by Allen Salkin
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At a luncheon to unveil Food Network’s forthcoming season, Eileen introduced Ina and told the assembed TV critics that her show “speaks to people who want to entertain with simplicity.” Her appeal was deeper than Eileen anticipated. Rachael Ray, with her blue-collar upstate roots, showed hardworking moms how to make miracles with supermarket ingredients. Paula delivered comfort from the South. Ina let viewers into a relaxed, refined life of fresh ingredients and airy spaces. It was the best kind of fantasy and it was real for Ina and Jeffrey. Although he was now a dean at Yale, spending weeknights during the school year in Southport, Connecticut, where he ate at Chinese restaurants and small diners, he came home to East Hampton on the weekends. He often appeared at the end of the show as part of “the beauty shot,” sometimes along with Ina’s friends, happily digging in to what she’d just made in the kitchen for viewers.
It was such a compelling vision that some fans began parking near Ina’s house or even poking through her hedgerow, aching for a peek into Ina and Jeffrey’s happy life. Some knocked on her door. It came to be a nuisance. But she became a fixture of the In the Kitchen—ITK—block, and the network agreed to her requests to do as little media as possible. Rachael, Paula, and Sandy were already on their way to becoming national brands, but Ina continued writing her own cookbooks and living the life in East Hampton that viewers saw on the show. She hardly remained an unknown. She continued publishing cookbooks and even starting making some endorsement deals, but she refused to join the celebrity chef festival circuit and, for the most part, sidestepped the fame machine the others were eager to step aboard. Of course, she and Jeffrey had not come from the same humble circumstances as most of the others.
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The new hosts were helping the network break into new television territory. When Comcast added Food Network to the lineup for 70,000 subscribers in the South Bend, Indiana, area in November 2003, a year after Ina’s show debuted, a reporter at the South Bend Tribune wrote a primer “to help you figure out the tempting but unfamiliar at this 24-hour, all-you-can-watch buffet.” By the network’s tenth anniversary, South Bend’s cable population was part of around seventy-nine million national subscribers.
“And they didn’t want me to do rabbit, they wanted me to do chicken breast.”
—MARIO BATALI
Meanwhile, the success of the easy meals–easy comfort hosts was beginning to provoke a backlash on chefs like Mario Batali who were still emphasizing more sophisticated cuisine. Batali had been sent to Italy to film a new show, Mario Eats Italy, in which he’d visit off-the-track villages and trattorias, the sort of places where he had learned how to cook the Italian food he brought to Babbo and Molto Mario.
Shortly before the crew was about to film Mario demonstrating how to make tripe stew—the cow’s stomach is a staple of Roman cuisine—the producer Sarah Burmeister received a call from Jeanne Shanahan, an executive in the programming department. “Don’t do a tripe stew,” Jeanne told her. “It’s disgusting.”
Sarah was taken aback. To her, chefs of Mario’s accomplishments were artists who used a plate instead of a canvas. They needed to be treated with sensitivity. “That’s one of the lead dishes at Babbo,” Sarah said. “You’re basically telling him his food is no good.”
The tripe survived, but the programming department began thinking about finding someone else to explain to the public how to cook Italian food. Perhaps an orange-clog-wearing, erudite storyteller who made pastas from chestnut flour was not the man to kindle a newfound appreciation for Italian cooking in states where you could still find only one kind of mushroom in the supermarkets.
Despite the programming department’s second thoughts, Mario was a pop-culture phenomenon. In Bill Buford’s 2002 New Yorker profile of Mario, later expanded into the book Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, he observed Mario walking the sidelines before a New York Giants game as a guest of the commissioner. Football fans in the stands recognized him.
“Hey, Molto!’” one of them shouted. ‘“What’s cooking, Mario?”’ ‘“Mario, make me a pasta!”
Soon the football crowd had started chanting, “Molto! Molto! Molto!”
