Cooking as Fast as I Can

by Cat Cora

  I was stuck in an awkward place: Postino was my restaurant, but it wasn’t really my restaurant, not in the way that Rocco had Union Pacific, Bobby Flay had the Mesa Grill, or Wolfgang Puck had his mini-empire.

  I had never aspired to be a businesswoman, but I knew I had to become one. I had to understand my contracts, to learn to negotiate in my own best interest, to learn what it meant to create and build a company, become a brand, promote it and protect it. I had no idea how one went about doing this; I just knew it had to be done, and I was the only one to do it.

  Before I gave my notice I recalled a conversation I’d had with Donna during one of our many arguments: “You know, you’re never going to be happy just staying in the kitchen.” She’d meant it as a criticism, but I chose to interpret it as a prophecy. My attitude was “You’re absolutely right. Just watch me.”

  On January 15, 2003, I called the CEO of the restaurant group and told him I was giving my two weeks. He was furious, and when I offered to stay longer in the interest of making the transition easier, he declined. The thing that made my blood boil? He acted surprised. He was shocked that I’d want to leave. That despite my national TV shows, commercials, endorsement deals, newspaper column and food features, starring gigs at food shows around the nation, James Beard Dinner, and impending cookbook, I still didn’t find it an honor and a delight to work my ass off for him and feel penalized for wanting to grow. I had spent five years helping to build and nurture Postino, taking it from a ho-hum space on a busy boulevard to a beloved local eatery with national exposure. I wasn’t expecting any credit—it had been part of my job, and I’d enjoyed doing it—but the contempt with which my years of hard work were dismissed was galling.

  So I decided to throw myself a big ol’ going-away party in Postino’s private room, knowing full well that the GM who had turned on me would have to serve the party. I ran up the bill, then stuck Postino with it.

  I would be remiss if I failed to mention that I had become pretty full of myself by this time. The turn of the century coincided with the rise of the celebrity chef. The Food Network was getting its mission figured out right about the time Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly hit the bestseller lists, and the word was out: cooking was sexy. Crazy shit went down in the kitchens of your favorite two-star restaurant. Sex, drugs, and rock shrimp tempura with creamy, spicy sauce. Chefs were no longer lowly service workers, enduring miserably long hours in kitchens hot and cramped enough to cause a prison riot, but rock stars.

  Before filming a show, I would put myself on a self-styled “cleanse.” I already ate fairly healthy, but I would go religious about not putting anything impure in my body until after the show was shot. Impure is a euphemism for booze. After the shoot was over I’d go a little crazy. I would hit the town for a few martinis, then make the rounds. I’d set up a handful of get-togethers. The culinary world stays up late. I could show up at a chef friend’s apartment at 1:00 a.m. and no one would bat an eye.

  One time I arrived at a producer’s apartment so drunk I couldn’t tell whether she had six cats or I was seeing double and she actually had only three. This struck me as hilarious—cats were everywhere!—and I tripped right over one, falling on my ass. The more the producer scowled, the more I cackled like a hyena, which only amused me more. The producer was pissed, although she got over it, going so far as so ask me to cat-sit a few months later.

  seventeen

  I knew Jennifer was The One from that day in the lodge in Tahoe, and I saw no reason why we couldn’t have a splashy, romantic courtship, just like any other couple. After we’d been dating for about a year and a half, her nanny job sent her to Paris. I followed along, claiming I wanted to revisit the land of my culinary internship. On her first night off I suggested we check out the Eiffel Tower. The evening was warm and the tower was lit from within and glittered bright gold. I threw open a blanket on the lawn beneath it and broke out some good champagne and Brie. Not a minute after I set out my spread some guys standing around nearby started catcalling us, and I hollered back in my kitchen French to beat it and leave us alone.

  Jennifer laughed, amused but also growing less enchanted by the minute. It was late and she was hungry. Once the French guys had moved off, I popped the cork on the champagne and poured us each a glass. We sat back and gazed up at the lights of the tower. At 11:00 p.m. the nightly light show began, and as the lights began to sparkle and dance, I asked her, in French, to marry me and produced the ring I’d been nervously fingering in my pocket for hours.

