From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  Soon, he found a pleasure that helped take his mind off the cold accommodations: school lunches. They seemed strange at first: chicken feet soup, pâté, escargots, and other inexpensive French country staples. He had never heard of this stuff, but it was delicious—mind-blowing in fact. No one ate like this at the cafeteria in Ferndale. A hippie type, his mother made his lunches on homemade bread with grains so whole the vegetarian sandwiches fell apart as he lifted them to his mouth. Instead of saying to a French girl, “Where have you been all my life?” he ate a midday meal of sheep’s tongue and couscous with gusto, and thought, “Where has this been all my life? These school lunches are the bomb!”

  Eventually, things got better. He met a Norwegian family with three sons and, hearing of his troubles, they took him in. His food pleasures expanded.

  Before school, he went down to the local bakery to fetch bread. He was to wait in line and buy five baguettes. He bought six and ate one on the way home.

  “The vinaigrette, the mustard, the bread, the cheese—oh, God! At the end of the day, eating cheese was so overwhelming.”

  —GUY FIERI

  Julia Child had her fateful sole meunière experience in northern France. Guy had his biggest French food moment in the south. He was driving through villages with the Norwegians, and they stopped at a house for dinner. It looked like someone’s home, but it doubled as the town restaurant. Soon, he was served steak frites, the beef so rich and flavorful he could think nothing other than Oh, my God! He knew meat well. The first meal he’d ever cooked for his parents was a steak when he was ten. In sixth grade, he’d worked at the Ferndale meat market. But the simplicity here, the quality of the ingredients, the setting—this was something else.

  Instead of phoning his parents with his troubles, he wrote them with his wonder: “You guys have got to come try this food! It’s out of bounds!”

  In another letter home, quoted in his book Guy Fieri Food, he said, “I really think I know what I want to do. I want to be a chef and own restaurants.”

  —

  After college, Guy moved to Los Angeles and found work at Louise’s Trattoria, a string of Italian family restaurants across Southern California. He quickly became the best-known employee. At company retreats in the mountains around Big Bear, he organized all-night volleyball games in the snow, fueled by Jack Daniel’s, lit by the fog lights of his jacked-up Chevy Silverado and presided over by his Dobermans, Rocky and Sierra. He was a natural-born character.

  Soon he was bristling at having to take orders. Guy got into a conflict with an executive at the Louise’s chain, Robert Kissinger. As the sophistication of diners in California deepened through the mid-1990s, the chain had spent heavily to improve the authenticity of its Italian menu. But Guy, who was overseeing a few locations, had other ideas about what would make regular customers happy. His food tastes had become less inspired by his French experiences than by some of the places he’d been since. He had attended a hotel management program at UNLV in the late 1980s, when Vegas was in the midst of big changes as dreamers like hotelier Steve Wynn were remaking the landscape, demolishing old hotels and building shimmering palaces in the desert. The spicier foods he was exposed to there and throughout Southern California influenced his palate and his willingness to take chances. For a cooking competition in one UNLV class, he invented a winning dish, Cajun Chicken Alfredo.

  When he added tortilla soup to the lunch menu at the Louise’s locations he was managing, Kissinger phoned him, furious. “What the hell are you doing? This is an Italian restaurant chain!”

  Guy was unintimidated. “Listen, I got a lot of businesspeople that come in here every day and want soup and salad for lunch. And I can’t feed ’em pasta fagiole and Italian wedding soup every day. I’ve got to branch out, man! I don’t want to lose my lunch business. You know, I’ve got to do it.”

  By the age of twenty-six, he had grown weary of banging up against the wishes of the people above him. He and a friend, Steve Gruber, had been quietly plotting their departure from the company, drawing up plans for a restaurant they wanted to open together. Guy’s wife, Lori, had always wanted to own a horse, and Steve had young children. Santa Rosa, forty miles north of San Francisco on the edge of wine country, not far from Ferndale, was big enough to support restaurants, but remote enough still to have acreage a young family could afford.

