The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  CHAPTER 2

  The Branded Chef

  Just as the cultural role of the chef has grown and evolved, so have the chefs themselves. Those who are defining what it means to be a chef today began working in the 1970s, the end of the culinary dark ages in America, illuminated only in spots by a few distinctive lights. They are now about fifty years old, give or take a few years. They are mainly too old to work a line or to want to. They’ve done that. They’ve worked their asses off. They’ve built successful businesses. They want to enjoy the fruits of their labors. But where are the fruits? You can’t hang in St. Bart’s on renown alone, or buy a little stone house on Majorca on a single famous restaurant. Celebrity is not a commodity. They’re thinking, Show me the money. But they don’t know exactly who to say it to.

  Here they toil in an America obsessed with food, an America so hungry for their restaurants they’re paying as much as $100 for a single entrée in Vegas, or $350 simply to take a seat at the bar at Masa in Manhattan so the chef can feed them not what they want but what he feels like. They go to group signings of their own books and see the line for Emeril looking like the one for the most popular ride at Disney World during spring vacation and think, I want a line like that. They feel the power of themselves when they put on a chef’s coat and walk into a room. They are adored. They are famous. Now: How can they exchange that adoration and fame for the cash it must be worth?

  Keller had a telling premonition many years ago when he was only the chef-owner of the French Laundry. He was part of a multichef benefit outside California and was in the fitness center of the hotel when he ran into Norman Van Aken, the Miami chef. They began talking about their various prospects—restaurants, books, endorsements, licensing agreements, the media—and Keller realized there was no real formula for making decisions or a good model for proceeding once you got to their level, nationally recognized chef-owners ready to expand and diversify. “We should get a group of us together and invite Wolfgang Puck to discuss the issues we’re facing,” he said to Van Aken.

  Nothing ever came of their treadmill discussion, but it was a prescient idea. Keller recognized that there was no consistent precedent for growth—who better than the biggest chef brand in the business to help lead the way for others, to discuss good decisions and bad decisions he’d made along the way. Puck had surely made both. He had opened multiple fine-dining restaurants, “fast casuals” as they’re called, high-end fast food. Grocery stores sold his pizzas and soup. He’d authored a half dozen cookbooks and had a television show. His chef brand was the broadest and arguably the most successful in terms of venues and total sales.

  There were others out there expanding, too. Todd English was expanding in restaurants, but there were signs of undercapitalization, not enough infrastructure to support the growth. Michael Chiarello, chef at Tra Vigne, in St. Helena, was moving out of restaurants altogether and toward products and lifestyle entertainment with the company Napa-Style. Chefs smelled opportunity everywhere—the soil was fertile but what to grow?

  They all knew that single restaurants can’t do it, no matter how famous—it’s simply never going to generate the cash. A single book won’t likely do it, nor a TV show, nor a set of pans. It’s got to be multiple restaurants, or multiple books and shows, or, more precisely, a unique combination of all these things—restaurants, books, products, and media presence.

  In order for that to happen—indeed, even before “celebrity” happens—something else, something more elusive and hard to define and distinctly American, has to happen: a brand must take shape. The brand is the key to the money box.

  “There’s always a brand before there’s celebrity—always,” says Adam Block, an adviser to scores of the country’s most successful chefs on contracts and financial issues. “Not everybody likes a brand, but everybody likes a celebrity,” he says. “You become a celebrity because everybody likes your brand.”

  Once you have a brand you have the critical lever to roll that hefty log of fame into cash. If you have a good, strong brand, it scarcely matters how you’re using that brand, it seems. As long as it’s not diminishing itself, that brand can work toward more restaurants, more products, media, now, amazingly, even things unrelated to food and cooking—skin-care products, toothpaste, golf clubs.

  Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of Manhattan’s revered Le Bernardin, one of the city’s five four-star restaurants, has over the past year or so thought seriously about the branding issue. “It’s what I’m trying to do,” he told me. “My goal is to be able to retire in ten years.” That would be before he’s fifty.

