From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  As Judy prepared to make other drastic and difficult changes, a gift arrived. One day in late 1999, before Judy took over, Eileen Opatut called Bobby Flay with some news.

  “I got this phone call,” she said. “I wasn’t even going to tell you about it, but I feel like I have to. Fuji Television called because they were looking for you, and they thought they could find you here. They want to come to the United States, and they want to challenge an American chef, and Tim Zagat [copublisher of the Zagat restaurant rating guides] told them that you are the quintessential American chef. I’m sure you don’t want to do this.”

  Bobby had been a fan of Iron Chef even before it debuted on Food Network. In the mid-1990s, he’d watched it in Japanese at 3 a.m after he got home from Mesa Grill. He loved competing in any game he had a chance of winning and he understood the mythic quality of the show. He would be defending his home territory, New York. This was epic.

  “Give me the number,” he said.

  He called Fuji. They explained that they were bringing the whole circus to New York for a special battle. Four Iron Chefs would be in attendance, and, if he accepted the challenge, he would be cooking against Iron Chef Japanese, Masaharu Morimoto, who happened to be living in New York at the time. Did Bobby want in?

  He was way in. “Tell me what you need from me.”

  Weeks before the scheduled battle, a crew of around fifty began arriving from Japan. They stayed at the Kitano Hotel on Park Avenue, and dozens of them showed up at Mesa Grill every night, tasting the food and asking Bobby what ingredients he used and where to buy them. Fuji had rented out the downtown nightclub Webster Hall to stage the battle. Soon the Chairman and the four Iron Chefs joined the entourage in New York.

  The coming together of the Iron Chefs at the Kitano in the spring of 2000 was not unlike the gathering of little people at the Culver Hotel in Hollywood in the fall of 1938 for the filming of the Munchkin scenes in The Wizard of Oz. According to legend, dozens of the cast members drank heavily, swung from chandeliers, and engaged in bacchanalia. In an infamous TV interview years later, Judy Garland professed that one of the diminutive actors asked her on a date.

  Kaga stayed in character as the Chairman at all times, on camera and off. From the moment he emerged from his hotel room, he was in his shining bejeweled cape and his hair was pomaded into the Dracula-on-steroids pompadour he wore on the show. When he spoke, even if it was to ask for someone to pass the soy sauce for his breakfast bento box, he did so in the same booming voice he used for the character.

  Heidi saw a big promotional opportunity in the Iron Chef cast and lined up a full schedule of media interviews and photo shoots. She also dispatched a young Food Network public relations assistant, Amy Voll, to mind the visitors.

  The very first morning, Amy called Heidi from the chefs’ hotel suite and stammered, “They’re all drunk! They’re smashed. They’re beyond, they’re just totally drunk!” At breakfast, the Iron Chefs had quaffed sake and devoured bento boxes of sushi, yakitori, and sashimi. They were speaking Japanese, so Amy did not understand what they were saying, but sensed from their throaty laughter that they were telling dirty stories. They occasionally cast a long glance her way.

  Amy typically wore formfitting jeans and a tight T-shirt to work. On the second morning at breakfast, Amy found herself standing not far from Honorary Iron Chef Japanese Michiba, the eldest of the Iron Chefs. Michiba was known for cooking with a strongly flavored stock of dried skipjack tuna and kelp, called in Japanese Inochi no Dashi, and, in English, Broth of Vigor. Apparently, his famous broth was keeping him in working order. Amy heard the sixty-nine-year-old say something in Japanese which sounded like “hunnn, huuuuuh, hoooo,” and then he lunged at her, grabbing her rear end. Amy, horrified, stepped back. Michiba attacked from the front and grabbed at her breasts. It looked to her as if he intended to twist them like old radio dials.

  Amy swatted his hands away and fled from the room, shocked and upset. She was a professional and understood how much had been invested in the Iron Chefs’ visit. She was trying to mind these esteemed visitors and now one of them had molested her. Amy phoned Heidi again. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this just happened!” she sobbed. “What am I going to do?”