  Guy, who’d changed his last name back to his great-grandfather’s, Fieri, when he married Lori in 1995, moved to Santa Rosa in 1996. No local bank was willing to loan them restaurant start-up money. So Guy’s parents, two years away from retirement, mortgaged their home and loaned him the money to open Johnny Garlic’s. Guy took the menu way beyond tortilla soup. Johnny Garlic’s featured the Jackass Roll, a sushi-style maki with pulled pork and green chili, and a recipe he’d been saving, Cajun Chicken Alfredo.

  Thanks to good local publicity and the outrageously named menu items, the restaurant was wildly successful as soon as it opened. Early one morning in 1996 or 1997, Guy was, uncharacteristically, watching television before work. Normally, he was out the door by 8 a.m., barely pausing between waking, showering, and leaving. But Lori was watching Good Morning America, and as he got dressed, the GMA host announced, “Chef Emeril Lagasse” and mentioned that the chef had a show on the Food Network. Guy had heard of Food Network from a teenager who lived on his block, but he’d never watched it.

  Unusual name, Guy thought. Then he saw a showman who stopped him cold. Emeril strutted out on Good Morning America to a gush of loud blues music, with a towel draped over his shoulder. The whole scene seemed to light up as he threw garlic into pans. “Oh, baby, yeah!” Emeril praised his suddenly sizzling array of pots.

  Wow-ow-ow! Guy thought. That’s awesome! Look at this dude! This dude can walk the talk. He’s jamming! This guy must own the Food Network!

  In Emeril, Guy recognized the showmanship of his childhood heroes, Evel Knievel, the stunt rider who’d jumped the Snake River Canyon when Guy was a boy, and Elvis Presley. The New Orleans chef used a sauté pan to do what Evel did with a motorcycle: reveal its inherent power.

  “To me, food is a party. Food is energy. Food is love. Food is excitement. Food is—I mean, I get excited about making a sandwich, you know. ‘What are we gonna make happen today! Pepperoncini juice mixed with some cream cheese and some fresh cracked pepper, all right!’ You know, that’s where the jive starts coming down. I looked at Emeril and just said, ‘Oh, there’s Elvis. There’s a guy that’s owning this.’”

  —GUY FIERI

  This guy has got this down! Guy thought.

  Later that week, Guy asked his teenage neighbor about Emeril. He wanted to see if the chef was having the effect on young people that Evel had had on him.

  “Aw, yeah, man!” the kid replied. “Emeril Lagasse!”

  The appeal for three-minute audition videos for The Next Food Network Star had reached a friend of Guy’s, who suggested he send in a tape. He had auditioned to be on a pilot for a barbecue show in 2004 that went nowhere, so it took some coaxing to get him to try again. He used his own nickname, Guido, and demonstrated how to make a sushi roll.

  The Star producers were amazed at how calm and real Guy seemed. He was playful and humorous, talking to viewers like they were sitting having a beer with him. He didn’t look like any other cooking show host, with his bleached hair and tattoos. But a couple minutes in, he seemed so likable and quick-witted that they almost forgot his weird appearance. He grabbed attention and kept it, which is what TV stars need to do.

  When the network called Guy with the good news that he’d been cast, he thought it was a prank. As he left for New York in November 2005, his father told him, “Hey, the number one thing is to stay true to yourself.”

  Season two was really no contest. Guy bathed everyone in charisma. He had enough food knowledge to make himself a viable cooking show host; compared to Sandra Lee, Guy
was Jacques Pépin.

  Emeril had a bad cold, but came out to declare Guy the winner on April 23, 2006. The prize was the right to host a cooking show for six episodes, which became Guy’s Big Bite. The day of his victory, Marc Summers, the host of Star’s second season, pulled Guy aside and cautioned him, “Okay, you have no idea what’s about to hit you in the face. If you need some help, if you have questions, you give me a call.” When Guy did, Marc told him there might eventually be some great money coming his way for doing easy things like showing up at supermarket openings and shaking hands at corporate events. “First of all,” Marc said, “open a bank account that funnels nothing but personal appearance money into it. At some point, this will go away and you can have your fuck-you money, and you don’t need to worry.”