  In addition to running the New York flagship, Ripert has several consultant contracts and opened Blue by Eric Ripert in the winter of 2005 at the Ritz-Carlton in the Cayman Islands. In the fall of 2005 he partnered with restaurateur Stephen Hanson to open a tapas joint, Barca 18. With the help of Fred Siegel, partner of Antsnpants, a brand-development company based in Philadelphia and Chicago, he is exercising another branding strategy—producing culinary products, including, he hopes, a line of organic baby food.

  “Eric is at a great point to start a brand in terms of public awareness, the amount of ink he’s generating, and personal appearances,” says Siegel. “Also, the trend toward organic is building, so he’s very much on-trend.”

  “The bread and butter of this,” says Scott Feldman, who created the Manhattan-based Two Twelve Management and Marketing (“Building brands to their boiling point”), “is if you can build an entire brand strategy that has multiple diverse components, including all parameters of having a restaurant—having a consumer base, having a product line, having a book, having a TV show—those are all the things that allow someone to have a fruitful and financially successful business. They all feed each other.”

  What’s perhaps even more interesting than the superstars’ developing restaurants and products to capitalize on the success of their high-end food or mass appeal—Keller and Trotter, Flay and Batali, et al., not to mention Puck (considered to be the originator of the branded chef) or Emeril (the first restaurant chef to combine entertainment and cooking on television)—is that lesser-known chefs are entering the arena as well. These chefs are kicking the one-thing-leads-to-another up a notch: They’re not waiting for it to happen naturally; they’re aggressively pursuing it, trying to crank that gear faster.

  How many people outside the New York food world know Geoffrey Zakarian? I don’t know, but he’s not yet a household word (you really need a TV show for that). Nevertheless, working with both Feldman and Block, Zakarian has opened a second Manhattan restaurant, Country (his current restaurant, Town, is highly regarded and has three stars from the Times), and plans to publish a book, launch not one but two restaurants in Vegas, and produce a line of food-based skin-care products.

  “We have our talent and our integrity,” Zakarian said, while slicing foie gras terrines for a Beard benefit dinner at Lola last fall. “To solidify that, you develop a brand that replicates who you are.”

  Michael Chiarello created a name for himself with the restaurant Tra Vigne in the Napa Valley town of St. Helena and made the unusual choice to leave restaurants altogether.

  He began as the restaurant’s twenty-four-year-old chef in 1987 and slaved away during the 1980s like most other young chefs. Featuring Italian cuisine, the restaurant went through tons of olive oil, more than fifty gallons a week. He and his partners decided to make their own and contracted for the fruit and the production of it. It now went out on the tables as a condiment for bread, a relatively new idea in American restaurants at the time. One diner at the restaurant was Chuck Williams, founder of Williams-Sonoma. He loved the oil so much, Chiarello recalls, that Williams said, “God, Michael, you’ve got to bottle this and I’ll sell it at my stores.”

  After two years at the restaurant, Chiarello was in the olive oil business. It became Williams-Sonoma’s biggest-selling food item. The infused-oil business didn’t exist, and Chiarello set to work creating a line of
oil specialties, with things like basil and porcini mushrooms. “The specialty market was so different then,” he said. “It was wide open.” The business grew to the point at which they could move into grocery stores. Next he did vinegars. Chiarello did a book on cooking with the product he was selling, Flavored Oils, followed by a book called Flavored Vinegars.

  The Napa Valley became hot, and life began to speed up for Chiarello. He opened more restaurants, with partners, in Aspen and in Walnut Creek, California. He did a TV show for the Food Network. And with all these new ventures, his professional life and his personal life became more complicated.

