by Allen Salkin
There was some truth to this argument. The pre-Scripps network had relied more squarely on chefs and deeply knowledgeable food folk—who had been watched by audiences about a fifth the size of what the network was reaching by 2003. But you could still learn a hell of a lot about cooking and the wide world of food by watching the Food Network at the dawn of its modern era. How Junior Mints are made is an interesting process, as is how the chef at Lemaire restaurant in Richmond, Virginia, keeps the skin on his Chesapeake Bay Rockfish crisp, shown on an episode of FoodNation. The network’s various road shows were putting the evolution of American cuisine on display. In the mid-2000s, Road Tasted featured shrimp and crawfish “turducken” in Louisiana, and a Danish kringle in Wisconsin.
Tony, freed from the constraints of working at the network, became its most entertaining critic, launching a side career harpooning its stars at every book signing and food festival he attended. In December 2004, on tour in Toronto to promote Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, he was asked by a newspaper reporter, “What’s the most offensive TV cooking show?”
“There’s one in the U.S. by Sandra Lee,” Tony said. “She seems to suggest that you can make good food easily, in minutes, using Cheez Whiz and chopped-up Pringles and packaged chili mix.”
Sandy was particularly ripe for attack. Even Sandy admitted that she had made some mistakes when she first started in the food business, especially her infamous Kwanzaa cake, which Tony called “a war crime on television.”
The cake was hardly on a par with waterboarding, but it demonstrated that hosting a cooking show requires more from the talent than good teeth and an iron will. Sandy told Denise Vivaldo that she wanted to add easy-to-make cakes for every holiday, including Chanukah and Kwanzaa, in her second book, Semi-Homemade Desserts.
Denise wondered what she could possibly use for a Kwanzaa cake. Sandy had specified that all the cakes be store-bought angel food. The holiday was supposed to have a connection with the harvest. What semi-homemade ingredients seemed autumnal and harvest-like? She found cans of apple pie filling and a bag of corn nuts, a jar of Orville Redenbacher popcorn, and pumpkin seeds—what was more late season than all that? To hold it all together, Denise grabbed a can of Betty Crocker Rich and Creamy vanilla frosting.
When she looked at the corn nuts and pumpkin seeds sprinkled on the icing of the Kwanzaa cake, Denise thought, Those might be too hard for people’s teeth. Someone will break a crown. But at that point, she’d written out the recipe and was worn out from Sandy’s badgering 7 a.m. phone calls.
Most authors wanted to taste the recipes before they put them into cookbooks or at least offer suggestions. But that wasn’t the case here. Denise and her assistant tossed the first Kwanzaa cake into a dumpster. A recipe tester sold the second one at a school bake sale—the first Semi-Homemade Kwanzaa cake ever offered to the public is believed to have been sold to an anonymous buyer for less than $10.
“I feel bad as a professional cook that I was involved in that abortion.”
—DENISE VIVALDO
Years later, after the video of Sandy making the cake on her show had gone viral, she admitted that she had learned from it “how in control of every single element of your show you need to be. The first couple of seasons I was not.”
Denise had learned, too. It was her last project for Sandy.
As nasty as the criticism of Sandy and other stars got, Tony and other attackers were in many ways doing them a favor by keeping their names in the media. Every time he came up with a brilliant new insult—“frightening hell spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker”—it would be picked up and reposted, or dozens of commenters would share their own bile about the stars they hated so much they couldn’t take their eyes off them, helping cement them as household names while stirring their fans to rise to the defense of the kitchen personalities they loved. Whether the talent was pushing pecan pie, Chicken Short-cut-a-tore, or a visit to the Butterfinger factory, fans were mad for them.
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Indeed, one bad cake could not spoil the party. For those who had survived the putsches of the previous years, it was laissez le bon temps roulez. In November 2004, the organizers of The Great Big Food Show in Cleveland sprang for a large complement of Food Network stars to appear at the International Exposition Center. Mario, Rachael, Alton, Marc Summers, and local celebrity chef Michael Symon led cooking demonstrations, trivia contests, tastings, and book signings. More than forty thousand people attended.
