From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  “I want to do a show called Fit for a King. I want to make food I made for people in England.”

  “Let me tell you, if we sign up today to do something, it’s going to be two years before anything happens, if it does. Are you willing to put in two years?”

  “Yes.”

  Marc, Robert, and Robert’s writing partner Brian O’Reilly met with Charles Nordlander at Food Network, but Charles did not like the sizzle reel they produced for Fit for a King. Too focused on pleasing rich people, not enough mass appeal. To Charles’s eye, Robert looked like a superhero. He did not look like anyone Food Network had on the air, but that did not mean it wouldn’t work. What, Charles thought, could they do with a superhero chef? The four men batted it around, and out came a concept based on the old TV show Mission: Impossible. Why not try Robert as a kind of secret agent of food, showing up where he was needed to tackle a task he always chose to accept. The challenge, Nordlander insisted, needed to involve a time element, a deadline Robert would have to meet.

  The producers arranged for Robert to go up to a training facility where the New York Knicks and the Rangers worked out. They produced a seven-minute sizzle reel showing him meeting with the teams’ nutritionist and preparing meals tailored to the players’ dietary requirements.

  When Charles showed the sizzle reel at a programming department meeting, there was some hesitation about how viewers would feel about a British accent, but the network agreed to finance a full pilot episode for what was now called Dinner: Impossible. ShootersTV, the Philadelphia-based production company that Marc, Brian, and Robert were working with, was given a budget of less than $200,000 to do the hour. Shooters was so desperate to be in business with Food Network that it spent around $450,000 on a pilot in which Robert cooked for a 200-person wedding at a mansion, given only eight hours and an inexperienced staff. At one point in the pilot, Chef Irvine offered his perspective on leadership: “The chef’s jacket is like a coat of arms; it makes you who you are. It turns me into this very prim and proper English guy who has no nonsense.” Robert had been raised in Salisbury in southwest England, a two-hour train ride from London. His father, a former professional soccer player from Belfast, worked as a painter, and his mother, Patricia, toiled in a wallpaper shop.

  The investment in the pilot worked. The network ordered a season, twelve additional episodes, although the budget was still so tight, it would take Shooters years to break even. Just as Marc had predicted, it was to be two years between the meeting in the accountant’s office to the debut of Dinner: Impossible.

  And yet something had been niggling in the back of Marc’s mind: all these claims Robert had been making about cooking meals for the royal family. Marc had not exactly seen Robert chatting on his cell phone with Prince Charles. He only knew for sure that Robert had cooked for a few years at casinos in Atlantic City. It was a long way from Caesars to Buckingham Palace. But Marc dismissed the doubts, deciding, what the hell did he care if someone was fudging the truth to get on TV? Marc himself had changed his last name from Berkowitz to Summers after the Son of Sam serial killer, David Berkowitz, had made it a bad name to have.

  But now, the night before Dinner: Impossible was to go on the air, he pulled up Robert’s website and took a close look at his bio. The site said he was “chef at the Inaugural Dinner for President George W. Bush,” and had done the same for George H. W. Bush. It noted that he had a B.S. degree in food and nutrition from Leeds University and had served aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, “preparing outstanding cuisine for royalty, presidents, and high-ranking dignitaries.”

  Robert was not officially Marc’s employee and Marc had not done his own investigation into the claims. If anything, Food Network, which would own the rights to the show, should have looked into his biography. Still, a pang of worry shot through Marc’s mind. He and everyone else had put a lot of time and money into this show. Sitting at a breakfast bar in his production office in Philadelphia, he started thinking that if—IF—some of the biography was embellished, it went beyond the old showbiz white lies of changing your name or trimming a few years off your age. Claiming to have cooked for presidents would be considered a big lie, something that if exposed could cost you your career. It reminded Marc of an exposed truth that had nearly cost him his own show business life.

  Ever since he was a boy, Marc had been obsessively neat. As an adult, he’d developed strange superstitions and rituals, such as a belief that if he booked a flight and did not read the back of a cereal box over and over again, the flight would crash. For years, he did not know he was suffering from a disease, but when he’d been the cohost of the morning show Biggers and Summers on Lifetime, he’d read a description of obsessive-compulsive disorder in preparation for a guest interview and recognized himself. On the show the next morning, he spontaneously revealed to the psychiatrist that he struggled with OCD. Marc described how he hung his clothes exactly a quarter of an inch apart, believing that if he didn’t terrible things would happen, and confessed that he had yelled at his wife on their wedding day for being fifteen minutes late. He had been signed to host a new version of Hollywood Squares, but after People magazine wrote an article about him and Oprah interviewed him, and word started spreading in Hollywood that he was a nut job, the deal fell through. He began doing speaking engagements about his disease and wrote a book, Everything in Its Place: My Trials and Triumphs with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It was only after his old Lifetime boss, Judy Girard, went to the Food Network that he started the second phase of his career on Unwrapped. Marc had not deliberately lied and he didn’t think Robert suffered from some moral failing if he had embellished his résumé. Marc knew simply that you had to be careful about your reputation if you wanted to survive in showbiz. Perhaps Marc should have raised his concerns earlier than the night before the show was to debut, but there was still time to change some copy on the website if necessary. He urged Robert to think through what might be coming if he was hiding something.

