by Allen Salkin
—ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Something was going on that did not make sense. Why would these two very smart, successful women want to risk their reputations on him? But if they really were as willing as they said they were, to send cameras on his tour and allow him to do it his way, then okay. Why not?
Eileen was genuinely entertained and interested in Tony. He fit her urban sensibility. Of all the shows she developed, she really wanted this one to work. Judy was willing to take a few chances. The network was on firmer ground, and she was starting to grow a bit restless, despite the raw fennel she munched to maintain mental clarity during the day. Tony certainly seemed a more likely TV star to her than Rosengarten had.
With the network’s money behind him, Tony set off on the first stop on his television journey with a husband-and-wife production and camera team of Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia. In that first season, he ate cobra heart in Ho Chi Minh City, iguana tamales in Mexico, and drank a lot of vodka in St. Petersburg. “Look at that; it’s sex, man,” he said, peering at slices of fresh tuna in Tokyo. He drank, smoked, and even cursed on camera. The curses were bleeped out, but Tony received none of the negative feedback from the network that he’d anticipated. He never called the network and appreciated that they never called him.
Ratings weren’t spectacular—Good Eats and Emeril Live were beating A Cook’s Tour in prime time, as was Marc Summer’s lower-budget evergreen, Unwrapped—but reviews were strong, and the network sprang for a second season, shot in 2003. Tony went to Brazil, where he sampled seafood stew and many caipirinhas, and to Kansas City, Houston, and North Carolina for a show on barbecue.
Eileen wanted the network to be smart and risky and was emotionally invested in the show, but during the second season she started hearing from Scripps that a cigarette-puffing, vodka-swilling Lou Reed of the planet’s fire pits and stillhouses might not be the right direction for Food Network. Nevertheless, she believed in the show and spent personal capital arguing for it as a counterbalance to the light and sunny ITK fare.
Perhaps she should have saved up some of that capital.
In early 2004, Ed Spray, who oversaw the company’s cable channels, offered a consulting job to Brooke Johnson, a veteran in the business who’d been program director at WABC in New York, where she had launched the show that became Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. Most recently she had been the head of A&E, until she was pushed out in 2000. Brooke was widely credited with helping A&E grow from a fringe cable channel that ran British coproductions in the late 1980s into a major player that reached seventy-six million homes. Although her departure was called a resignation so she could spend time with her teenage children, she had been shoved aside in a complicated corporate power play. When her three years of severance ended, she called friends in the TV industry about a new job.
Ironically, Brooke had discussed taking the top job at Food nearly a decade earlier. She knew Reese Schonfeld, and when he was starting CNN in the early 1980s he had tried to bring her to Atlanta, but Brooke had declined. When he was leaving as head of Food Network in 1995 and Brooke was rising at A&E, he’d floated the idea of her taking his place.
“I’m in a position to influence the board, and if you were interested, I could probably make that happen,” Reese had told her.
Like most people in those days, Brooke thought that a 24-hour network devoted to food was a nutty idea. It was doomed to failure. Known to deliver her unvarnished thoughts in a straight monotone, she told him plainly, “I am not interested.”
But when Ed offered her the job of being a general consultant across all the Scripps networks, she’d been out of work for three years and it sounded like an ideal way to reenter the business and survey the cable landscape.
One day she received a call from Judy, whom she’d known over the years. “You’re a consultant to us, right?” Judy asked. “Well, let’s have lunch. I have a problem.”
The problem was Eileen. The head of programming griped about the lack of funding to try more experimental pilots, even though her overall budget had increased dramatically—58 percent in 2003 alone, with twelve new series and sixty specials. There were solid TV veterans on the programming team now: Bob Tuschman, Kathleen Finch, Bruce Seidel, Alison Page, and others. It wasn’t just about following hunches anymore. It was about managing a team. Judy liked Eileen personally, but she didn’t think she could run a department the size of Food’s. She thought Eileen had made a mess of some presentations to the Scripps board. Budgets and show ideas were not being teed up clearly enough to receive easy approval and, while she did have many successes, Barefoot Contessa among them, many of Eileen’s hunches weren’t working out.