  She said oui.

  We kissed, knowing this was a great beginning to our life together. On the way back to the hotel, in anticipation of some serious champagne-fueled lovemaking, we stopped at a phone booth and called everyone we knew. It was a glorious night, despite our eleven-hundred-dollar phone bill.

  Even though we could only be domestic partners in California at that time, on June 30, 2001, we had a wedding with a capital W at Tre Vigne in Napa. Both of us were beautiful brides in white gowns and delicate veils, with a flower girl, a proper wedding party, and 125 guests.

  Our families were all for it, give or take a relative or two who thought it was all right that we were gay—they had no problem with that—but why did we have to parade it around by being so celebratory and public and, well, straight about the whole thing? Couldn’t we just live together and keep it to ourselves, like a couple keeping an illegal cat in a pet-free apartment?

  When I left my job at Postino the official response was “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.” I had an insane range of things keeping me busy. A production company in San Francisco had contacted me about developing my own show, and my first cookbook, Cat Cora’s Kitchen, was coming out in the fall. I’d followed Rocco’s advice and gotten an agent at William Morris. Endorsement deals for stuff I’d never even heard of came my way weekly.

  My first commercial was a big one, for Johnson & Johnson. Saran Disposable Cutting Sheets. They paid me more money than I’d ever seen in my life. It was the summer after I left Postino, and I was doing a stint at Chez Panisse for fun and to keep my skills up. In those days any chef who dared to do a commercial was considered a sellout, and I knew some of the purists at Alice Waters’s place were making comments about me behind my back. One of the servers, who despised hypocrisy, pulled me aside and told me that every female chef in the industry—even some of the gals looking down their noses at me—had auditioned for that commercial, but I was the one who’d landed it. I had a bit more spring in my step after that. Plus that huge payday.

  Even good money from Johnson & Johnson wasn’t going to last forever. I took a lot of meetings, but a great meeting does not pay the electric bill.

  Sometimes I wondered what in the hell was I thinking? Here I was, a trained chef with a good résumé who left a good full-time job at a well-respected restaurant to build my brand, a nebulous task if there ever was one. One of the great satisfactions of being a chef is that the work is tangible and obvious. That pile of onions has either been chopped or it hasn’t. The stock has been started or it hasn’t. The three-top at station six either has received its appetizers or it hasn’t. I was trained and wired to work merciless hours tackling what was directly in front of me.

  Now my project was launching a chef named Cat Cora. Who was she? Female, first and foremost. Even at the turn of the century the top chefs were overwhelmingly male. Sure, there were Julia, Alice, Anne Rosenzweig, and Melissa Kelly, but they were outliers. Mostly, women were welcomed only in the world of pastry, where the work was precise, calm, and measured, the environment controlled, the ingredients sugar and spice and everything nice.

  Cat Cora was a cook and she could cook as well as the boys. Petite and pretty, but not so petite and pretty that she didn’t look like she could command a kitchen. Determined and tough, but not so determined and tough as to make her appear unfeminine. Small but mighty was how she played it. She possessed a background peop
le found intriguing, and when she quipped that she grew up eating grits and feta, folks were charmed. Over the years a mistake would be perpetuated that both her father and grandfather had been restaurateurs. It was my godfather, Taki, who was a chef and restaurant owner.

  I had managed to charm some key individuals. But charm doesn’t pay the mortgage. I called my agent as many times a week as I dared. I let it be known at the Food Network that I was game for anything, was available to fly to New York at the drop of a hat. They took me at my word. Some executive would call and ask to see me as soon as I could get there. I’d race back to Manhattan to do a bunch of auditions, and when time after time I was cast in shows that everyone believed would be big hits but wound up falling flat, I wondered if The Melting Pot had been a fluke, and whether it was hubris seasoned with a little insanity that made me quit my regular paycheck job.