Mario had leveraged this mainstream fame into a series of successful new restaurants in New York with his business partner, Joe Bastianich, and others. Those places, Osteria Lupa Romana, Esca, and Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, received strong reviews, but the power of Mario’s celebrity helped draw all sorts of customers, not just well-heeled New Yorkers who always flocked to the hot new restaurants. If you were coming into the city from Pine Brook, New Jersey, or Hewlett, Long Island, you would be likely to swap your Giants—or Jets—gear for a blazer and consider trying one of Mario’s places.
It was good restaurant business, but for its In the Kitchen block, the network was not looking to appeal to Giants fans in the way Emeril Live had done. Ina, Sandra Lee, and Rachael were aimed primarily at women who dreamed of getting food on the table fast, not an audience who wanted to learn about which dried and salted parts of the pig Italian shepherds carried with them for snacking. If a few men wanted to pause on the channel to bask in the intense gleam of Sandra Lee’s smile or to fantasize about having a mother who was as good a cook as Ina, well, that was fine, too.
Bob Tuschman found an alternative to Mario in the February 2002 issue of Food & Wine magazine. An article entitled “Let’s Do Lunch” featured Giada De Laurentiis, who appeared ready for her close-up.
(That issue of Food & Wine also contained a feature on Maria Guarnaschelli, a renowned cookbook editor, and her daughter, Alex, a rising New York chef. Bob was not moved to call the less ethereal Alex, and it would be a few years before she found herself a network fixture.)
The article of interest explained that Giada, inspired by her grandfather Dino’s love for the Neapolitan food of his youth—he had lost a fortune opening upscale Italian markets and restaurants called DDL Foodshow—had enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. She had done stints at a hotel restaurant in Marina del Rey and at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills before tiring of long restaurant hours. Her catering company, GDL Foods, was known not just for Italian food but also for California comfort staples like turkey meat loaf and chicken pot pie, made for clients like the actor and director Ron Howard. For the photo shoot at a lunch in honor of Dino, Giada, thirty-two, was photographed with a sweater over her narrow shoulders, smiling wide and holding a little furry white dog on her lap. She had made baked rigatoni, pork loin with spinach and ham, and a ricotta tart.
Bob could not phone the gorgeous, petite, honey-haired caterer fast enough to discuss a cooking show. She was open to it, even if it had not been her intention to be in show business.
Bob talked it over with Eileen. Her concern was that despite Giada’s Italian food heritage, she had been trained in a different tradition at Le Cordon Bleu and then had cooked generic fare for her catering clients. How exactly could they present her? She wasn’t the expert that Mario or any number of Italian chefs were. Ina, Rachael, and Sandra Lee had cookbooks. Giada didn’t. From their conversations came the idea that Giada could be the personality who represented “everyday Italian” cooking. She would make dishes regular people could make, not just admire as part of the sport of “armchair cooking.” This would allow the network to carry two Italian experts—Mario, the professor, and Giada, the home ec teacher.
Bob asked Giada to make a test video. A friend in TV production filmed her making a baked rigatoni, but she did not look very comfortable on camera. Eileen asked Bobby Flay to take a look at the test. “What do you think of this girl?” Eileen asked him.
“She’s really pretty,” Bobby said. “She seems like she’s good.”
“I think I’m going to give her a chance,” Eileen said.
It made sense to him. Giada seemed to know s
omething about food. She came from Hollywood royalty and probably had an intuitive understanding of show business. Bobby understood better than most of the old guard chefs that show business was what the Food Network was in now.
Eileen had a solution to Giada’s on-camera stiffness: Nigella again. But cheaper. She asked a young Food Network staff producer, Irene Wong, to study the Barefoot Contessa tapes. They could borrow some of the production technique and do a lower-budget version with Giada for a show they decided to call Everyday Italian. Irene did not consider what she was doing as stealing the Nigella formula. Yes, there were multiple takes from different angles of each cooking move, and there were close-ups of Giada explaining to the camera what the actions were, so the talking could overdub the action. But an important difference was that Irene was shooting with just a single camera, giving the director even closer control over every shot, and they rented a neutral location instead of shooting in Giada’s home, so there was less narrative backstory required.
