From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  On the set, between takes, Anne needled her assistant, Young Sun, who was arranging ricotta gnocchi on a sheet pan.

  “How is your boyfriend Dr. Weiner?” asked Anne. Her spiky blond hair gleamed like steel quills in the stage lights. “Paging Dr. Weiner. Paging Dr. Oscar Meyer Weeeeener.”

  A cameraman chimed in: “I used to go to college with a girl named Mai [pronounced “my”]. Her parents named her that. Her last name was Johnson. Mai Johnson. She’s married now, so she’s not Johnson anymore.”

  Young walked off the set toward the prep kitchen in the rear of the studio.

  Upstairs in the control room, the producer and director ignored the banter and watched a replay of the segment Anne had just shot in which she made the batch of gnocchi. Was it as perfect as possible or did it need to be redone? Did the star use all the proper ingredients in the proper order? Did she stumble on any words? Did the cameras catch the dusting of the sheet pans and the squeezing dry of the spinach?

  Anne called out for her hairdresser, Alberto Machuca. He ran up behind the cameras, spray can in one hand, plastic pick in the other.

  “Alberto. Is there a hole right there?” Anne pointed to a spot at the back right of her head.

  A “hole” meant a gap in the symmetrical pattern of spikes in Anne’s mane—as if her head were a medieval mace. Alberto sprayed and teased a spike back into place.

  Behind the set was a small prep kitchen where a sous chef cooked along with Anne, in case something burned and needed to be swapped out.

  Beyond that sat Rani Cheema, a graphic designer whose job was to make new labels for commercial products Anne used on camera. She was a one-woman branding company. You don’t want the chef to use Green Giant if Birds Eye was buying thirty-second ad spots. So every bottle of hot sauce, vinegar, wine, every can of tomatoes, corn, or artichoke hearts had its label removed and Rani made a new label with a fake brand name. When Sunny Anderson needed a hot sauce, Rani came up with the name Nuke It with a little mushroom cloud image on the label. Now Rani was working on a label for the white wine Anne would need in an upcoming episode. She named it Fabella, fashioning a golden yellow and black label.

  Wendy Waxman, the set designer, was one of the few survivors from the network’s earliest days, having worked with Joe Langhan, Reese—all of them. She had created the perfect Anne Burrell kitchen, giving the viewer a range of hints about the chef’s personality, a temperamental chef-artist who surrounded herself with a mélange of the funky, the modern, and the nostalgic—vases in muted tones, a copper-colored bowl, and stacks of colorful tiles. Behind Anne’s kitchen set, a wide door led to another room. The cameras occasionally captured a glimpse of a 1950s modern wooden dining room table like the one Anne might have had as a child in upstate New York. Her home had not been so sedately appointed, but it was pretty to think so.

  Word came from the control room into the earpieces of the floor producers: “Moving on!” The producer, Shelley Hoffmann, a prótegé of Mark Dissin, and the director, Mike Schear, were satisfied that the segment was perfect enough.

  Forty feet from the fake upstate kitchen was a cornucopia of junk food. Anne grabbed three Crème de Pirouline sticks (rolled crispy wafers filled with waxy hazelnut cream) and fed them into her mouth all at once as she padded back to the set in pastel rainbow flip-flops.

  After the clacker struck and started rolling, Young quietly sat down at a production desk with two raw steaks on a white platter. They were for the show shooting the next day, but something about them didn’t look right. Was tomorrow’s show supposed to be about cooking T-bones or porterhouses? she asked Sarah Paulsen, the culinary producer, who checked the script for the next day’s show. It called for porterhouse. But these were T-bones.

  Sarah pulled up the Wikipedia entry for T-Bone steak. A porterhouse has more tenderloin, but both have a big T-bone. Young trimmed two little bits of fat from the steaks.

  Up in the control room, Shelley, Mike, and a crew of eight people tethered to headsets scrutinized Anne’s performance. Shelley, tall and thin in skin-tight jeans, a tailored blue blazer, and black high heels, was concerned about the shortcake-making in segment 2.