  “You begin to say, ‘Who am I, what am I doing?’ I’ve used about every good idea I have. I’m not able to spend the twelve hours in the kitchen I need for my food to really evolve. You have hundreds of employees, a couple of bakeries—it was just more like giving profit-and-loss meetings rather than inspiring your team to create. It was time to hit the reset button. I control-alt-deleted my life. Which is really scary…. But it was a culmination of a bunch of things I wanted.”

  He left the restaurant world completely and embraced the retail world in 2000 by creating a company called NapaStyle. “Could you bring a point of view to life on air,” he recalled wondering, “and then support it with product?” That point of view was The Good Life in the Napa Valley—blue skies, crisp nights, dry days, mountain vistas, amazing wine, golden vineyards—the rustic, upscale life enjoyed by the most sophisticated agricultural community in the country. The first catalog came out in 2001, just when the economy “went into a nosedive,” he says. “Certainly we had to fight our way through to today…. It wasn’t an easy haul.”

  On its Web site, NapaStyle calls itself a “media company” that produces books and television shows—on both the Food Network and the Living Channel—designed to portray a specific perception of Napa Valley life. NapaStyle has a catalog containing more than four hundred diverse products—books and knives, plates and bowls and baskets, vinegars and oils, bedroom furniture and panini grills—everything pertaining to the “lifestyle.”

  “I’m the host of the brand,” Chiarello says. “I’m not the brand…. One of the things we’re superconscious of is that the brand’s not me. Napa’s much, much bigger than I am. And all we get is a chance to represent a style of life that we’re blessed to be able to enjoy…. But it’s not about me. It’s: ‘We’re going on this trip together and I’ll steer the bus for now.’”

  This, by his own admission, had not been an easy road, even for an established chef of a popular restaurant who had a success in olive oil, infused oils, and vinegars. He may not yet have succeeded in his bid to become the Martha Stewart of the Napa Valley, but he does have a company—he owns it, he notes, along with other investors—two TV shows, books, and products in a country hungry for just this kind of stuff.

  Even chefs with less behind them are looking for the branding key to the cash box.

  Tanya Holland is a forty-year-old chef, currently working on financing for a restaurant of her own in Oakland. Holland, who grew up in upstate New York, worked front of the house for seven years before deciding to learn how to cook at Peter Kump’s in New York and La Varenne, Anne Willan’s cooking school in Burgundy, France. After graduation in 1992, she did the rounds as a cook, an expected progression, working the line at a lot of good restaurants, incluing Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston and Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill in New York. In 2000 she was in New York waiting tables at El Teddy’s (she’d left a recent chef job in TriBeCa and was searching for the right kitchen) when she got a call from the director of the career services office at Peter Kump’s—she’d stayed in touch and asked him to keep her in mind if he heard of any opportunities that might be available to her. The Food Network was looking for a young female, African American, to take part in a hip, multicultural show, Melting Pot. She contacted the network, they arranged for what they called a “talent test,” and she did well. Exciting as this was, she was also skeptical.

  “When I first got it,” Holland says, “I was like, ya know, I trained in France, I worked at Mesa, I worked at Hamersley’s Bistro, I worked at Verbena—and they want me to cook soul food? What? It just seemed a little ridiculous. But then I realized I did have the freedom to give it my own interpretation. And then I realized there really was no African American voice in food that people could really relate to.”

  The more she thought about it, the more the idea seemed to make sense to her—there was a niche to be filled. How many African American chefs under forty could you name? Indeed, the professional kitchen is one of the great multicultural petri dishes, where immigrants and eth nicities of every stripe can thrive—except, apparently, for American blacks. They are vastly underrepresented in the professional restaurant kitchen. Here was a great opportunity to be an African American voice in what was virtually a vacuum, especially in New York City restaurant kitchens. Holland never really had a role model, never had a chef she became close enough to call a mentor, and she wishes she had.

  Her appearance on Melting Pot led to a cookbook, New Soul Cooking, in 2003. Meanwhile, she kept cooking at a restaurant in Berkeley called Le Théâtre until leaving to pursue her own restaurant, and she hoped more.