  Guy thought he could manage his own affairs. He co-owned a number of restaurants at this point. Okay, Marc’s advice that he hire a good lawyer, he understood. But he didn’t need a big-city agent.

  “Listen!” Marc, a showbiz survivor of more than two decades, insisted over Guy’s protests. “You get yourself an agent.”

  —

  This was the game now. Food Network had created contracts for its Star contestants that tied them closely to the network. The early business model had been to pay the hosts as little as possible and allow them to leverage their TV fame however they chose. Emeril made good money from his TV contract, but he cashed in on the spices he touted on the air, his books, and his restaurants. Low talent fees kept programming costs in line with advertising revenues and whatever subscriber fees the owners could collect. Under Scripps, the network finally started shaking off Reese’s original business plan, which gave away the station for free, but it was taking years to ratchet fees up to the levels comparable networks were getting. In 2006, Food was collecting an average of 6 cents a subscriber per month. TLC got about 16 cents and Bravo 15 cents. The website was attracting 7 million unique visitors a month, advertising revenues were rising, and total viewership was up 12 percent in the second quarter of 2006 compared to a year earlier, including a 20 percent ratings rise for the In the Kitchen block on weekends. Prime time lagged with just a 5 percent improvement, despite the ratings success of the new competition shows. With that growth, the talent saw their earnings spike. Jon Rosen, Jim Griffin, Shep Gordon, and other agents had shown there were massive profits to be made on the side by food show hosts. Barry Weiner had finally declared open season for Paula Deen endorsements, allowing her to sign to produce a line of products, starting with the Paula Deen Egg & Muffin Toaster in 2006. Judge Judy was a great show, but she’d never created a line of iced teas. As Shep was fond of saying, you don’t get rich going to work, you get rich going to your mailbox.

  When she’d been a consultant, Brooke had written the memo pushing Food Network to get in on the paydays. This seemed especially obvious when the network was creating stars out of nobodies. Now the contracts the contestants on The Next Food Network Star signed were more restrictive, giving the network approval over future books, TV, and endorsements, and a share of revenues for all contestants. Even established talent like Bobby faced pressure from the network over royalties when their contracts came up for renewal. In the old days, the network’s softhearted bookkeeper negotiated contracts with cooking show hosts. But with millions at stake, and the network reaching nearly universal distribution, around ninety million homes, a tough business affairs lawyer named Pat Guy fought hard for the network’s interests. When Emeril signed his latest contract in 2003, the network extracted the video-on-demand and home-video rights to his series, gaining back a little bit of what it had unwittingly let go years earlier.

  Before Guy taped his first season of Guy’s Big Bite, he received a call from Jason Hodes. They met at the Maritime Hotel and walked over to Soho House, a private club nearby. It was a warm spring Saturday and they sat on the roof, next to the pool. Jason told Guy that he and his colleagues at William Morris thought Guy had “that one-in-a-billion spark.” But there were challenges to making him as big as he deserved, Jason explained, the Food Network contract being the first problem. “It’s incredibly cumbersome,” Hodes said. “There isn’t a lot that you’re going to be allowed to do. But I have good relationships over there. And, I can be very aggressive when it comes to the representation of my clients, and I’m not afraid to push back.”

  If, just if, Guy’s Big Bite was successful, they would gain leverage that could force Food to renegotiate. Selling the Jon Rosen line, Jason offered the potential for merchandise, endorsements, more television shows, and book deals.

  Guy signed.

  “I know that people sometimes think that I just go like, ‘Ah, yeah it’s one, I think I’m gonna get up and have a mochaccino, then I’ll maybe shoot an hour of Guy’s Big Bite, and then probably just go fly my helicopter over to Cuba.’ It’s nothing like that, ladies and gentlemen. If you’re going to be great at something, you’ve got to work really hard.”