  Heidi told her to get out of there. Back at the office, Amy met with Ken, who was in New York for the Iron Chef visit. He told her he would order the entire shoot and publicity campaign shut down if that was what she wanted. He put no pressure on her to continue with her work.

  “No,” Amy said. “Anytime you halt production, it costs money.” She told Ken the show must go on. Although she went back to minding the chefs, including Michiba, from then on she was never alone with them. Another assistant was assigned to stick by her side and step in if any of the chefs tried to demonstrate their vigor again.

  The night came for the big battle. Gordon Elliott was the master of ceremonies. Judges included Tim Zagat and Donna Hanover. Bobby’s adrenaline was pumping and his mother and girlfriend were in the audience (he and Robin “Kate” Connelly had split).

  At the top of the show, the Iron Chefs who were not competing, including Michiba, hit their marks and stood regally as smoke machines set a dramatic billowy background. The Chairman bit a pepper and the secret ingredient descended from the ceiling of the dance club in a disco ball. Before it was low enough to see, Bobby smelled shellfish, recognized it as lobster or crab (it was rock crab), and started thinking about how to prepare it. He quickly formulated his menu. Four dishes: crab and scallops in cilantro sauce; crab and avocado salad in a coconut shell; spicy saffron soup; and a potato and crab cake. About five minutes into the battle, Bobby was so hyped, he stuck his hand into a food processor. It was not running, but he cut his thumb badly.

  I don’t fucking believe this, he thought. He wrapped his hand in a towel and continued to cook as best he could with one hand.

  Twenty minutes later, Bobby felt water at his ankles. The sinks were leaking. He saw the wires to the ovens running through the water. When he put his hands on a stainless steel table, an electric current shot through him and vibrated hard in his cut thumb, throwing him back. At first, he did not realize what had happened, and thought the shock was a sign that he’d severed a nerve.

  When his assistant chefs discovered that electricity was running through the kitchen station, they wanted to walk off the set.

  Bobby, red hair standing on end, thumb throbbing, commanded, “We’re not fucking going anywhere. This is it. We have forty minutes to finish these dishes, let’s go!”

  On the other side, Morimoto and his two assistants were busily constructing five dishes: crab brain dip; rock crabs grilled in seaweed; crab rice in sour soup; a double hors d’oeuvre of claw meat in bean paste along with crab and asparagus with mint; and Japanese crab salad.

  The crowd was chanting. Those from outside New York yelling, “Mo-ri-mo-to!” those from the city, “Here we go, Bob-by, here we go!” With just seconds to spare, Bobby and his team finished.

  “It’s the Comeback Kid!” Tim Zagat cried, the pride of a New Yorker in his bellow. As the clock reached zero, Bobby’s sous chefs lifted him up and he stood on a cutting board. Bobby could barely breathe. His mother was crying. His thumb felt like it was hanging by a thread, and his body was reeling from the shock. The judging was still to come, but he lifted his arms up in joy. “Raise the roof, yo!” he yelled. “Raise the roof!”

  A reporter walked over to Morimoto and asked, “How did you do?”

  “I did my best.”

  “And, what about your competitor?”

  “He’s no chef.”

  “What?” she asked, as if mishearing.

  “He’s no chef.”

  “Why?”

  “He stood on the cutting board. In Japan the cutting board is sacred to us.”

  Bobby lost in a unanimous vote, and the cutting board incident sparked an internatio
nal scandal because Japan’s national pride had been offended. The media loved it. Within days of the show’s airing in June, CNN, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the New York Post ran stories casting Bobby as the bad guy for breaching international cutting board etiquette—something that before that moment no one knew existed. Time magazine called Bobby “a big whiner.”

  As far as Judy was concerned, six months into her tenure, Bobby, in one stroke, had drawn more attention to the network than all the other celebrity chefs, even Emeril, had in years of trying. In 1999, about 84,000 households tuned in to Food at any given hour; a year later 1.5 million viewers watched the Flay-Morimoto battle. By that October, the network was available in 52 million homes and was projecting annual advertising revenue to reach a record $91 million.