At lunch, Judy told Brooke she was thinking about restructuring the department, wanting to somehow keep Eileen but ease her out of responsibility.
One of the reports Brooke had written as a consultant noted that Food Network was doing nothing to capitalize on the growing success of its stars. By January 2004, Food Network was reaching eighty million households. Its website had four million regular users who were accessing a recipe library that had reached 25,000 entries. The site had a store selling Emerilware pots and pans, Bobby Flay pear margarita mix, recipe cards from Ina, and roasting pans from Jamie Oliver—none of them official Food Network products, but a testament to the growing power of the brand. Was Food Network the pivotal factor in American culture’s increasing fascination with all things food-related or did it happen to come along when that interest was increasing for other reasons? From the perspective of the people inside the network, it was not their job to tease out how many tablespoons of the new gourmet-obsessed nation were added by Food Network and how many by other societal factors. They just kept putting out shows that they hoped the culture would eat up. They used focus groups to help them understand the new order so they could cater to it, but full comprehension of the phenomenon was a complex exercise best left to university Food Studies departments (New York University had started one in 1996). TV people were too busy trying to turn a profit.
Brooke was appalled that such profit opportunities were being left to the talent and their proliferating agents to figure out haphazardly. Ed agreed with Brooke, and before her lunch with Judy had suggested she head up a department of ancillary business. Even though the creation of such a role was her idea, Brooke admitted to herself, Man, I’m so bad at this kind of stuff. At the same time, she had received an offer from Laureen Ong, the president of the National Geographic Channel, to become her head of programming. Brooke was tempted to jump ship, but the NatGeo job would require a weekly commute to Washington, D.C., and Scripps had been so generous, hiring her as a consultant.
All of these pressures erupted at lunch with Judy when Brooke spontaneously said, “I have the solution to your problem, Judy. You don’t need to restructure, you should hire me. Hire me as head of programming.”
By then, Brooke had come to admire the kind of foresight that Ken had and that she did not, seeing the potential in Food Network in the mid-1990s. Judy said she’d think about a programming role for Brooke, but Ed nixed it, insisting it was ancillary business or nothing. Brooke was close to jumping to NatGeo, but after sleeping on it one night, decided to stick with Scripps. A week later, Judy, having talked it over with Ed, offered Brooke the top programming job, installing her above Eileen and giving her the title of general manager in charge of programming and creative services. Judy hoped that Brooke could organize the department and make strong presentations to the Scripps board, leaving Eileen to continue developing show ideas with her team.
At A&E, Brooke had invested in a few major shows rather than a lot of minor ones, as Food was doing. Her first ratings breakthrough was with a series called Biography, documentaries about historical figures and big celebrities like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Hope, and Calvin Klein—and eventually nearly everyone you could imagine. Running every single night at one point, it made A&E a prime-time
force on cable.
Now she wondered, why not place a big bet by investing in one of the most successful shows on Food?
She asked Eileen, “Why don’t we do Iron Chef in English?”
“Because it would cost so much money!” Eileen replied.
In 2001, Food Network had turned down the chance to buy the American rights to an English-language version of the show they’d made famous. The struggling broadcast network UPN bought them instead and produced a version called Iron Chef USA. It starred William Shatner as the Chairman, who managed, in a glittering purple coat and frilly vest, to channel Takeshi Kaga’s histrionic original in a uniquely Shatnerian way: “Totally rad!” the former Captain Kirk and T. J. Hooker exclaimed at one point.
Iron Chef USA tipped too far into camp. Instead of carefully following the evolution of each dish, the show searched for one-liners. The through-line of watching the competitors’ creations evolve—crucial to the mythology of the show as a pressure cooker that would drive chefs to new heights of creativity—was lost in the noise.
