From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  Emeril himself was changing. Now forty-six and happily remarried, he was confused by the change at the top of the network. He’d originally been told Brooke was being brought in over Eileen Opatut to give more attention to Emeril Live. But now Judy was gone and Brooke was overseeing everything? He and Karen sensed that the show was being taken for granted and agreed it could use fresh thinking. Was someone still going to be tasked with helping Live?

  But the network’s new female stars were attracting the kind of heat the men had had back when Heidi Diamond pitched the “chunks”—chef-hunks—to the media, and a breathless female reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News had called Emeril “cute as a butter bean.” Rachael did a pictorial spread in the men’s magazine FHM in which she was shown leaning over a stove in a short skirt and bra, and in 2006, Esquire called Giada De Laurentiis one of the “Fifty Reasons It’s Good to be an American Man.” She and Sandra Lee were following the sexy-chef trail blazed by Nigella Lawson.

  A story appeared in the New Jersey paper The Record in the summer of 2004, headlined “TV Kitchens Turn Up the Heat; ‘Food Babes’ Have Taken Over.” “It’s clear,” the reporter Charles Passy wrote, “we’ve come a long way from the days of a bumbling Julia Child preparing coq au vin for a coterie of public-television viewers.” In a sign that the cavalcade of food babes was having a serious effect, he noted that women made up 35 percent of the student population at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, up from around 20 percent of the student body in the 1990s. The article, a rewrite of a similar piece Passy had done for the Palm Beach Post, allowed a nod to Food Network stalwart Sara Moulton. She also had some appeal to men, he wrote, due to her “maternal comfort factor.”

  Sara, who had been reliably delivering cooking advice on Food Network for nearly a decade, had certainly noticed the big young personalities and felt her own middle-of-the-roadness. But she had hoped the network would always have a place for a respected cooking instructor like her. The first day she saw Rachael make that pilot of 30 Minute Meals, Sara recognized how young and fresh, friendly and smooth Rachael was. It got uncomfortable when Rachael, with Jon Rosen’s help, signed a $6 million cookbook deal in the summer of 2004 with Clarkson Potter. Sara was also a Rosen client, but she was just not as marketable as Rachael.

  Brooke saw it all with icy precision. The ratings for Sara’s Secrets were only so-so. If the network decided it did want to run her shows at some point, it had more than 1,500 of them in the archive.

  She broke the news to Sara over lunch soon after she became president. “We’re putting the show on hiatus.”

  Sara’s stomach sank. The H word. She’d been around TV long enough to know the H word almost always meant the T word: termination.

  Jon, despite his negotiating clout, could do nothing to save Sara. She served out her contract, hiding the news as best she could and dependably producing episodes through the spring of 2005. She knew the show’s producer, Georgia Downard, was also aware that the end was nigh, but Sara wanted the bad news to stay under the radar. She did not want to lower her value at Gourmet magazine. She had grown used to being treated like an important person there and throughout the food world because she was on television.

  When they were getting around to shooting the final Sara’s Secrets, in the spring of 2005, Sara said to Georgia, “So we’re going to have a wrap party, right?”

  “I don’t know if they have the budget for it,” Georgia replied.

  Some of the cameramen had been with Sara from the beginning. After 1,200 episodes of Cooking Live, and 300 of Secrets, Sara thought they all deserved more, especially if this was supposed to be a “family,” and she let Georgia know it: “Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve worked here for nine years and we’re not going to have a proper wrap party? They can’t pony up for a wrap party? Go back and tell them we’re having a wrap party.”

  The network finally agreed to pay the $1,500 tab at a little Italian restaurant near the studio. But on the last day of taping, a member of Sara’s team kept running to Bob’s office saying, “You’ve got to come down and say something. You’ve got to come say good-bye.”

  He sent champagne, but stayed away. Brooke did not come to the studio, either.