Symon, who had made guest appearances on a number of Food Network shows, owned the most food-forward restaurant in Cleveland, Lola Bistro. After the second day at the expo center, the Food Network crew headed to Lola for a late Saturday-night “family” meal.
As the food arrived, Mario decreed, “Take away all the utensils! Utensils are not allowed!”
Marc picked up his steak with his hands and bit into it. Beef juice shot onto Mario’s shirt.
“What the . . !” Mario yelled.
“You’re the one who wanted to do this!” Marc yelled back. The meal stretched on. Eating and drinking. Eating and drinking. Laughing. And drinking.
Around 2 a.m., a few participants started muttering that maybe it was time to head back to their hotel. After all, some of them had to be onstage at 9 a.m. that morning.
“We’re going to a strip club!” Mario declared.
The group poured into cars. When they arrived at a strip club under a bridge in a seedy part of town around 3 a.m., the manager warned them that it was closing in fifteen minutes. Mario ordered twenty-five shots and sent over lap dances to Marc and Rachael.
“No, no, please!” Marc and Rachael protested as the strippers sank down onto their laps and began gyrating.
“We gotta get out of here!” Rachael shouted.
Rachael and Mario said they were headed back to Lola. Marc fell into a car with people he didn’t know. Back at the hotel, and nearly blind drunk, he phoned Rachael and Mario to make sure they’d be fit for the show in a few hours. No answer. He passed out.
The next morning onstage, Mario was there, hitting his mark, although his voice was unusually deep and gravelly. Alton, game and on point, made beef jerky with a room fan, three furnace filters, and a bungee cord. But Rachael, whose schedule over the three days included eight half-hour cooking demos and eight book signings, complained repeatedly from the stage about her hangover and forgot to explain many details of her recipes.
Fans waited afterward to give Rachael supportive hugs, as they would to someone they loved and forgave.
Marc asked his audience, “How many people watch us and say, ‘I can do that. I want my own show’?” He told them the network was working on a new reality show that might make their dreams come true and encouraged them to send in audition tapes.
“I would get phone calls in NYC at 11 p.m. saying, ‘Hey, Summers, what are you doing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Come to the Spotted Pig.’ . . . I love Mario to death, but man, I couldn’t hang with him. That guy was going to kill me. I realized it after a few outings with him. He gets away with murder, but I couldn’t do it.”
—MARC SUMMERS
Fans adored the illusion that almost anyone might be able to leap over the bar and become a star on the network. It wasn’t true, of course. But the job description had changed. Good looks, performance chops, and fierce ambition now counted for more than a degree from Johnson & Wales.
Days later, during the week of the network’s eleventh anniversary, its stars gathered in New York for a live Thanksgiving special. The premise was that they were all cooking turkey and fixings together. Programming executives wanted to deepen the feeling among viewers that these stars were members of their families, and that it was one big happy group. Cooking in the network kitchen were Giada, Paula, Tyler, Alton, Rachael, Emeril, and Sara Moulton. Sara had been appearing live on the network in prime time for years, and this was the most
artificial show she’d ever done.
She eyeballed her colleagues and thought how strange it was that they were all pretending to be so chummy. Sara had never even seen Giada or Paula in the flesh. One taped her show in Los Angeles, the other in a New York suburb.
“I’ve never met either one of them before,” she thought. “And yet here we are, all cooking a family meal.”
Competitors Sharpen Their Knives
The Food Network’s internal slogan might have been Every New President Makes Changes. Each one came to the job with a central idea about what he or she wanted to accomplish. Reese envisioned CNN with stoves. Jeff Wayne worked to rationalize the operation, Erica Gruen brought in more on-air personalities, Eric Ober boldly expanded the programming, and Judy Girard sought to broaden the network’s appeal to a less food-centric audience.