  “Mike, I think she’s off today in general,” she said to the director. “She keeps calling it shortbread again and again. It’s not shortbread. It’s shortcake.”

  The two of them discussed whether they would have to reshoot the segment. They tried to find a spot where they could splice in a fix, but decided there was no good spot and that they would have to take it from the top.

  The crew had been putting out new ingredients for segment 3, while maintaining basic visual continuity with the end of segment 2. A freeze-frame shot of the set as it was at the start of segment 2 was put up on one monitor in the control room, and Mike and Shelley compared the freeze frame to the live shot and gave instructions to the floor crew about where to place the baking powder, the butter . . . “Put the cream to the left of the Cuisinart. No, closer to the sink,” Mike said. Five hours later, when Shelley was moments away from calling the work day done, Anne realized that she had forgotten the anchovies in the Caesar salad dressing. This required another major set reset. “We’re going to do a fridge walk to get the anchovies,” Shelley declared. “They can’t just suddenly appear on the counter.”

  This business of the gathering of the ingredients is a serious business in the construction of a modern cooking show. It takes time to walk to the fridge. In the six to nine minutes of actual showtime between commercials, an extra trip to the fridge to fetch a forgotten ingredient can cost thirty seconds, ticks of the clock that are better spent instructing viewers how to cook. Everyone already knows how to walk to the fridge.

  But it would look weird if anchovies that were not there at the start of the making of the dressing were suddenly there. So the fridge walk was the only choice.

  Sink trips to wash hands are another big issue. Salmonella-mad viewers want to see those hands washed after a chef handles a chicken, but those trips are noncooking time and are carefully plotted so they don’t ruin the action.

  Down on the set, Anne said: “We can do a Caesar salad without Parmesan, but we can’t do it without anchovies.”

  Sarah, in a response only the control room could hear, said, “Oh, the irony of that statement.”

  A few weeks later in the same studio with many of the same floor crew—sound guys and the food stylist, Santos Loo—Rachael Ray was cooking chicken breasts wrapped in prosciutto and rosemary with a side dish of cold pasta with tomatoes for an episode of 30 Minute Meals.

  The place seemed almost asleep. The whole episode took about forty minutes to shoot, flawless, Rachael keeping the banter smooth and easy as she placed sprigs of fresh rosemary between the chicken and the ham and cooked them on a stovetop griddle.

  “You don’t have to serve pasta hot. Room temperature is nice sometimes and you don’t have to worry about everything being served hot at the perfect time.” She could do three shows in a day, easy. She was Babe Ruth, a natural.

  —

  On Anne’s set, the question was whether any of the crew would get home in time to see any of their family members still awake.

  As the gnocchi Anne had assembled in the first segment were bobbing to the surface of the simmering water, she quickly fished them out with a mesh spoon, her restaurant instincts taking over and depriving the cameras of a chance to capture a shot of the pasta floating and ready. Before anyone could react, Anne dropped the gnocchi onto a plate with tomato sauce, grated a chunk of Parmesan over it and delivered her final line: “Gnocchi Dokey!” as she stood smiling in front of her steaming pasta.

  But the cameras needed that shot of the floaters. To add to the problem, Anne had come in thirty seconds under time.

  As they explained all this to Anne through her earpiece, the control room team could see a close-up of her on the monitor, rivulets of sweat moisten
ing the furrows of rage above her eyebrows.

  Young brought out a pot of clean boiling water and a tray of perfect rows of uncooked gnocchi from the shadow kitchen behind the set. The star remained motionless, temples pulsing, staring down at a blank spot on the floor.

  With Anne’s anger and frustration apparent to everyone, Leigh Rivers, whose job it was to type text into her teleprompter, said to the control room at large, “What would JCC do?”