  For nine years, she had done everything they’d asked of her. She’d been there, 7 to 8 p.m. every weeknight, and she had meant something to her audience. There had been a few profane callers on Cooking Live, but far more of them were like the viewer who’d called and said, “I just lost my daughter to cancer and you remind me of her.” Another told her, “My mother has Alzheimer’s, but she loves your show.” Yes, she had benefited handsomely, but she had worked hard. Recently she had been keeping a mental file of slights. She believed she had invented the term “garbage bowl” on her show and that Emily Rieger, a culinary producer who’d first worked for Sara, had stolen the term and handed it to Rachael. She saw Rachael give viewers a tip on how to tell if oil was hot enough for frying by dipping a wooden spoon handle in it. “That’s my tip!” Sara seethed. And Tyler! He was like a fame-sniffing puppy, always sucking up to everyone in power and constantly volunteering to come on anyone’s show. But now the perceived bad treatment all came together and burned. It was a strange sort of family, but she realized she loved being in it. These people were still part of the network family, and she was not.

  “I knew it was going to be over sooner or later. But I have to tell you when it was over, I was devastated. I was completely devastated. It took me several years to get over it. Because I’d lost my identity.”

  —SARA MOULTON

  Tyler may have come across as desperate to Sara, but his strategy was paying off. He was having a ball. By the time Sara left the network, Tyler’s Ultimate, a travel and cooking show that brought him to Italy, Ireland, and the South of France, was running. He was cohost of a new version of How to Boil Water, and his second cookbook, Eat This Book: Cooking with Global Fresh Flavors, had come out. When he wasn’t taping for Food Network, he was traveling the country cooking at the Sundance film festival, giving holiday tips on the Today Show, and talking about plans to open a restaurant in New York City. He was now represented by Jason Hodes, a protégé of Jon Rosen. One day in 2006, the phone rang with a tempting but complicated offer.

  It was from Applebee’s, the national restaurant chain. The company wanted to improve the image of its food, and the thirty-four-year-old Food Network personality seemed the ideal pitchman. Tyler’s roots in South Carolina communicated an easygoing, Middle American charm that could fit in with the company’s target customers.

  Applebee’s proposed that Tyler come up with gourmet dishes to add to the menu and do television commercials touting the quality of its food. They were offering a lot of money, but Jason told them it wasn’t enough.

  The deal was not what agents call “a smash and grab,” where a talent shows up at a corporate event, shakes some hands, says nice things about a product, and then flies out of town, with almost no one remembering it except the talent and his pleased accountant. What Applebee’s was proposing was like Rick Bayless’s endorsement of a line of chicken sandwiches for Burger King in 2003. Rick was the host of a PBS cooking show, and despite his intention to bring the best cuisine he could to the fast-food chain, he’d been savaged by the food media and fellow chefs. It was the sort of endorsement that people remembered.

  Tyler and his girlfriend, Tolan, were in Tyler’s home office on a conference call with Jason and Jon Rosen. An Applebee’s deal might not represent who Tyler thought himself to be, a chef who wanted to encourage people to cook good simple food for themselves like the kind on his grandmother’s recipe cards. But the amount the chain was offering was the kind of money that could really change his life. Then Jon and Jason told him Applebee’s had gone to $3 million.

  “Really?” he said. “Wow.”

  He talked it over with Tolan. You could do a lot of things with $
3 million. “Okay,” he said to Jason and Jon. “Let’s do it.”

  The day of Tyler’s first on-air appearance on Food Network, he knew the right thing for him to do with his life was to get back on that channel as much as possible. It wasn’t about money.

  When he said yes to Applebee’s, a chill ran through him. He did not know exactly what it would bring, but he knew what the feeling meant. Okay, he admitted to himself, this officially kind of feels like selling out.

  After the ads went up in the fall of 2006, Applebee’s executives happily reported on a quarterly conference call with reporters that dinner sales were up and they were seeing former customers start to return to the restaurants, curious about the menu additions.

  Anonymous critics from the Philadelphia Daily News who called themselves The Chain Gang reviewed some of the main offerings. Tyler’s Herb-Crusted Chicken, topped with Italian seasonings and buried under arugula, grape tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and a Parmesan dressing was, “not too good for you. But good.” A side salad of greens, chopped hard-boiled eggs, caramelized onions, shaved Parmesan, and warm bacon dressing served with Tyler’s Crispy Brick Chicken “was terrific, the best thing one Gangster had ever eaten at Applebee’s.”

