by Allen Salkin
Meanwhile, the weekend mornings that used to be the sweet spot for In the Kitchen were eroding. In 2008, Pat and Gina Neely’s Down Home with the Neelys was the highest-rated debut in the block since 2003. But a few years later their show was out of production and showing only in reruns. Likewise, Anne’s Secrets of a Restaurant Chef was kaput after 119 episodes.
The network had decided Anne was too important in prime time to be tied to a cooking show that they could easily rerun. Her sometimes tart pronouncements and unpredictability made her an ideal character for reality shows, and she started appearing more frequently on them: as a competitor on Next Iron Chef and Chopped, a mentor on Worst Cooks in America, and the ultimate judge on Chef for Hire, where the winner received a kitchen job.
In fact, Food Network had begun distancing itself from the business of producing its own television shows. At the end of December 2011, many of its production staff were let go, and over the next year, nearly all of the remaining house productions were farmed out to other companies. The network’s own studio spaces, once a core part of its identity, were for hire.
A few new programs doing passably well during the In the Kitchen block were hosted by people who were celebrities already. One starred the country music star Trisha Yearwood. Another, Pioneer Woman, starred Ree Drummond, who had gained a huge online following on her own with a blog chronicling her back-to-basics move to an Oklahoma ranch. Maybe this was the new paradigm: the world of food no longer needed or wanted the network to make new stars or spread the basic gospel. In a country now familiar with arugula, Food Network’s job was to harvest what had sprouted and display it in as fun and entertaining a way as possible.
In the fall of 2011, The Chew debuted on ABC. A combination talk and cooking show, it drew solid ratings out of the box, roughly equaling Days of Our Lives, the soap opera it had replaced. Food had not had its original talk and informal demo show, In Food Today, since Donna Hanover and David Rosengarten were let go in 2000 and had not ventured into anything approaching the format of The Chew.
Two of the show’s four stars—Mario Batali, who had stopped appearing on Iron Chef America, and Michael Symon, a new Iron Chef, who continued to appear on Food Network—had been built by Food Network. The producer of The Chew was Gordon Elliott, late of Door Knock Dinners. Some at the network thought Food was being treated as a minor-league outfit, where fledgling cooking personalities and producers could sharpen their skills before being tapped to join the major-league broadcasters.
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In December 2010, Denise Vivaldo, the recipe writer who had created the Kwanzaa cake for Sandra Lee’s cookbook, wrote a column for The Huffington Post attacking her:
“I can honestly say Ms. Lee had nothing against African-Americans or Jews. She just has incredibly bad food taste.”
Sandy’s lawyer, Dennis H. Tracey, wrote to Denise accusing her of violating a nondisclosure agreement and of spreading false and defamatory statements in the column.
The Huffington Post pulled the column, but Denise never issued “a formal retraction and written apology to Lee . . .” as Tracey demanded. Eight months later, a video surfaced on YouTube and then on the food blogs Grub Street and Eater showing a series of outtakes from a commercial shoot in which Sandy appeared to be starring in an advertisement for tequila. In it, Sandy stumbled over her opening line: “Hello, I’m Semi-Homemade.” She rolled her eyes and, in a tight Santa-red sweater, joked “All of me,” grabbing her breasts, bobbing them up and down, and swiveling her hips. With every subsequent flub, there was a profanity, one “fuck me,” one “shit,” and then a request to the crew: “All these outtakes—I want them. Here’s her real personality. Just splice together the curse words.”
The video became an Internet sensation and seemed to confirm what many of Sandy’s detractors thought—that her supersweet persona was fake. The video was pulled from YouTube “due to a copyright claim by Diageo North America,” but it continued to live on eater.com.