  That morning, Juan-Carlos Cruz, a former star of Calorie Commando—“Keep the taste while you trim your waist!”—which had had a thirty-nine-episode run before it was canceled in 2006, had been charged with hiring homeless men in Los Angeles to kill his wife. JCC had reportedly given two homeless men the halves of ten $100 bills and told them he’d give them the other halves if they slashed his wife’s throat with box cutters. The homeless men told the police, and Cruz was arrested at a dog park in Los Angeles. He eventually pleaded no contest to a charge of soliciting murder and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

  Anne could not hear the comment. When the retake of segment 4 finally rolled, she was ready. She let the cameras catch the floating gnocchi as she scooped them out of the water and plated them with a ladle of tomato sauce. She cut one with a spoon and quickly tasted it, a steaming, thick ball of pasta just out of the boiling water.

  “Hot, hot,” Mike warned Anne in her earpiece.

  Anne’s taste buds were apparently made of asbestos. “Creamy, delicious,” she said after swallowing quickly. “The cheese and the tomato go together so well.”

  “Are we still in Happytown?” Shelley asked Anne into her earpiece at 1:48 p.m.

  “I live in Happytown, USA,” Anne replied.

  At 1:49, “Moving on” was called out, and “Lunch!”

  —

  While the grunt production work continued apace up on six, down on the third floor, programming executives were still trying to find fresh ideas for prime time as the network struggled to harness the wild energy and the soul of the chefs rather than try to force them into premeasured formats.

  As problematic as food people could be, they were often, like Anne, great characters. Mining that, Top Chef continued to draw huge audiences to Bravo, but Food had yet to find an answer.

  That changed because of an unlikely pitch from City Lights productions. The New York–based company had conceived of a high-concept show, which took the idea of the mysterious silhouetted banker character on the game show Deal or No Deal and transposed him to a cooking competition. The idea was that in each episode, the banker—they did not own the rights to the character, so referred to him as a tycoon—would be planning to throw a dinner party at his castle. His butler, a snooty John Cleese type, would find four sous chefs who would compete in the castle kitchen for the privilege of cooking the dinner. The competition covered three rounds: an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert. After each round, one chef would be eliminated by a panel of judges. The food of each eliminated chef would be scraped into a dog bowl and fed, on camera, to the butler’s ravenous Chihuahua.

  The network was cool to the idea until Linda Lea, who had worked on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which had put Bravo on the map and inspired the creation of Top Chef, was attached as a producer.

  When City Lights first offered Linda a producer role in 2007, she had feared for her professional reputation, asking a girlfriend, “How can I produce a show where food is being scraped into a dog food bowl?”

  The network agreed to finance a pilot. On the set, Linda and the crew found themselves amazed at the passion of the chefs to win the competition, silly as it might have seemed. At the start of each round, the chefs raced across the kitchen to the pantry and seemed to forget about the cameras and all the distractions. As they furiously cooked, the cameramen and the rest of the crew placed bets on who would be eliminated.

  The Chihuahua, Pico, was a problem. Pico was friendly and had a professional trainer. But it dawned on the producers that if they kept feeding the little fellow food all day long, he would get sick and not eat on cue. There was no dog double. After each round, Rocco DiSpirito, back for another try at TV, this time as a judge, was assigned to grab the rejected dish, scrape it into Pico’s bowl, and place it on a cutting board under the dog’s nose. They started allowing the Chihuahua only one hungry gobble for the camera before snatching the bowl away.

  Soon after the pilot was done, Bob Tuschman called Linda and broke the bad news. “All that stuff, we just didn’t respond to it. It’s too wacky. We’re sorry.”

  “No, no,” she fought back. There were elements of this show worth saving, she just knew it. “I will be in your office Monday and we’ll talk about it.”

  The next week, Linda explained to him and Alison Page that something magical had happened on the set. The competing chefs had yearned to show what they were made of. When the clock had started for each course, they had forgotten the loony setup and that the camera was rolling. The dog and the butler could go, but the rest had serious potential. “Let’s get rid of all that nonsense and concentrate on what is working,” she said. “And that’s these chefs dying to play this game and compete and prove they made the right choices in their lives.

  “I can do another pilot for ninety thousand dollars. Let me try.”

  Bob had always liked the title of the show: Chopped. “All right,” he said. “Go do it your way.”