  Tyler’s interaction with Applebee’s culinary team and its mass-market food suppliers taught him a lot about streamlining a menu and the challenges of bringing good food to places far from fresh ingredients. And the $20 million TV ad campaign brought him fame in a way even Food Network had not, making him more in demand at food festivals and other events.

  Or was it infamous? It took sixteen months for the worst to hit. At a satirical food world awards show in Miami, Tony Bourdain and author Michael Ruhlman hosted what they called The Golden Clog Awards. Ina Garten won “The Alton,” for “being on the Food Network and yet, somehow, managing to not suck.” But they awarded Tyler the “Rocco Award” for worst career move. It was named after Rocco DiSpirito, a New York chef who many thought had squandered his talent in the 2003 NBC reality series The Restaurant. Rocco, a good sport, was on hand for the presentation, but Tyler was not.

  “You can get really fucked up at Applebee’s for cheap,” Tony vamped. “You can’t do that shit at Dunkin’ Donuts!”

  It didn’t take long for both Food Network fans and haters to take aim at Tyler in online forums.

  “What a joke!” one wrote. “Talk about a sell-out. I used to think this guy was alright and passionate about food.”

  The network had been talking with Tyler about doing a straight cooking show, something that could fill a slot during the day. Originally it was to be called Ty Food. But with the blowback over Applebee’s, Tyler suggested avoiding the risk and staying with the name that had proved successful, Tyler’s Ultimate. Instead of having him travel, discovering something about food and then using it to cook a recipe at home, as he had done on twenty-six episodes over two years, he would stay in one place and cook—in 106 more episodes over six years.

  By 2007, with money in his pocket, he gave up plans to open a restaurant in New York and he and his new wife moved to Northern California, where he began to quietly plot how to remake his image into someone more down-to-earth than the grinning dude in the Applebee’s ad.

  “Yeah it hurt. Of course it hurt. . . . If you take a look at Anthony Bourdain, have you ever seen that guy put anything on a plate? . . . What gives him the right to say anything about anybody? I’m just trying to feed my family, you know? And it was a really good opportunity, it was a really good business position for us.”

  —TYLER FLORENCE

  When Iron Chef America debuted as a regular series in the spring of 2005, it cut through the stale confines of the network’s kitchen sets like a jug of tart lemonade. The doings at the new Kitchen Stadium aired on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. and then reran at 11 p.m. on Wednesdays, a time slot suited to college-age viewers who’d watched the original Japanese version on other nights.

  Print and bus shelter ads showed American fans who had shaved the images of Iron Chefs into their scalps and others who face-painted themselves. The new Iron Chefs were rebranded as gutsy combatants in a world of whiz-bang artistry, and if the show lacked the mythic weight of the Japanese original, it gained in vibrancy. The Iron Chef America producers would reveal to all the competitors three possibilities for the secret ingredient twenty-four hours before contests were shot. This was deceptive. Viewers were not told about it. The show made it seem as if the secret ingredient really was a secret until the Chairman unveiled it on set. But the deception did give the inventiveness of the chefs time to bloom. In Mario’s case, he would meet with Anne and Mark and devise menu variations based on the ingredients and practice making them together. They practiced every single time Mario was on Iron Chef America, and their record showed it: nineteen wins against just five losses.

  “Today’s food personalities are as comfortable on the red carpet as they are in the kitchen. On TV, in restaurants, on supermarket shelves . . . their phrases have become part of the American idiom.”

  —STERLING GROUP 2004 STUDY

  Competition was performing magic in prime time. Soon after Judy left, the network moved to a new home. As CEO of E.W. Scripps, Ken Lowe no longer had to fight anyone above him to keep Food in New York. The network signed a multiyear lease at the massive Chelsea Market building on Eleventh Avenue and West Fifteenth Street in Manhattan’s burgeoning Meatpacking District, near the Hudson River.