Somehow, neither Sandra’s nor any other star’s personal controversy seemed to detract from their popularity with Food Network audiences. Do you cast out a member of the family because they’ve had a few struggles? No. You hold them tighter. Viewers’ reaction to Robert Irvine’s troubles was equally benign. He flourished on Restaurant: Impossible. His audiences grew with each new season so that by 2012, regular episodes were pulling in 1.6 million viewers. That fall, the network plastered subway tunnels and bus shelters with posters of Robert swinging a sledgehammer through restaurant walls, grinning and flexing his biceps. He was literally and figuratively huge.
Sandy won a Daytime Emmy award in 2012 as Outstanding Lifestyle/Culinary Host, an award Martha Stewart had regularly taken home. At the same ceremony, Bobby and his production company Rock Shrimp won the Outstanding Culinary Program Emmy for the latest incarnation in his cavalcade of outdoor cooking series, Bobby Flay’s Barbecue Addiction. Sandy was rewarded with two new series, Sandra’s Restaurant Remakes on Food Network and Sandra Lee’s Taverns, Lounges & Clubs on Cooking Channel, a variation on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, featuring Sandy traveling around to imbibe cocktails instead of cheese fries.
Still, Teflon does wear out. A never-ending series of publicity crises continued to rain on Food’s existing stars, emboldening critics and potentially threatening the value of the network brands.
Ina Garten had taken a bad publicity hit in the spring of 2011, when it was reported that she had twice refused a request from a six-year-old cancer patient via the Make-A-Wish Foundation to cook with her. In 2010, she had claimed to be busy due to a book tour. The next year, after she turned down the second request outright, the boy’s mother wrote about the experience on her blog. ABC News was among many outlets that picked up the story, and a fan website, foodnetworkhumor.com (motto: “Cook with Them. Laugh with Us”) listed “Top Ten Reasons Ina Garten Rejected the ‘Make-A-Wish’ Foundation Boy,” such as:
6. “Sorry, I’m too busy writing my new book, Chicken Soup for the Nervous Laugher’s Soul.”
5. “I can’t! I’m stuck in Meineke all day getting the oil changed on our fleet of BMWs.”
After the bad press, Ina invited the boy to a taping of her show, but, twice rejected, he chose to swim with dolphins instead. When I requested an interview for this book a few months later, Ina’s publicist agreed, then called back to ask if I intended to ask anything about the Make-A-Wish matter. I said that since I intended to ask about her whole career, it might come up. “That’s old news,” she told me. The interview was canceled.
When Ina’s next cookbook, Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust, came out in 2012, she handpicked her interviewers. She appeared at the Food Network New York City Wine & Food Festival in front of an adoring crowd of five hundred fans. Maile Carpenter, the editor of Food Network Magazine, tiptoed around the issue and asked her, “I’m interested in why you’ve decided to sort of keep things reined in. And also I would love to hear what you haven’t done.”
“Oh, there are so many things I haven’t done,” Ina answered. “I’m very satisfied when something’s done really well. And I feel like I need to have my hands in it. My book publisher will tell you, there isn’t a font or a color or a recipe or an ingredient that I haven’t been involved in in the books. I don’t have a lot of people around me doing things. I do them all myself. So, that limits what I can do. . . . I was asked to do something with the UN. I’m like, the UN? Like, solve the problem in Syria?” She laughed. “I’ll make everyone chicken pot pie and they’ll be happy.”
The audience of Ina lovers loved it, laughing along with her. As with Sandy, bad publicity did not dim her. Ask random Food Network fans who their favorite star is and the most common answer will be “Ina.” They recognize her authenticity. Perhaps because she says no to so much in a world that now asks much of celebrity chefs, she is able to keep living the life that her fans aspire to, roasting chickens for her hus
band and keeping muddy footprints off her carpets.
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Some Food Network stars provided irresistible fodder. Guy Fieri imitators were cropping up. One was even interviewed by an unwitting reporter who thought he had the real Guy on live TV during a Kansas City Royals baseball game. Among Guy’s growing legion of passionate fans was the Connecticut-based hedge fund titan Steve Cohen, who would become embroiled in federal investigations of his funds. The 38th-richest American on the Forbes list in 2012, worth $8.8 billion, Cohen was a fan of “Triple D” and asked Guy’s business associates how much it would cost to hang out with him, driving around and visiting diners. Cohen paid Guy $100,000 to be his friend for a day. The two became close, and Guy even asked Diners’ producers to feature Cohen’s favorite hot dog spot in Fairfield, Connecticut, Super Duper Weenie.