  Linda brought in Ted Allen to host it. Despite Ted’s having been on Queer Eye, one of the most successful shows on cable, Food Network executives were concerned because he had not hosted a show solo before. But they relented, and when they saw the results, they ordered a thirteen-episode season to start. Poor Rocco, however, did not make the cut, nor did Pico.

  The show was a streamlined version of the original. They kept the drama of the run to the pantry and added a mystery basket of ingredients for each round—kind of like the bag of groceries from Ready . . . Set . . . Cook!, but instead of being easy foods to cook at home, these typically included at least one obscure item, like Pop Rocks or durian. Three courses were each timed and judged. Ted announced that the loser’s dish had been “chopped,” and the loser took a walk of shame off the set, explained his or her heartbreak to the camera, and then the next round began, the whole drama moving forward relentlessly. Viewers found it addictive.

  A rotating roster of judges comprised the panel, all of them prominent New York–area chefs, some who had appeared frequently on Food Network over the years: Marc Murphy, Alex Guarnaschelli, Scott Conant, Marcus Samuelsson, Amanda Freitag, Geoffrey Zakarian, Chris Santos, and Aarón Sánchez. During the long taping days, a comradeship developed between them. Aarón’s flatulence, sometimes aimed directly at the stern Alex, became a running joke on the set.

  After a chef was eliminated, he would stay around until a winner was named. Then each was interviewed on camera and asked to relive what he’d done and felt at each moment. For their sixteen-hour day, the losers received nothing. The winners received $10,000.

  Even the losers benefited, though. Soon Chopped became a popular staple of prime time. The network reran episodes frequently and ordered more. Corporate event planners offered cooking gigs to chefs who had appeared, glad to add a Food Network touch to their dinners, and competitors found that fans recognized them on the street.

  Eventually even critics who hated the network’s general move away from foodie content into “escapist” fare were raving. “Chopped manages to be absolutely riveting television that educates, informs, and thrills at the same time . . .” Jace Lacob wrote in The Daily Beast. “Egos flare, tempers simmer over, and occasionally true culinary genius and ingenuity is glimpsed.”

  It appeared that the network had finally learned the lesson it could have learned before Top Chef gained its foothold: there was gold in the fiery cave of the professional kitchen.

  —

  Difficult people often ma
ke good TV. Dinner: Impossible had been a promising show and Robert, the superhero, a promising star. In his place, Food put Michael Symon, an endlessly likable chef personality with a quick smile and good cheer. He was fine, but DI was designed around a demanding, relentless drill sergeant—Robert. Viewers’ e-mails asking for Robert’s return poured into the network offices. Charles Nordlander had left, frustrated over the network’s refusal to pay him a salary competitive with other cable channels, but Brian Lando, a rising young executive in the programming department, agitated to bring Robert back. Still, whenever the idea came up, Lando and Carrie would engage in a conference-room war.

  “We can not do this!” she insisted. He had swindled the network’s viewers. It was bad PR.

  But Brian’s argument that the show was a hit with Robert and not one without him was in the end impossible to shout down. Plus Brian had clout, because he was overseeing Chopped and other shows that were doing well. In the fall of 2008, Marc received a call from Brian: “Are you ready to go back to work?”

  Brooke called Robert, who was still in some shock, having gone from being the star of a successful show to sitting at home watching someone else host it for ten episodes. Now he was being allowed back. He thanked Brooke profusely. The network went over every line of his biography with him, carefully checking its veracity. A few news items appeared noting the about-face and rehashing the fiasco, but there was no storm of viewer outrage over his return. His exile had lasted about eight months.

  After Robert made about twenty-five more episodes, Brooke told Marc that the network was interested in seeing what Robert could do with a restaurant makeover concept. Marc’s company shot a pilot of Restaurant: Impossible at a struggling diner in Providence. Robert’s no-nonsense attitude in getting the place torn apart and remade in two days, along with his skill at psychoanalyzing the owners and trying to set them on the path to prosperity turned out to be weirdly heartwarming. And the good he was doing on the show helped rehabilitate his image.