Giada’s famous grandfather, Dino, had always questioned whether his five-foot-two granddaughter could stand up to the rigors of the kitchen—how could she even lift the heavy pots?—and the harshness of a twelve-hour shoot day could be even more brutal. Irene, accustomed to training new talent on Melting Pot, instructed Giada to smile whenever she spoke on camera, no matter what was happening around her—the same advice Sara Moulton had given Rachael. However, the space was strange to Giada, as were the borrowed cooking utensils, the water pressure, and the stoves. Trying to remember what she was supposed to say and keeping a cheerful expression on her face while occasionally burning things was a challenge. Smiling widely throughout a twelve-hour day under lights made her cheek muscles ripple with pain. But like any other new workout, her system adapted to it, and soon Giada could smile effortlessly, no matter what the circumstances.
Once her show aired, viewers asked their own questions. Some wrote to the network criticizing it for hiring a pretty young actress to host a cooking show rather than someone who knew something about cooking. Even those who liked her show began asking how she could cook so much pasta and stir in so much panna and yet stay so thin. Was she spitting out food when the camera stopped?
Giada always told people that the secret to her slender figure was that she ate small portions throughout the day rather than big heavy meals, and that she hit the gym regularly. Those who worked with her on the set knew that that was basically true—salads for lunch and only small tastes of finished dishes. But Irene and the production crew did have a secret weapon: they kept a stash of bittersweet chocolate in the freezers for Giada. When they needed to pep her up for a segment, they’d feed her a fortifying nibble of chocolate. On some twelve-hour shoot days, the little bits of chocolate seemed to be the only food she took in.
This was talent an agent could do something with. Jon Rosen, who by now had gained a reputation for making money for his Food Network clients, received a call from a lawyer in Los Angeles. “Would you be interested in Giada De Laurentiis?”
She was represented by International Creative Management, but was considering making a move. The lawyer arranged a video conference, and during the meeting, Giada told Jon she was satisfied with her book agent at ICM, but she complained of her TV agent. “I asked what he thought of my show, and he hadn’t even watched it.”
Jon told her she did not need to be treated that way. He gave her a version of the pitch he had made to Bobby: she had enormous potential, she could be a brand, there was a lot to do, and he would do it with her.
Giada signed with Jon.
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The In the Kitchen block running on Saturday and Sunday mornings was solidifying, but prime time was not as set. New research from focus groups was confirming Judy Girard’s instinct that after 7 p.m., viewers wanted more entertainment. Emeril Live filled an hour every night and was solid. Cooking Live had filled up a lot of time, and Judy found Sara’s pluck appealing, but the instructional show ended in 2002, when Sara’s Secrets, an ITK show, began taping. Unwrapped, Good Eats, and Iron Chef were slotted on various nights. But there were still hours in the schedule filled with one road show or another—$40 a Day, FoodNation, Food Finds, The Best Of—but begging for programs that could make more of a cultural and ratings mark.
Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! was gone, but Eileen believed there was still potential life in food competition and game shows. She gave the green light to Date Plate. The premise was that two young bachelors would watch a clip in which a young woman described herself, and each would then prepare a dish she would like so much she’d go on a date with the guy who made it. Each competitor was paired with a professional chef and given $50 for ingredients. On the premiere episode, an opera lover named Joshua, twenty-seven, competed against a bartender-actor-weightlifter John, twenty-two, for the affections of Hallie Sherard, twenty-five, a TV producer whose hobby was said to be sculpting rear ends out of wood.
Joshua and Cat Cora made Crazy Water Fish Stew. John, with Daisuke Utagawa, cooked Elvis-Inspired Lamb Chop. Hallie chose Joshua’s stew. The reality of the show was less than real. The men were cast from modeling and talent agencies. On their off-camera date, Josh took Hallie to a ceremony with a friend of his father’s who was a shaman. A ritual was performed with burning sage. Josh told her he was very interested in theater. She drove her own car home. The show lasted twenty-six episodes—thirteen fewer than Three Dog Bakery.