  Tell you what: I wasn’t feeling so full of myself now.

  But I was never despondent for very long. Rejection increased my focus, caused me to dig in my heels. A chef’s training also confers the habit of never dwelling on failure. I kept on. Just you wait, everyone who’d said thank you but no thank you.

  Finally, I was hired to cohost a show called Kitchen Accomplished, where a team of kitchen experts—designer Wolfgang Schaber, contractor Peter Marr, and I—would collaborate on a remodel for a lucky homeowner whose kitchen needed renovation. Kitchen Accomplished was a hybrid cooking show and home improvement show, where my main job was helping select the big-ticket appliance items, plus smaller but no less important kitchen equipment like knives and cutting boards, bantering with my colleagues all the while. Even though there wasn’t much cooking involved, I dug it. I immersed myself in the experience, trying not to pay attention to the reality of the situation: the Food Network had ordered thirteen episodes, but as the weeks passed they failed to order any more.

  Looking back, there’s no doubt that my ongoing freak-out was due in part to the fact that Jennifer and I had decided it was time to start a family. Not long after we married we bought a town house in the town of Fairfield, equidistant from San Francisco and Sacramento, and less than twenty miles from Napa. I was thirty-six—tick-tock, tick-tock—and if Jennifer and I were going to have the big family of our dreams—we agreed that four was the perfect number of children—it was time to get on it. With that in mind, Jennifer legally changed her last name so we and our future children would all be Coras.

  We considered adoption first. I was the poster girl for successful adoption, managing to maintain a close relationship with both my adoptive family (whom I just thought of as my family, period) and my birth mom. Jennifer and I set out to find an agency to help us. We interviewed at least a dozen, and to a one they were all encouraging until the moment they learned that Jennifer and I were not sisters or friends, but wives. Every single agency turned us down flat.

  I had a romantic notion that the Mississippi Children’s Home, the agency that had placed me with my parents thirty-six years earlier, would be open to helping us. They were solely responsible for placing me with wonderful people, and I was sure they would want to continue the legacy. The social worker I spoke to first was delighted to hear from me, the famous hometown girl who’d made good, calling to adopt. Of course they could help me! When I told her the situation, that I was gay, she was hesitant, but still open. When I told her I had a wife, she said absolutely not. I was hurt and mystified; a single gay woman could adopt, but not a married couple? It still breaks my heart to think that one of those kids could have been ours.

  We started to explore in vitro, which would require a donor. Before we even settled on the right sperm donor bank we were stricken by the responsibility of being placed in the position of deciding on the other half of our future children’s DNA. The sperm bank we used gave us a dossier of profiles, which we pored over for months. The donors were mostly med students at UCLA and Stanford, who’d aced organic chemistry or quantum something or other. Obviously, most would-be parents in search of a donor wanted to do their best to ensure their kids had some smarts. But we were also interested in physical features, religious belief, and appetite for world travel. We went through one insane week when we thought we should know the donor’s favorite color. Finally, we decided on a smart, seemingly attractive Greek American (we had no pictures of the donors, only physical descriptions), a painter and an athlete who’d traveled and whose ambition was to finish medical school and do research in genetics. Even more appealing to us, he had, according to the sperm bank, retired from the donation business. We wanted our children to feel as though they belonged to us and weren’t part of a huge tribe of half brothers and sisters roaming the planet. This apparently was a common attitude, because the bank had a policy that once you gave birth using one of their donor’s sperm, you could buy the rest. After our first son was born, we bought every vial of the donor’s sperm and took them to our OB-GYN. This nameless, faceless donor is the biological father of all of our children. Our boys call this man their “sperm dad,” and we are endlessly grateful to him, whoever he is.