  “You have no idea,” he warned him. “I came out and started talking about OCD, the shit that started to come down.”

  “It’s all good,” Robert assured him. He was so close to the dream he’d been working toward for years.

  “I think it is worth mentioning that, as an Executive Chef, I have been in charge of kitchens in the Navy, on cruise ships and in hotels and casinos and have hired and fired hundreds of chefs and I didn’t hire a single one of them based on what I might have read on their resume. I listened to personal recommendations about them from other chefs and then I found out for myself if they could cook. If they could cook and were willing to work hard, they got the job, case closed.”

  —ROBERT IRVINE, BLOG ENTRY

  Brooke stayed focused on shaping the network into the moneymaking force she believed it ought to be. In March 2007, the network hired Sergei Kuharsky, a former Disney executive, as general manager for new business, finally filling the job Brooke had nearly created for herself as head of “ancillary business.” Sergei had worked for Disney in the late 1990s where he helped develop the “get it before it goes back in the vault” strategy, in which DVDs of classic animated movies were sold for a limited time at premium prices. It unlocked vast millions in profits from dormant content such as Bambi and Pinocchio.

  A magazine was Sergei’s first priority. The network owned a treasure trove of recipes and its stars were generating new ones every day. The same year Gourmet magazine folded, Food Network Magazine was launched in partnership with Hearst. The first issue, with Bobby and Ina on the cover, featured recipes for hamburgers. Print magazines were supposedly a dying breed, but Food Network Magazine, leveraging its star power, was a stunning success, with a circulation of 1.25 million in its second year.

  Sergei pushed for “permission research” in which the network asked its fans what sort of products they could see the Food Network brand associated with. A common answer was “a restaurant.” Food Ne
twork installed a food kiosk in the new Yankee Stadium in 2008 that offered exotic dishes like a Chinese noodle bowl and jicama fries—one baseball fan asked what “Jamaica” fries were. The network kept things simpler when it opened a stand at the new football stadium at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. It served fancy hot dogs. They partnered with the national restaurant group Delaware North to sell brisket sandwiches at a stadium in Texas, and a Food Network eatery at a small airport in Florida offered turkey pinwheels with hummus. They partnered with Wente Vineyards and introduced their own wine label, Entwine, available in red and white. As he’d done with Disney movies, Sergei was making a lot of money out of little additional investment.

  —

  On February 17, a week before the SOBE festival in 2008, an article appeared in the St. Petersburg Times: “TV Chef Spiced Up His Past Exploits.” By then, Dinner: Impossible had become a successful Wednesday night staple in prime time in its third season and Robert was involved in a deal to open two restaurants in the St. Petersburg area. The paper’s investigative reporter Ben Montgomery had looked into biographical claims, some on the website Marc had perused, some in Robert’s cookbook, Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes, and Making the Impossible Easy, and some he had been heard mentioning around town. No matter what Irvine had been claiming, he was not a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, a spokesman from Buckingham Palace confirmed. Walter Scheib, the White House executive chef from 1994 to 2005, cast doubt on Robert’s claim that he had cooked for the George W. Bush Inauguration, telling the paper that during that period Robert had had nothing to do with food preparation for the part of the White House where presidents live. A spokeswoman at the University of Leeds told the paper that the school could find no record of him. And as to his claim that at a royal school of cookery he had “aided in the construction of the cake for the royal wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer” and “participated in the design and execution of the beautifully crafted side panels,” the real baker of the cake e-mailed the paper two days after the article: “He most certainly was not involved with me in making or baking the cake.”

  The original article noted, “Irvine’s relationships have soured like month-old milk. His website consultant claims he owes her thousands. His restaurant designer has backed out. His interior decorator is suing him.”

  Dinner: Impossible was shooting in Puerto Rico the morning the article appeared and Robert told the early arrivals that it meant nothing.

  But at 7 a.m. someone from the crew called Marc in Philadelphia. “Have you seen the article about Robert?”

  After reading it, he called the star.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “It’ll blow over,” Robert insisted.

  “Robert, this is not blowing over, trust me.”

  Network executives quietly told Lee that Robert was not coming to the festival and to cancel his cooking demonstration. The pennants showing his face continued to flap above the “tasting village” tents along the beach as the network staff debated what to do about him. Would Dinner: Impossible stay on the air? Two weeks after the festival, Carrie Welch, the head of public relations, called Marc and asked him directly, “How come you didn’t vet him?”

  The previous June, Carrie had had to deal with allegations that a competitor on The Next Food Network Star, Josh “Jag” Garcia, had been inaccurate in presenting information about his background, including his military service, claiming he had deployed to Afghanistan though records were not clear that he had. He’d withdrawn from the competition. Carrie was particularly upset that in the wake of that mess, Marc had not vetted Robert more thoroughly.

  “He wasn’t mine to vet,” Marc protested. “I would have, if I was going to sign him, but you guys took him over, so your attorney should have done it, not me.”