  “You took it on the chin for us,” she told Bobby. “I will never forget this. You have changed the Food Network.”

  That fall, Bobby was in his office at Mesa Grill and heard his assistant, Stephanie, take a call.

  She stuck her head in Bobby’s office. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Fuji Television. They want a rematch. In Tokyo. We’re not going.”

  Yes, they were, Bobby said. Another chance at supremacy.

  “Tell them we want six first-class round-trip tickets and we’ll be there.”

  Fuji brought Americans from a military base to cheer for Bobby at Kitchen Stadium, Japan. This time he won.

  “Of course, I had no idea my action would become such a big deal later on. It was my natural reaction to what Bobby did. To me, a cutting board is a place where you prepare food for customers. So stepping on it with shoes is just something I would never do.”

  —MASAHARU MORIMOTO

  Iron Chef exemplified the move away from traditional cooking shows and sober formats. Amidst the flush of success, Judy was following Ken’s mandate to make the network more fun and less focused on education. “The more that we can convince people that we’re not a cooking channel, the better,” Judy told a trade magazine. She also had her favorites and, as David had been, her not-favorites. Sara Moulton—Saint Sara the educator—of Cooking Live, Sissy Biggers of Ready . . . Set . . . Cook!, Bill Boggs of Corner Table, and others knew they were vulnerable.

  One of her first decisions was to move Emeril Live to 8 p.m. every weeknight, where the most popular show on the network could build an audience that might carry through prime time. Heidi launched a publicity campaign: “Emeril at A-T-E.”

  In order to do this, Bobby’s show Hot Off the Grill, which aired five nights a week, would have to be moved. Judy, expressing her newfound confidence in Bobby and aware that Iron Chef had put Food Network on the cultural map, and made Bobby a star, went to Mesa Grill for lunch to explain what she planned.

  “Look,” Judy said, “I just want to let you know something. I’m taking your cooking shows out of prime time. I’m putting you in daytime.”

  “What?” Bobby said. He had fought his way back onto the network. He liked things how they were.

  “We’re going to do the cooking shows in daytime. I’m going to put more entertainment-driven shows in prime time.”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind. This is the Food Network. People want to see cooking.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m doing,” Judy said.

  She told him that shows with more entertainment like Alton’s Good Eats and Iron Chef were the type of thing that would be on in prime time from then on.

  Bobby liked Alton’s show. When Judy first showed him a tape of Good Eats, he’d told her, “This is a talented guy. We don’t have anybody like this on the network. He’s on his own planet.” But now she insisted that “dump and stir” cooking shows—the kind that Dione Lucas, Julia Child, the Frugal Gourmet, and others had delivered for nearly half a century on television—would no longer be in prime time.

  It meant a lot to Bobby that Judy was taking the time to explain the direction of the network, even though he was losing his evening spot. After all, she wasn’t canceling his show. After Iron Chef, there was no question that Bobby could be fun or that he’d be a good soldier. He would survive.

  Others would not. David’s and Donna’s heads were already in the bag.

  Next Judy came for Sissy Biggers, the host of Ready . . . Set . . . Cook!

  Sissy liked her role as a game show host. She liked being on Food Network Live tours. She liked making appearances on other network morning shows where she was billed as “Food Network’s Sissy Biggers.”

  Then she received a phone call from her agent. “I just got a call from Judy Girard’s office. She said there’s no reason to come in for a meeting.” Judy had assumed Sissy would know what it meant.

  “What does that mean?” Sissy asked. She knew, but needed to hear it.

  “Judy’s taking you off the show.”

  “Babette,” Sissy said, her tone sharpening, “I’m having that meeting. If she wants to take me off the show, she has to do it in person, because I want to see what it’s like to be fired twice by the same person, and she’ll probably never get to do that again in her career, so why should we deprive ourselves of this opportunity?”