After a few seasons, the relationship between Guy and the show’s creator, David Page, began to sour. Guy regularly traveled with a posse of friends and hefty bodyguard types he’d known for years. During one Diners shoot, producers received a call from a hotel after one of Guy’s entourage had gotten drunk and jumped up and down in the elevator until it broke, trapping him between floors. When the hotel staff finally freed him, he began yelling at them. It took a lot of talking before the producers convinced the hotel not to evict the whole team.
The pressures were not easy for Guy to deal with, either. A few days before the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in 2010, Guy’s sister Morgan died after a long battle with cancer. Guy’s Rock and Roll Beach Barbecue was scheduled along with a cooking demonstration, but Marc Summers and other friends had told him he did not need to appear at the festival that year. They counseled him to cancel; Lee would understand.
Guy vowed to make the trip despite his despair—“I made a promise.” He and his business manager and entourage, which now included Steve Hutchinson, an All-Pro lineman with the Minnesota Vikings football team, arrived in time for Rachael’s Burger Bash, held under a massive white tent on the beach.
Standing at the back entrance to the tent, Guy was still in mourning. “If my sister knew that I didn’t come and do an event, that I didn’t give back to the fans and the people that supported my career—my sister knew how I got here. She was on that road with me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m . . .
“It’s really a balance about, how do you focus and see and believe and, but I’m really contained, really controlled with what I’m here for—my mom, my dad, and my sister and my nephew, and my kids, my wife, and—I’m not necessarily in the same zone I’m always at when I come to South Beach.
“This is the hardest time of my life,” Guy said, starting to choke up. “Oh, this is, there’s nothing been like this in my life.”
He excused himself wordlessly. He walked to a very dark area behind the tent near a chain-link fence and, standing with his back to the crowd, lifted his free hand to his forehead, and began to shake.
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After more than a hundred episodes in which Guy visited nearly four hundred diners, drive-ins, and dives, Food Network told David Page he was off the show he had created. In May 2011, he sued the network for breach of contract. They countersued, arguing that they owned the rights to “Triple D” and the contract allowed them to replace producers. In court papers, Food Network alleged that it was David who had rendered the shoots “intolerable” because he mistreated staff and others working on the series. The network included snippets of e-mails it said David had sent to staff: “You are one fucked up dumbass loser,” and “Lets assume im a genius from now on” [sic].
The lawsuit was settled confidentially out of court, and a new producer was found. But the conflicts were not so quietly settled in the media. David wrote to a Guy Fieri fan website:
Perhaps as Guy matures in his career he will come to realize that even Hemingway had an editor. And that actually listening to notes is something that can make a big difference in one’s longevity. Along the way he may also learn it isn’t good to get a reputation for plundering a production company’s budget or for wanting to be surrounded only by sycophants, and he might even adopt more tolerant social views regarding minorities.
Next, a Minneapolis City Pages article included Page’s claim that Guy had complained to him about being introduced to two gay men running a restaurant being profiled on the show, saying, “You can’t send me to talk to gay people without warning!” and “Those people weird me out!” and “You know, it’s true: Jews are cheap.”
Guy’s public relations team pointed out that all the claims came from a disgruntled producer. But with Guy’s agent’s encouragement, a crisis communications consultant with Sunshine Sachs & Associates, Jesse Derris, was hired to protect the star’s image. Among Derris’s past clients was John Thain, the former head of Merrill Lynch who had spent $1.22 million of shareholder money redecorating his office, including buying a $35,000 antique commode. Derris and his team explained to Guy’s camp that all it would take would be a statement against Guy from Abe Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, and a gay rights leader, and Jews and gays would call Food Network, demanding that ads be pulled and calling for a boycott of Guy’s shows. The damage could be permanent.