  “What did you know and when did you know it?” Brooke asked Marc in a phone call soon after.

  “Brooke, I swear to God,” Marc said. “I don’t know shit.”

  “What’s fake and real on DI?” Brooke pushed. She was worried the problems reached beyond the résumé and into the core of the show. What if they had to yank it from the network entirely? “Here’s how I run my show,” Marc said. “He has no freaking idea what the challenge is until he walks in, end of statement. Everybody knows in the office, if anybody tells Robert what’s going to happen they’re fired. Brooke, I swear, it’s all for real. We’re not giving him anything.”

  Frustrated, Marc reminded the chef that he had sworn to God that everything on his résumé was true. Why had Robert risked the whole enterprise on it?

  “Don’t you remember when we were having our private discussions?” Marc asked.

  Robert replied, “I know, I know, I know.”

  Finally, there was a meeting at the Food Network’s business offices among Carrie, Bob Tuschman, and Pat Guy, the head of legal affairs, and Robert and his business manager, Randall Williams.

  Fighting for his television life, Robert brought in stacks of files and award plaques, and he and Randall pushed folders forward of British Navy papers and testimonials. But the network would lose credibility if it allowed him to stay after what he’d done.

  “I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “It’s not going to work out.” She was a little scared. Robert’s muscles were bulging and the look in his eyes was alternately pleading and murderous.

  Bob told him, “I’m sorry, but there’s no way that we can keep you on the network with this happening.”

  “At the end, we hugged! I mean, isn’t that ridiculous? We were like, ‘Oh, good luck.’ We went back to Pat’s office afterwards, and we all just stared at each other for a while. I had never done that to anyone before.”

  —CARRIE WELCH

  As much as Brooke was focused on prime time, the network still filled many hours of its schedule with old-fashioned cooking shows. By this point in its history, the art of producing them had been honed nearly to perfection. Gone were the days when producers like Pat O’Gorman enforced silly rules like “no food with faces,” and gone was Reese’s “no stopping” dictate. The network had enough money to afford editors now—and if you wanted to use raw eggs in your mousse, go for it!

  There was only one problem, one wild card that prevented the production of a cooking show to reach perfection, and that was human beings, especially human beings who came from the tumultuous world of restaurants.

  A visit to the set of Secrets of a Restaurant Chef revealed just how challenging it could be to channel a professional chef into the expensive constraints of a modern half-hour cooking show. It starred Anne Burrell, one of Mario Batali’s sous chef from Iron Chef America, a talented and respected veteran of professional kitchens. Anne grew up in occasionally unpleasant circumstances in a small upstate New York town. In her childhood home, she would never know when her father was drunk based on his outward appearance, but then she’d realize she had no idea what he was talking about.

  As a little girl, she began telling herself that she was going to be famous when she grew up. She believed that she was special, that she had a “sparkly factor.” She also found succor on TV. When she was three, she told her mother she had a new friend named Julie.

  “Julie who?” Anne’s mother asked.

  “Julie Child,” Anne said. The big woman on the television who was cooking beautiful-looking food. She felt like a friend to little Anne.

  The enemy of the sparkly person, Anne figured, was the mediocre person, and she knew she wasn’t that. She started working in restaurants at nineteen because she wanted to buy a car, but was quickly pulled into the life. The restaurant people would go out late after work every night and get wasted, talk about all kinds of interesting things, then sleep late and do the whole thing again the next day.

  A few years later, Anne found herself trying to hold down a more “responsible” job as a headhunter for doctors in a dr
eary office in Buffalo, New York. After work one unusually warm evening, while walking her dog, she had an epiphany: “I am twenty-three years old and I am too young to be this miserable. I will go to the Culinary Institute of America, and I will have a restaurant in Manhattan.”

  Thanks to her appearances on Iron Chef America, with her commanding personality and restaurant experience—and spiky peroxide hairdo—in 2008 the network gave her her own show, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, where she would teach home cooks useful professional techniques. Programmers recognized that something about her seemed true to the frenetic energy of a restaurant kitchen, and she added something different to the ITK lineup. But she was not a smooth television presence like Rachael Ray, Giada De Laurentiis or, once she got the hang of it, Ina Garten. Anne was a handful.

  When the network started in 1993, it cost about $2,000 to make a thirty-minute cooking show, including roughly $300 paid to the talent. Secrets of a Restaurant Chef employed a fleet of professionals and cost around $50,000 an episode. At 10:30 a.m., cameras rolled on the first of four segments for the half-hour show. When it aired, the first segment would take about seven minutes. Minus commercials, twenty-two minutes of television needed to be made. If all went according to the schedule, shooting for all four segments of episode #LR0612 would be completed in three and a half hours. The crew would lunch from two to three and begin taping another episode (“The Secret to Garlic Chicken Casserole”) at 3:15 p.m.

  First call in the main studio at the Food Network was 8 a.m. Anne arrived at 8:30. An hour and a half of primping later, she was due on the set, where she spent half an hour with the director and producers rehearsing.

  The script for this episode called for the preparation of spinach and ricotta gnocchi with quick tomato sauce and apricot nectarine shortcake with vanilla whipped cream.