Sissy Biggers found work on the show—she and two others were outfitted in gold blazers and cast as roving reporters and commentators. An exchange about sea urchin roe was typical:
“What? It’s the sperm? We eat that?”
“Yes, it’s like the love juices of the sea urchin.”
Bruce Seidel, the programming executive at Food Network in charge of Iron Chef, attended the taping of the UPN version. “We should have bought this,” he said to a colleague. “We could do better.”
After two low-rated episodes, UPN surrendered.
As head of programming, Brooke knew that she had a short honeymoon period with Judy and the executives at Scripps in which they would allow her to take a few chances. It might require building an expensive new Kitchen Stadium set in New York, wrangling live audiences, developing a big cast, and asking the network kitchens to source obscure ingredients, but she was confident it would all be worth it for a big hit.
Bruce put it together, producing the pilots in Los Angeles. He cast the American Chairman, and since Food Network was still running the Japanese version, he saw it as an opportunity to link the two shows, and sought an ethnically Asian actor as the nephew of the original Chairman. Many actors answered the casting call in Los Angeles, but when Mark Dacascos walked in and started speaking, Bruce turned to a colleague and said, “We’ve found our Chairman.”
Mark’s father and stepmother were both kung fu champions and teachers. He was raised in Germany and spent long hours training in martial arts and attending tournaments. As a boy, he’d seen a kung fu movie in which powerful fighting monks defended a small village, and he developed a fantasy that he could become a warrior monk who would be a gardener and teach philosophy and history to children. Before Bruce cast him, Mark had found work in a few martial arts movies but little else.
Brooke asked Bobby Flay to help create the match-ups; he chose Mario Batali and Wolfgang Puck. Bobby was matched against one of the original Japanese Iron Chefs, Hiroyuki Sakai. Wolfgang beat Masaharu Morimoto. Michiba, he of the grabby hands and the “broth of vigor,” did not attend. For his two sous chefs, Mario had chosen Anne Burrell, who was the chef at Italian Wine Merchants, and Mark Ladner, the chef at Casa Mono in Manhattan. Both had serious technical skills, and Mario enjoyed hanging around with them. Anne screamed so loud with joy when Mario told her she was in that people nearby thought she was hurt.
When Mario was pronounced the winner of his battle with Morimoto, he turned to Anne and Mark and said, “That’s it. You’re on my Iron Chef team forever!”
“The judges of the original Iron Chefs were all Japanese, so they understood what I cook, or do in terms of technique. That doesn’t mean they are better, but at least they know what I am doing, which is in a way satisfying for me, even if they vote for my opponent. Also, I feel more comfortable explaining my dishes in Japanese to them, which is far better than explaining my concepts and dishes in my broken English. I always feel terribly frustrated when I cannot convey my thoughts to American judges.”
—MASAHARU MORIMOTO
The conflict between Eileen’s gut and Brooke’s more clinical thinking came into play as the network negotiated with Tony about a potential third season of A Cook’s Tour. Eileen continued to believe that his voice was good for the network’s identity and well worth keeping, even if the ratings were not at Unwrapped’s level.
Judy, eager for Brooke to shoulder some of the decision-making load, had taken a step back. Never a food person, she was starting to dream of resuming the long beach walks Ken had interrupted when he hired her. Brooke wasn’t totally opposed to A Cook’s Tour, but she had already decided that it needed to change if it was to survive. In his book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, Tony described the jolting moment when he met Brooke, when the good feelings of working with Judy and Eileen were replaced by a new mood: “There was a limp handshake as cabin pressure changed, a black hole of fun—all light, all possibility of joy was sucked into the vortex of this hunched and scowling apparition.”
While visiting Spain on a book tour, Tony was invited to the workshop of the groundbreaking chef Ferran Adrià. The Spaniard had heard that Tony called him “bogus” in Kitchen Confidential and wanted to set the author straight. Over glasses of cava and slices of ham in Barcelona, Ferran invited Tony to film the creative process in which Ferran developed new dishes for his restaurant El Bulli. It was a once-in-a-lifetime invitation. No one had ever filmed Adrià at work, and Tony wanted to do it for season three of A Cook’s Tour.