  On the train into Manhattan from her home in Connecticut, Sissy thought back a half decade to her time as cohost of a cheerful morning talk show on Lifetime with Marc Summers (the former host of Double Dare on Nickelodeon) when Judy was in programming at the network. One day, immediately after a live broadcast of Biggers and Summers, Judy called her into a meeting.

  Sissy, ebullient from the day’s show, walked into Judy’s office and complimented her. “I love that suit!”

  “You just did your last show.”

  “Forget what I said about the suit,” Sissy responded, keeping her wits despite her disappointment.

  Now Sissy steeled herself for another visit to Judy’s office by wearing her best outfit, a dark navy skirt-suit that showed her famous legs. When she was shown in, Judy said, “Sissy, I don’t think you work on television.”

  Sissy tried to stay calm. “Judy, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion.” She told the network chief that Today had booked her for a number of upcoming food segments and that she was an integral part of the Food Network’s traveling road show. It was the best Sissy had.

  It wasn’t enough; Judy said she was not going to change her mind.

  Sissy was out, but the network still thought there might be an appetite for a food competition show that was more straightforward than Iron Chef. And the premise of Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! was tidy: two chefs with two audience members as assistants, a bag of groceries, and eighteen minutes to make the best meal they could.

  Sissy had feared for weeks that she’d be replaced by someone younger and prettier. When Bobby called to tell her he’d heard that her replacement was the host of Ready . . . Steady . . . Cook! in the UK, Ainsley Harriott, who was four months older than Sissy, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  Judy was more gentle with Curtis Aikens. He had been earning around $200,000 a year for the programs he was still making for the network, including cohosting Calling All Cooks, a showcase of recipes from home cooks. When his contract expired, Judy offered him a third of what he’d been getting. Predictably, he said, “No hard feelings,” and informed the network he’d be moving on.

  Judy flew out to Los Angeles to tell Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger they were finished, too. The name of their show had been changed to Tamales World Tour, but to Judy, it was still an instructional show. All together, they’d made four hundred episodes, more than enough to use as reruns if the need arose.

  Susan was bummed out, but her girlfriend, Liz Lachman, had always told her, “You just need to do the show and know that at any point it could end. These things come and go.”

  The day Bill Boggs was told he was out, he left Food Network and walk
ed over to the 21 Club and ordered his favorite: a cheeseburger with grilled onions and a glass of wine. As he sipped his drink in the late afternoon, he stared at the empty booth where a couple of years earlier he had interviewed Deborah Norville for Corner Table. He raised his glass and toasted the air.

  As the cancellations mounted, so did complaints. What was left of the network’s old guard told Judy that something essential was being lost—the world of fine food that Alan Richman and Nina Griscom had presented, the intricacies of French wines David Rosengarten knew so much about. The grousing droned on, but had no effect on Judy.

  The cultural change at the network was underscored when it moved out of 1177 Sixth Avenue to more spacious and modern offices across the avenue at 1180, which had desks for the advertising sales and marketing departments that had previously been relegated off-site. It was more professionally decorated. In-house production and the kitchen moved to professional studios at Fifty-seventh Street and Tenth Avenue, a twenty-five-minute walk away, meaning there were fewer fruit flies, and the executive suites no longer smelled like whatever was being cooked in the central kitchen. Emeril Live was shot on the ground floor at the studios, and Sara Moulton, whom Judy found appealing for her simplicity and for the economy of her show, finally got her own permanent Cooking Live set that was scaled to her height so she could cook safely. The professional ovens had doors that did not shatter, and more space to cook. The quality of the recipes and the appearance of the finished dishes improved dramatically.

  “I’m a television person, not a food person. So my job was to take it to the next level in building it as a television network. The food thing was secondary to that, it really was. The other point of view is from the foodie point of view of what the network did and didn’t do, its effect on food culture, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”

  —JUDY GIRARD

  By the spring of 2000, Judy’s new programming schedule began taking hold. The programming day was now segregated into three clear parts: straight cooking shows, cooking shows with strong personalities, and cooking as entertainment.