  Jennifer retired from nannying and set about trying to get pregnant. It wasn’t simply a matter of dusting off the ol’ turkey baster. Her doctor put her on Clomid to induce ovulation every month, and also monitored her ovarian follicles with ultrasounds at regular intervals. The Clomid made her feel nauseated and pregnant without actually being pregnant. She decided she needed something to occupy her time and offer some distraction, so she applied to help with the grape harvest at Stag’s Leap in nearby Napa, where she learned about winemaking, from picking grapes to corking the bottles. While she was spending her days learning how fermentation works, I was manically taking meetings, appearing at festivals, conferences, and events, and doing everything I could to launch my brand. After I gave notice at Postino, it didn’t escape my notice for a single day that I had no steady work, and soon, a baby on the way.

  After six or seven months Jennifer conceived, and gave birth to our first child on October 24, 2003, a beautiful boy we named Zoran. Jennifer took to motherhood easily. Maybe it was all those years working as a nanny, coupled with her calm temperament. Whatever physical traits the sperm dad’s DNA contributed were not readily apparent at birth. Zoran was dark-eyed, with well-proportioned features and a mouth shaped just like Jen’s.

  Holding our baby in my arms for the first time, I was struck by the realization that it wasn’t about me anymore, and that I was responsible for this helpless little being, a being who was largely unknown, with whom I fell immediately in love, and for whom I would lay down my life.

  Later that year, while on a book tour for Cat Cora’s Kitchen, I received a call from Bruce Seidel, an executive producer at the Food Network. This was nothing out of the ordinary. They called me all the time for pie-in-the-sky shows that never panned out.

  After identifying himself he asked, “So, do you want to be our first female Iron Chef?”

  “Uh, yeah!” I said, after thinking carefully for a quarter of a second. I figured this was a preliminary chat, and I would be asked to come in and audition along with every other female they knew who’d ever donned chef’s whites.

  “Great. Your first battle is in two weeks.”

  “You just want me to—”

  “Two weeks,” he said.

  Iron Chef (Ryo¯ri no Tetsujin, translated literally as “Ironmen of Cooking”) was a hit show in Japan in the nineties. No mere televised timed cook-off between competing chefs, Iron Chef also had a fictional history. The story went like this: Takeshi Kaga, the so-called Chairman, dreamed of this competition, set in a kitchen stadium that was part of his castle. Chefs from around the globe would come to wage battle against the reigning Iron Chefs of his Gourmet Academy. When the Food Network picked up the show in 1999 and dubbed it into English it became a cult hit, a crazy, entertaining cross between high-octane cooking competition and a kung fu movie.

  Inspired by the success of the dubbed original, UPN produced Iron Chef USA in 2
001. Its two episodes were shot in the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, with William Shatner cast in the role of the mad, visionary Chairman. The show flopped, due to any number of reasons: a loud, rambunctious Las Vegas audience who behaved as if they were watching a boxing match; commentators who made no effort to look knowledgeable about food cracking endless dumb jokes; the inability to translate the quirky tone of the original.

  Undeterred by the failure of Iron Chef USA, in 2004 the Food Network produced a four-part miniseries, Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters, introducing a new story line. The Chairman dispatched his “nephew” (martial arts actor Mark Dacascos) to continue the tradition in the United States, where he founded a new Gourmet Academy.

  Battle of the Masters, hosted by Alton Brown, with floor commentary by Kevin Brauch, was a hit, and the network then went on to order a full, season-long weekly series. The producers had managed to capture the perfect blend of camp and serious cooking. As in the original show, the contest between the challenger and the Iron Chef involved cooking five courses in an hour, each course featuring a “secret” ingredient revealed by the Chairman at the top of the show.

  When I got the call there were only three American Iron Chefs: Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Masaharu Morimoto. I was fully aware I was their token female, but I was not about to pass this up. I knew the show had been a huge hit in Japan and featured intense cooking battles that verged on athletic competitions. It was wacky and cool, and I felt in my bones it was going to be big.

  My first battle was against Alex Lee, executive chef at DANIEL, Daniel Boulud’s flagship fine-dining establishment on the Upper East Side. I was so nervous I could feel my heart beating in my ears, but my attitude was Bring it on. I’d brought Lorilynn along as my sous chef. Who knew better than Lorilynn how I worked?