finally, in November 1998, the time came for Ken to make the switch at the top he had planned. It had become clear that he would not be forced to move the network to Knoxville anytime soon, and he had someone in mind to take her place who appeared to be a good blend of New York and Tennessee—Eric Ober, a former CBS news executive who was commuting from New York to Knoxville four days a week to run the Scripps television production facility. Although news articles about Erica’s departure in November 1998 noted that it came shortly after the Hesser piece, negotiations over Erica’s severance had been going on long before that, and Eric had known for weeks beforehand that he would be entrusted to carry the network to its next stage.
“Allez Cuisine!”
I say unto you: Allez cuisine!
All this buying and selling, firing and hiring, wouldn’t mean much if the network couldn’t put great shows into viewers’ homes. But as the songwriter Leonard Cohen often says, “If I knew where the good songs come from, I’d go there more often.” In late 1998, Food Network had Emeril. But after him, it had pretty much a gang of nobodies and a few half-somebodies on the air. Even as Scripps installed a new president, the business was doing only slightly better than breaking even.
The person in charge of a television network, and his or her team, approves or rejects ideas when they come knocking. Too conservative in placing bets on new shows, and it’s unlikely anything original will make it through. Too chance-taking, and money will be squandered and viewer patience exhausted before the miracle of a hit arrives. Ultimately it comes down to gut instinct. Take the right chances and the kingdom of TV riches opens. Stumble and you’re crocodile food in the moat. Everybody eventually stumbles.
Into this moment ambled the former slop bucket boy, Matt Stillman, who was about to reach into the mysterious realm of creativity where the hits live. For a time, when he came knocking with ideas, the people in charge were willing to listen.
Growing up, Matt played Dungeons & Dragons and his father inculcated in him a fascination with Greek, Indian, and Norse mythology. Matt also watched martial arts movies by the Shaw brothers, who combined heroic conflict with underlying romance. His upbringing, in short, was a brew of geeky obsessions.
In college, Matt found a bizarre cooking competition series from Japan called Ryori no Tetsujin—literally translated as Ironmen of Cooking—on a public access channel in upstate New York. Each episode—with English subtitles—was centered around an hourlong culinary battle between colorfully attired chef/warriors and presided over by a histrionic “Chairman” who wore a bejeweled cape and announced his presence by taking a loud, crunchy bite from a yellow bell pepper. The basic setup was enticing, but Matt went bonkers for the show’s underlying mythology. The Chairman was presented as a real person who had used inherited wealth to build a kitchen stadium. His stable of “Iron Chefs”—one specializing in French cuisine, one in Italian, one in Chinese, and one in Japanese—would take on challengers and, under the pressures created by competition, invent new delicacies. At the start of each show, the four Iron Chefs would rise onto a stage on hydraulic lifts, smoke billowing, their satiny robes gleaming. The challenger, whose biography was carefully told and used as explanation for his desire to test himself in this arena, might be from a popular restaurant in Japan or from another country. He would pick one of the warriors with whom to do battle, saying, for instance, “I choose Iron Chef Japanese!” The chosen Iron Chef then stepped forward. The Chairman unveiled the day’s secret ingredient, say cuttlefish, or pork belly, or apples. The timer was set: one hour to prepare a meal based on the secret ingredient.
“Allez cuisine!” the Chairman would shout, a declaration that the battle was joined.
Osamu Kanemitsu, an executive at Fuji Television, created Iron Chef around the same time Joe Langhan was concocting a food channel. Osamu’s boss, Yoshiaki Yamada, had issued a seemingly simple order: “I want you to air a culinary program on Sunday nights at 10:30.” In that era, Japanese television programmers generally had the same attitude as their counterparts in the U.S: cooking shows were for housewives and there was no audience for them at times other than on weekday afternoons or weekend mornings. Osamu decided to violate two cardinal rules of traditional cooking shows: that recipes should be set in advance and the shows set in a sedate kitchen. His new show would be improvisational and held in a busy, chaotic environment. Osamu’s concept, he explained in the fastidiously detailed Iron Chef: The Official Book, was to “create a culinary program where the menu hasn’t been decided on in an atmosphere like the Harrods food emporium.”