Eileen also tried Food Fight, which pitted two teams of amateur cooks against each other in themed episodes. In one, Jill Kelley and her twin sister, Natalie Khawam, battled a pair of brothers to see who could make the best dish using alligator meat. The show was canceled and forgotten until 2012, when Jill’s complaints to the FBI about receiving threatening anonymous e-mails ultimately led to the revelation of General David Petraeus’s affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and his resignation as CIA director. Suddenly the media was begging Food Network for archived copies of Food Fight.
Eileen also tried something Matt Stillman might have liked. Dweezil and Lisa was a reality show starring Dweezil Zappa, the son of the musician Frank Zappa, and his girlfriend, pop singer Lisa Loeb. Eileen hoped Dweezil and Lisa would appeal to hip young urbanites. The pair traveled around the country, sampling food and wine, cooking, and playing music. Eileen was correct that hipsters were becoming more interested in food, but this was not the show to capture that demographic. Reviews were mixed, and after ten low-rated episodes, the show was not renewed; the bickering couple broke up shortly after taping it.
These awkward, low-budget shows looked increasingly dated by 2004, when broadcast networks were showing more outlandish and sophisticated reality competition shows like The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire.
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Even as her programming department was delivering these duds along with Giada, Rachael, and Ina, Eileen was making her most ambitious post-Matt attempt to shake up expectations about Food Network.
In Anthony Bourdain’s 2001 best seller, Kitchen Confidential, he ridiculed Food Network, mocked Bobby, and compared Emeril to an Ewok—one of the glassy-eyed band of alien teddy bears in Return of the Jedi. Tony quickly inked a follow-up deal for a book called A Cook’s Tour, for which he intended to travel to far-off lands, eat interesting foods, and write about it.
One day, two TV producers, Dan Cohen and a colleague, came to Brasserie Les Halles, where Tony was still working as a chef. They looked dodgy to him, but he sat down. They said they were fans of Kitchen Confidential and were interested in working with him, but he told them he’d already sold the film and TV rights to New Line.
Tony, tall, lean, and disturbingly still at times, like a blank-faced poker player giving nothing away, could come across as simultaneously shy and intimidating, as if wheels were grinding underneath the surface calm. He concluded that the producers were the types who talked big and delivered little. He gave it to them straight. “I can’t give you Kitch
en Confidential,” he said, “but I just sold a book idea for a cook’s tour.” He explained the concept and said he was about to leave, making him unavailable.
He grew colder when they suggested that if they developed a show idea together, they might all pitch it to Food Network.
They haven’t been reading my book too closely, Tony thought. Food Network? I’ve been going around making fun of Emeril, for chrissake. These guys are full of shit. They don’t even know me. He glowered at them and they went away.
He was shocked when they called back a week later and said a meeting had been set up at Food Network to discuss the idea of doing A Cook’s Tour as a TV show.
Tony had appeared as a guest on Molto Mario and as a chef demonstrating a salmon recipe on one of the early newsy shows. He had been as appalled as Ken Lowe had been at the filthy kitchens, the tiny sets, the electric stoves, and the production values that were no better than porn. He had to wash his own pan.
But at this meeting, the situation seemed to have changed. Judy and Eileen seemed to be professional, smart, and, most surprising of all, genuinely interested in him and the kind of show he might like to do. He was impressed, but he tested them. “I make fun of Emeril. Why do you want to talk to me?”
They told him they were eager to hear new ideas.
He rattled off some of the countries he intended to go to as part of A Cook’s Tour: Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, places he could not imagine the network of Rachael Ray being interested in.
“That’s fantastic,” Eileen said. “Do the show!”
“I got the impression, I’m sure a highly subjective one, that they were really sick of their own programming. And they were looking for something a little subversive.”