  Some of the advertising sales people remained in Midtown, but the marketing side, the studios, and the kitchens were reunited for the first time since the network moved out of the space Pat O’Gorman had found.

  The proximity made one reality show idea that had been kicking around the network inevitable. American Idol was thriving on Fox. Project Runway was drawing unprecedented numbers to Bravo. Brooke and the programming department wondered why you couldn’t do an American Idol of the Food Network.

  There was opposition. One executive protested that there was not enough potential material to do a whole season. “Will it really work? Will it really be interesting?” Prime-time shows needed a focal point, a trusted Food Network personality or an up-and-comer, to be worth the expense. A standard instructional cooking show only cost a few thousand dollars an episode. A full reality show with moving cameras, shifting sets and a large cast, mostly of nobodies, could cost five times more.

  But new faces were the point. Fox was offering American Idol winners a record deal. Project Runway winners got a cash prize, enough to start a clothing line. And what would Food offer? “Let’s not make it a clichéd thing,” Brooke insisted in planning meetings. “Let’s make it real. Let’s have the prize be an actual show on Food Network.”

  Brooke wanted ten episodes, maybe thirteen. The debate settled on six. She pushed on. “And let’s make it even more real. Let’s have the judges be Food Network people.”

  “It’s like getting the role in your high school play. It was like, ‘Yay!’”

  —BOB TUSCHMAN

  Tryouts were held. Bob, Susie, Alison Page, Michael Smith, and other executives were given screen tests by CBS Eye Productions to avoid conflicts of interest. Bob, one of the more knowledgeable food people at the network, was chosen as a judge. Gordon Elliott, the effusive Australian of the now-defunct Door Knock Dinners, was added to the panel. They needed a female, and Susie was telegenic. Marc Summers, ever adaptable, hosted.

  For the first season of The Next Food Network Star, nine finalists, including a two-man team of caterers from Chicago, were chosen from an avalanche of audition tapes that poured in, some of them thanks to Marc’s onstage appeals at food festivals. The show was shot as cheaply as possible the first year, most of it done in February 2005, in the smallest of the network’s studio spaces, Studio B. Occasionally, the competitors and trailing cameras would venture into the office and kitchen spaces at Chelsea Market.

  When
it aired on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. in the summer of 2005, sliding into the Iron Chef America slot when that show’s first season ended, ratings were excellent. The team, Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh, won (and their show, Party Line with the Hearty Boys, debuted in the fall of 2005, shortly before taping began for season two of Star).

  Posters promoting the eight episodes of the second season in the spring of 2006 promised “Emotions Simmering Nightly” and pictured the new competitors. In the center was a fellow with spiky bleach-blond hair and a goatee, wearing some kind of bowling shirt. Who did this guy think he was?

  “He certainly looked very different from anybody, the nice, clean, scrubbed, people that we had before. That was a concern for me.”

  —BOB TUSCHMAN

  When Guy Ferry (as he was known then) was sixteen, he found himself lying on a bed in a third-floor room of a cold boardinghouse in Chantilly, France, staring at a two locked wardrobes and feeling unwelcome.

  Before leaving his small hometown of Ferndale in Northern California for a study year abroad, Guy thought he was going to be living with a lively French family. But it turned out that the parents of this real family were elderly. There was a daughter at home, but she was not Guy’s age, and a son who attended military school.

  Guy had been in France only a few days and was coming to grips with his situation. He was a paying tenant in the house, relegated to living in what was basically a storage room. He had a desk, an armoire, a sink, and a single bed. The bathroom was two floors down. He couldn’t even use the phone without permission, because Madame kept it locked. The house was near a famous racetrack, but it was empty most of the year. Guy was miserable and thought about phoning his parents, but he did not want to seem ungrateful. And the truth was that even if he had reached them, he would not have asked to go home.

  Guy had been entrepreneurial and unusually adventurous since he was a child. As a fifth grader, he had talked himself into a job selling balloons at the Humboldt County Fair. It took him six years to earn the money for this trip, running a pretzel cart—that he’d built with his father—on Ferndale’s main street. France was an adventure and he was going to see what there was here, no matter how mean the Madame was.