  She wants an iconic design for her restaurant, she says, “so that I could translate it into product design or signature pieces, a line of cookware…. Now in this industry, there’s so much potential to brand yourself. You don’t have to be just a chef.”

  And she’d like to be a mentor. “I see there are a lot of young people,” she says, “especially women, especially of color, they latch on to me—‘Oh wow, someone who looks like me who I can relate to.’ I want to achieve this thing. I feel I’m able to and I want to let people know they can do it.

  “I want to have a far-reaching brand so I can, I don’t know, get people to experience better flavor—a lot of people in this country eat mediocre food…. I feel like it’s a no-brainer, I’ve got such a niche that I can fill. I just feel like it’s a great opportunity.” Her first priority is her restaurant, and from there to branch out into other venues—cookware, books, television, culinary spokesperson.

  “Bobby interprets Southwestern food; Mario, Italian; all these people take these other cuisines, that were peasant cuisines, and elevated them. Why can’t I do that for soul food?”

  And yet it’s not that easy. She may be able to cook, she may have a real niche to fill, she may have great ideas for excellent products, but she’s missing that lever that’s going to make these gears engage and move her forward. What is it, where’s that magic key?

  I sent an e-mail to ask what had happened in the time since we’d spoken, which had been nearly a year.

  “Much has happened in the past year,” she wrote back.

  Opportunities come and go. At the moment, I’m focusing on getting a new TV gig. This exposure always gives leverage to negotiate new deals. I have since been introduced to a woman with a branding and licensing background…. Very sharp, but I haven’t seen anything tangible just yet…. I’ve continued to look for restaurant spaces and make contacts with developers and landlords. I’ve brainstormed about my next book and a way to tie it into building products and a brand. Personally, I think I’d be a great candidate for spokesperson gigs, but nothing has happened just yet. I continue to teach at recreational cooking schools (promoting my book, New Soul Cooking) and to demonstrate recipes at special events. I cater private events. I’ve done several television appearances, starred in the trailer for the San Francisco Black Film Festival. I’ve also become engaged and purchased a condo with my fiancé. Life has been interesting to say the least.

  Cat Cora is perhaps the model example of the new American chef, the one who’s completely bypassing the traditional route to celebrity chefdom, which for thirty years has meant establishing oneself as the chef-owner of a nationally renowned restaurant. She may represent the next generation of star chefs. Cora went to the CIA after college, then spent about a decade
in restaurant kitchens (including a stint under Melissa Kelly at Old Chatham) before moving full-throttle into television, setting up a company called 3 Street Media and The Cat Cora Show, LLC. Her television concept is an hour-long talk show about food and living issues, and until she gets that off the ground, she’s got a slot on Kitchen Accomplished, a kitchen-renovation show on the Food Network. She was featured in a documentary called Cat’s in the Kitchen, and has one book out, Cat Cora’s Kitchens, and another in the works. And, notably, she became the first woman to become an Iron Chef America, a hugely hyped production of the Food Network well covered by the major food media.

  When I called her at home in Northern California for an article on chef branding, she seemed eager to talk about it. “You go to bed one day and you’re the chef, and you wake up the next day and you’ve got an agent, a manager, and a publicist—how does this happen?” she said. “It’s been wild.

  “It’s something I’ve wanted all my life,” she continued. “To have the fame. Without beating around the bush, that’s the bottom line…. When I was going to culinary school, chefs weren’t the celebrity chefs they are today.” Her dream in culinary school was to cook for the best chefs in America, and to be the best chef she could be, but the chef world has changed in a way that seems to suit her disposition.

  “For me it started at a young age. I wanted to be famous since I can remember. I knew that I had a bigger calling from a young age, that I had something big to offer…. How can I combine what I love to do with also the celebrity of it or becoming well known throughout the country, throughout the world—how can I branch those together?