By the time it entered its second decade, Food had figured out some of what worked well throughout its programming day and how to market it. It had also seeded a sprouting world of production talent and potential new stars. The foodie culture’s roots in Berkeley, downtown New York, and elsewhere had now spread throughout the country, fed at least partly by the network and certainly feeding talent and ideas back into it. Whoever was in charge could reap what the network had sown and deliver its stars to a hungry audience.
But as always, getting it exactly right was impossible. The network was making some of the people happy some of the time. The task of the ever-changing enterprise was to make as many people happy as it could. The pursuit of this goal would create riches and fame, as well as failures and heartbreak. And opportunities would be missed.
—
Before she went to work for Scripps, Brooke Johnson, the head of programming, had rarely watched Food Network and the only network personality she had heard of was Emeril Lagasse. But she soon realized Rachael was the real rising star, a once-in-a-decade talent. She was attracting younger viewers than Emeril, and many of them had never watched a cooking show before. When Brooke extended the hours of the In the Kitchen block, ratings improved. In 2003, she invited Rachael to meet for a drink. At the Bryant Park Grill, Rachael ordered a vodka and downed it like it was cold water on a hot summer afternoon.
Hard liquor was not Brooke’s thing, but she calculated, I better have what she’s having.
Because Brooke had never spent much time with food folk, she had feared she would have nothing in common with Rachael, who had not gone to culinary school, but had worked in restaurants her whole life. But then the two began talking about the television business and the art of crafting a show. “It’s all about telling a story, grabbing them quick, and not letting go,” Rachael said.
This was Brooke’s language. Her dad had produced the classic television series Truth or Consequences. He’d died when she was only twenty-six, but she remembered one of his oft-repeated lessons about television: “The bit has to be complete.” She understood the advice to mean that stories needed a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that all three parts had to be good.
They ordered a second round of drinks, and then another. Rachael talked with feeling about her life, discussing how hard her mother still worked and how the only foods she used on her show were ingredients that anyone could buy at their local supermarket. Her focus on what you could and could not buy at the Price Chopper supermarket in Albany connected her to America’s home cooks outside the urban foodie zones.
After their fourth vodka and soda, Brooke slurred, “I have to go home now.” The two shared a taxi, and during the ride, Brooke kept thinking, I’m shit-faced. Don’t throw up on her. Don’t throw up. Don’t throw up. . . .
She made it out of the cab without vomiting and concluded that the two lessons of the evening were that Rachael understood TV and that it was a bad idea to try to keep pace with her drinking.
Both were true, but Brooke missed a crucial aspect of Rachael—the same one Ken Lowe had missed in his ouzo session with Mario and his indulgent meals with Emeril, and that other programming executives apparently missed despite their expense-account nights at New York’s finest restaurants. Some of the stars of food television straddle two worlds, the hard-living behind-the-scenes life of a restaurant worker and the people-pleasing world of the performer. Like great actors, the line blurs between the performance and the personal. Chefs present tripe not to be outrageous, but to reveal how humans can make something beautiful out of anything. And the great ones put a piece of themselves on every plate.
—
A year after Brooke’s night with Rachael, Judy saw that the network was on a solid path, and concluded that her job was done. “I’m bored,” she told Ken Lowe and Ed Spray. “Put Brooke in charge.”
For herself, Judy figured she was about a year or two from permanently starting the “second half” of her life, when she would give up her television career and live somewhere quieter, resuming her beach walks. She and Ken agreed she would take on one more assignment, trying to turn around a troubled Scripps property, the ShopAtHome Network, a rival to QVC. There, she might be able to find profits by selling merchandise associated with the stars Food Network had helped make.
In April 2004, Brooke was appointed president of the Food Network—the first peaceful transition in the network’s history.
“Brooke is a very direct, straight-ahead person. Judy is a little bit softer around the edges. So there were a few feathers ruffled early on because Judy had her favorites and Brooke was the new sheriff in town.”