It was sort of about cooking, but it was really about the construction of a pressured situation where the only solution was creativity.
Another Fuji Television programmer, Takashi Ishihara, proposed casting for the Chairman the musical actor Takeshi Kaga (born Shigekatsu Katsuta), who had played Jean Valjean in the Japanese production of Les Misérables. The format evolved to include a team of scurrying assistants for each chef, a play-by-play commentator assisted by a roving reporter, and a shifting panel of judges who offered comments during the cooking and at the end tasted each dish and declared a winner.
Mirroring Food Network, Iron Chef debuted in the fall of 1993—and faced low ratings. But with format tweaks, Iron Chef became popular in Japan, breaking the same ground as Emeril Live, showing that by injecting entertainment into a cooking show the audience could include men, women, and children.
A few years after its Japanese debut, Iron Chef first started attracting notice in the United States when it was aired with subtitles on KTSF 26, an Asian channel in the San Francisco Bay Area, and other Asian television outlets in Los Angeles, Hawaii, and parts of New York and New Jersey. Soon calls and letters poured into the San Francisco station from viewers of various ethnicities, expressing how much they loved it. It moved Iron Chef to an 8 p.m. slot on Saturday nights, and by 1998, the show had become a local cult phenomenon. In the bohemia of Oakland’s warehouse district, a fan staged a mock Iron Chef battle, attracting three hundred partygoers. Sake and soy sauce companies had long advertised, but soon American Airlines and computer makers bought time. An English-language fan website was launched and a drinking game developed: take a sip every time a judge says, “I think he may steam that.”
Matt saw the show as a medieval martial arts series with specialized weapons: gleaming sushi knives, stone pestles, whirring quick-freeze ice cream makers. The secret ingredients—salted salmon! eggplant!—were like things decided upon by the roll of a twenty-sided die in Dungeons & Dragons. He saw each challenger chef as a knight arriving from a far-off kingdom to challenge a master warrior on his home turf, the hallowed jousting ground of Kitchen Stadium.
Unlike the show’s fans anywhere else, Matt worked at a place that had the power to spread the good news of Iron Chef—if only he could convince management to put it on the air. When he was still a new hire making $17,000 a year, he’d shown Joe Langhan a videotape. Joe had recognized the wacky beauty of Two Fat Ladies, but nixed Iron Chef: “Too weird.” Soon after Eileen took him on as her assistant, he began gushing about the show to her.
Others at the network were noticing the show independently. Erica Gruen’s husband had seen it on a Japanese channel carried in Kew Gardens, Queens, where they lived. One evening, he called Erica into the living room. “Oh, my God,” her husband said. “You’ve got to come in and see this show. It’s Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! on speed!” Erica asked Eileen to reach out to the show’s producers to see if broadcast rights were available. Eileen had seen Fuji Television reps pitching it at a national cable convention in New Orleans. She figured that if the show was running on an obscure Japanese channel in Queens, American rights couldn’t be too expensive. She made inquiries.
Nevertheless, Eileen was skeptical. Iron Chef was a bizarre program made in a foreign language and the c
hefs used many ingredients Americans had never heard of. In the late 1990s, not many supermarkets carried kale, let alone sea urchin. Eileen knew that the odds of Iron Chef getting on the air were slim. Still, the show, as weird as it was, fit in with what she said she was trying to do, namely, expand the network from cooking to food in all its aspects. Iron Chef was certainly, as Heidi’s slogan had it, “full of flavor.”
Matt’s enthusiasm for Iron Chef motivated her. “You have to do this,” he beseeched her. “This is what you want to do.” Eileen wanted Matt to feel he was important at the network. She knew Fuji had been shopping the show around, but she encouraged Matt to think it was his baby. If she let her young, curly-haired charge think the idea was his, he’d work hard on it. In the unlikely case that the show landed on the air, it could give him confidence and help his career.
“This is amazing,” Eileen told him. “How did you know about this?”
He told her how he’d seen it in college and had been a believer in its potential for years.
“I was just so passionate about it, so into it, totally lit up by it, by doing all this cool programming stuff. It felt like this was my creative moment. I was so sure this was going to be a breakout. I knew I was responsible for making it come to pass, to be the best show it could be.”
—MATT STILLMAN