Ferran was a genius who had pioneered what some called “molecular gastronomy”; Ferran preferred to call it “techno-emotional cuisine.” He could turn vegetables into foams, solids into liquid suspensions, piña coladas into cotton candy. Eileen wanted to give him the go-ahead, but she was getting pressure from the network. Tony’s barbecue episode of A Cook’s Tour had outrated his international shows. Texas ribs were better for the bottom line than cobra hearts, and the network wanted him to do more shows in America.
Tony warned her, “If I don’t get my way, if I don’t get to do the things I want to do, I’m not going to do it.”
Eileen said she understood and she fought for him. But the network wanted less foreign content, fewer foreign accents. She lost the battle. Wolfgang Puck had already been canceled. An episode of My Country, My Kitchen that featured French-born chef Eric Ripert visiting Andorra was used as an example of what they didn’t want, because they thought Ripert’s accent was too thick to be understood.
Tony, Chris, and Lydia decided to make the Ferran episode anyway. They self-financed it for $35,000, which led to the founding of Chris and Lydia’s company Zero Point Zero Productions. They sold Decoding Ferran Adrià, an ode to the Spaniard’s artistry, to various television outlets around the world, and it became the pilot for the series Tony and Zero Point Zero made for the Travel channel, No Reservations—a bold and literate series that helped define the channel, though it was not fundamentally different from A Cook’s Tour.
—
It soon became apparent that with Brooke on board, there was no room for Eileen. As Brooke was given more responsibility, Judy thought Eileen knew her days were numbered. She didn’t imagine that Eileen would be surprised by what was coming when she asked her to lunch.
But she was. Judy wanted to get it over with, and as soon as they sat down, she asked, “How much money will it take for you to leave?”
Eileen was speechless. She loved this job more than any she’d ever had. Judy repeated, “How much will it take? Come back and tell me.”
“I’ve learned that you’re not the channel. And even if you started or built it or changed it, you don’t own it, and it’s not your child. And so anybody who’s in that kind of position is just sitting in a chair. So it shouldn’t surprise me. You can go through e
very other network alive, and there are a lot of changes. So it shouldn’t surprise me, but it just was a surprise.”
—EILEEN OPATUT
After contentious negotiations between the network and Jim Griffin, Emeril was signed to a new long-term deal for Emeril Live and Essence of Emeril. Judy had wanted to nix Essence because it was a pure cooking show without much Bam! and was not getting strong ratings, but Emeril, always a chef before he was an entertainer, enjoyed the low-key production of Essence. Jim threatened to walk if Essence was canceled. The network backed down, but they were not enamored of Jim and his tough tactics.
Deeply invested, the network continued to wring everything it could from the king. They shot specials in Hawaii. They did an episode in front of ten thousand people in Chicago. They went to Orlando and Las Vegas. A Halloween special was shot at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. There were plans to send Emeril’s food up in the space shuttle so the astronauts could cook along with him.
Compared to the newer hosts, Emeril, with his serious cooking pedigree, was seeming, as Bourdain remembered, “like Escoffier.” The network was finding success by following its Noodle Roni strategy, casting TV-friendly hosts, but there was a price to be paid. Even before the first episode of Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee aired, the food elite took aim. A writer for Gourmet magazine noted the inclusion of Cheez Whiz in a tortellini recipe and dared to make it herself: “It takes two days of soaking to remove the rubbery film the substance leaves on my saucepan, so I can only imagine what it’s doing to my insides.”
As the network’s profile rose, a counter-industry of Food Network critics was developing. Generally, the narrative was that there had been a golden age of foodiness, when David Rosengarten roamed the halls in an apron, Alan Richman ruminated on runny cheeses, and Marion Cunningham was always roasting a chicken. Sometime around the millennium, it had all been betrayed by the vixens of Velveeta, Sandra Lee, and her evil ilk.