  —GUY FIERI

  After the first season of The Next Food Network Star, Bravo announced its own food competition series. Its first major, defining hit—Bravo’s Emeril Live—had been Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and network executives including Andy Cohen, the senior vice president of original programming and development, concluded that the framework for their programming would be the categories that each of the five “Queer” characters represented: Clothing, home decoration, grooming, lifestyle/dating, and food. Bravo would focus on reality shows, and every show would be about either fashion, design, beauty, pop culture, or food.

  In one of its first forays in this direction, Bravo’s in-house production group developed a competition reality show around food. They soon announced a new show called Top Chef in which the winner would earn a whopping $100,000 prize.

  A debate broke out at Food Network: Should they offer a big cash prize on The Next Food Network Star to match the $100,000? Should they create a rival show?

  Other networks joined the food competition game. PBS created one called Cooking Under Fire starring Ming Tsai and Todd English, one of the Iron Chefs from the ill-fated UPN gambit. The winner would earn the comparatively meager prize of a job in one of Todd’s restaurant’s kitchens. Fox had debuted Hell’s Kitchen in which British chef Gordon Ramsay berated would-be employees who were competing for the prize of working in executive positions for top-of-the-line restaurants, sometimes his own.

  Top Chef worried Brooke the most, because it was from a cable channel more directly in competition with Food for viewers. To outwit Bravo, she proposed to her programming executives that they put Star on hiatus for a year, “then we’ll do a Top Chef–like show to try to blunt whatever impact they’re going to have.” Star was working, so she did not want to drastically change it to make it like Top Chef, but producing two reality shows with full casts would be very expensive. In the end, they stuck with Star, because it was working. She did not suggest doing both—keeping Star on and asking Scripps for the budget to create a big-money rival to match what Bravo was doing.

  When Top Chef turned out to be a hit, she scolded herself for not being more audacious. “I regard that as the single largest mistake I’ve made since I’ve been here,” she admitted later. “I allowed them to develop this franchise.”

  But as much as Brooke rued the rise of Top Chef, it was not a show Food Network could have made. Putting aside that the production values were much higher than anything Food was doing, Top Chef showed chefs in all their gory glory. There were tattoos, real anger, and sadness. Upon its debut, a reviewer from the Tampa Tribune called it “a scabrous culinary contest.” Such a show would never have made it through Scripps’s starched culture. Bravo, in contrast, had long shown a tolerance for everything—and would continue to stretch boundaries. Nothing like Real Housewives has ever appeared on a Scripps channel. For all of the great shows on Food Network, has there ever been anything “scabrous”?

  What Top Chef c
aptured with its “quickfires,” backstage jealousies, sniping, and brutal judgments, were the pressure and passion of the restaurant life, the factors that Brooke and Ken had missed when they spent time with the food people in their employ. It was there in Bourdain’s book, too, and in his intense expression as he sat across from Ferran Adrià and tasted his art, but Food Network had tried to rein him in.

  Doubtless, that passion was on display in Bobby’s performance at Webster Hall in the Japanese Iron Chef battle, and it was captured a bit on Iron Chef America. But it was also hidden behind the entertaining artifice of the American creation, in the steam and the backflips, and in the encyclopedic chatter of narrator Alton Brown. Stripped of the histrionics, Top Chef showed something real, including the demanding critiques of the perfectionist head judge—and the show’s executive producer, Tom Colicchio—who had proudly refused to go on Food Network in its messy early days. He was not a cartoon.

  Once something is a hit, it’s easy to imagine that you could have thought of it first. Top Chef would likely never have been possible if Food Network had not been on cable for thirteen years educating viewers. But Food never had the internal culture willing to put something as raw and real as Top Chef on the air. Bravo did.

  —

  The challenges that were flying in from many directions were flattering, since imitations signified success, but also troubling: What if a challenger figured out a better food TV formula? Worse from Food Network’s perspective than Top Chef was Gusto, a cable channel idea that was cooked up as a partnership between the media giants Viacom and Comcast.