The crisis management team called reporters and pointed out weaknesses in the story. Food media blogs quoted a “source with knowledge of the situation” who noted that the City Pages article was riddled with “omissions,” “basic errors,” and “complete fabrications. As to the homophobe allegations,” the source said, “Guy’s own sister, who recently passed away, was gay.”
Within a week, the stories died down. No boycotts or protests materialized.
But a year later, the services of Sunshine Sachs & Associates were needed again. Guy had signed a partnership with a New York restaurant company to open a Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, that would be festooned with his image and serve Guy’s signature dishes. The critics were eager to review the place and not of a mind to like it.
Emeril, who understood that exacting New York critics might savage a TV star who opened a restaurant but was not on the premises as the executive chef, had never opened a New York restaurant. Emeril knew that he did not have a trusted team in the city—the only thing that could protect the restaurant’s quality and his reputation. Both Bobby and Mario had earned reputations as serious New York restaurateurs before they got on TV and had top-notch restaurant teams who helped oversee their local empires. Bobby’s right-hand man is Laurence Kretchmer, the lanky son of the original Mesa Grill investor. Mario has Joe Bastianich, an author and food TV personality in his own right. Generally, Bobby’s and Mario’s restaurants have gotten excellent reviews year in and year out. Outside New York City, Bobby’s more informal restaurants, his Burger Palaces, had been opened mostly in East Coast shopping malls and casinos, out of the range of New York critics—but still within range of his management team.
Guy should have known what was coming, but, often surrounded by people who told him what he wanted to hear, he did not. Early reviews were savage: “Of course, the Guy-Talian nachos are cold,” Gael Greene, the former New York magazine critic, wrote in her blog just a few days after it opened. Steve Cuozzo of the New York Post wrote of his struggle “to extract edible elements from heaps of sugar and sludge masquerading as normal food.”
When an angry Guy came to New York for the annual food festival in October 2012, he took what revenge he could, insisting that the festival’s public relations director keep him away from reporters. But Guy hadn’t heard the worst of it. On November 13, New York Times critic Pete Wells wrote what some have called the worst restaurant review in the paper’s history. The entire review was a series of scathing questions to Guy, among them: “Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are?” and “Any idea why [that blue drink] tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?”
Sunshine Sachs conside
red suggesting to Guy that he apologize for the quality of the food and vow to shut down the restaurant until he got it right. But the decision was made to blame the messenger while simultaneously asking for more time. Flying in from California on the red-eye, Guy appeared on Today and told the show’s cohost, Savannah Guthrie, that Pete Wells wanted to make a name for himself by going “after a chef that’s not a New Yorker.” Then after admitting that some of the criticisms might have been accurate, Guy said the restaurant was a new concept and it was unfair to review it so soon. “Let’s see where we are in six months,” Guy said.
His fans crowded Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar through the holiday season despite the kerfuffle, maybe even wanting to defend their man of the people against the elite critics because of it.
In the meantime, Sunshine Sachs had another Food star to rescue—or, rather, to rescue the network from. In May 2011, National Enquirer reported that Paula Deen, famous for using unholy amounts of butter and sugar in her recipes, had been suffering from diabetes for years. The mainstream media did not pick up the story, but Novo Nordisk, the maker of a diabetes drug, reached out to Barry Weiner. Would Paula be interested in endorsing a diabetes treatment?
He was not sure the Novo deal was a good idea, but told Paula that the company was making a good case for itself. Novo pointed out that when Magic Johnson had announced that he had AIDS, he’d removed some of the stigma from the disease. More people got tested. It could be that way for Paula. Much of her audience was in the Southeast, where diabetes was prevalent. If she could convince her viewers to go to the doctor and seek treatment, she could do a lot of good. If that treatment happened to be Novo’s drug, Victoza (which cost around $300 per month), it would do the company a lot of good.