—KEN LOWE
Iron Chef America: A Battle of the Masters debuted during Brooke’s first month as president and attracted spectacularly high ratings, more than a million viewers for the finale on April 25. It scored a 1.4 prime-time rating, tying the channel’s highest ever, set by the original Webster Hall Iron Chef battle between Bobby and Morimoto in June 2000. It helped Food Network score an average 0.7 Nielsen household rating, a 17 percent improvement over the previous year. In an earnings conference call, Joe NeCastro, the chief financial officer of E.W. Scripps, bragged to a Morgan Stanley analyst, “We certainly did get the bang for our buck out of Iron Chef.”
“Even your current fans need to be reeducated that you’re not just ‘how-to.’”
—INTERNAL FOOD NETWORK STUDY, 2004
The success of the pilots for Iron Chef America gave Brooke the momentum to make more changes in prime time. Less gut, more spreadsheet than Judy, she was an even bigger believer in audience studies than any of her predecessors had been.
In November 2004, the results came in on one study she commissioned, “Getting Closer to the Truth: Exploring the Viewer/Network Connection.” The country was hungry for the network’s programming, but many potential viewers still did not know the Food Network had a range of shows, that there was more than just cooking instruction.
“Food Network is suffering from a perception problem, not programming weakness,” the study reported. Even regular viewers reported wanting shows about grilling, desserts, travel, “how stuff we eat every day is made,” and other areas the network already did cover but these viewers didn’t seem to know about.
It also found that on the most basic level, viewers were not physically hungry late in the evening. By 9 p.m., they wanted something more entertaining than someone cooking. “It’s everything I like about food without having to cook,” said a noncook in the study, praising the existing lineup. “It’s dinner and a story . . . the stories away from the stove.”
The study included a graphic that placed viewers’ perceptions of nine channels on a continuum. The History Channel had emotional appeal, but seemed a bit like “school.” Food Network, perceived as something that could change someone’s life, had strong emotional value, but it was considered even more educational and less stimulating. Travel and TLC were more stimulating, but less emotionally appealing. If the Food Network was to continue to grow, it would need to keep its emotional appeal b
ut increase its quotient of “stimulating.”
There were strengths. Both cooks and noncooks alike were drawn in, finding warmth. One viewer reported, “It’s my living, breathing food friend. It’s inspiring, comforting, and my partner in kitchen crime . . . and it lets me take the credit.” Another said, “Maybe someday I’ll surprise myself and turn on my stove. I don’t cook, but it’s fun to watch.”
But others were wandering away. Cooking shows starting to appear on other networks were threatening to steal their viewers. A graphic entitled “Nibbled to Death” showed the Food Network logo as a pie. Travel Channel, with No Reservations in production, had bitten out a little portion. PBS had done the same. TLC and the broadcast networks were making inroads. Armed with information, Brooke and her team began to take action. By 2005, they unveiled a new slogan: “Food Network, Every Night, It’s Way More Than Cooking.” It was announced in ads starring Alton Brown that featured passing banners: “Discoveries. . . . Competition. . . . Style.”
“They wanted me to do Iron Chefs all the time, and stuff like that. I said, You know what, I have nothing to gain from that. If I lose against somebody, they’re gonna laugh at me. And if I win, everybody would say, ‘Well, we expect you to win. What do you mean you’re not always gonna win?’ So I think it doesn’t make sense. I did one . . . And I won. So I said, That’s enough. I am the only one who is undefeated.”
—WOLFGANG PUCK
For years, Emeril Live had gobbled a huge slice of the programming budget. And as of 2004, the show was still airing every weeknight, but Iron Chef America and other shows were taking resources from it. Programming executives were no longer encouraging the producer, Karen Katz, to take Emeril on the road. Yearly specials were no longer on the docket. Karen was hearing exhortations to bring younger guests to attract younger viewers.