by Shep Gordon
To give them a sense of what a great restaurant could be like, I got Kumar to come to France and eat at the Moulin, the first time for him. I wanted him not just to taste the brilliant food, but to experience the truly great and gracious hospitality. He was tremendously impressed, the way everyone is.
Then I said, “And now, maybe the most important part of the lesson. I’m going to take you to a hotel nearby that’s widely considered the greatest hospitality facility in the world. One of the most beautiful, elegant, luxurious places in the world. And you’re going to see how you can have all the best resources in the world, and screw it all up.”
I took him to have tea with Monsieur Arondel, the general manager at the Hotel du Cap, knowing that he would put his foot in his mouth within three seconds. And he did. He told stories like the time, just for fun, he threw Brad Pitt out of the hotel. “I did not like the color of his shirt, I lock him out. It is my hotel.” And more, bragging about how he abused his clientele.
Kumar’s jaw was on the floor by the time it was over. He walked out aghast. And I said, “Mr. Kumar, with all due respect, when I stayed in your hotels with Mr. Vergé we weren’t treated much better. More polite on the surface, yes, but still with that same attitude. You need to get the greatest hospitality guy you can find to come in and be under you, or you could end up with a Mr. Arundel. There’s no point spending a lot of time and money creating a place to attract Americans and Westerners if your people have that attitude. You won’t win.”
He did as I suggested, and it worked beautifully.
The first international cuisine we brought to India was called Wasabi by Morimoto, at the Taj Mahal. Morimoto was very famous at the time as the Iron Chef. His was the first sushi restaurant in India, and I’m told it still has the highest per-person check. (It was also where the terrorists holed up when they took over the Taj Mahal in 2008, and was completely destroyed.) Then we did an organic vegetarian restaurant called Pure, in the Taj Lands End hotel in Mumbai. It was created by Michel Nischan, who had created Heartbeat, the first heart-healthy restaurant in New York. Pure was the first organic restaurant in India, which was very difficult to do. Besides a chicken farmer we found in Delhi, there were no organic farms, so we had to create them. But getting the great Michel Nischan to do a restaurant in India went straight to the heart of what we were trying to do, trying to get Westerners not to think of vomiting when they thought of traveling there.
For the next part of building the bridge, I turned to Jean-Georges Vongerichten. To me he was the epitome of the highly respected chef in New York City. He had a Thai restaurant, a French restaurant—he seemed able to do anything. I told him I had money from these Indian guys if he had any interest in opening another restaurant. As it happened, he and his partner Phil Suarez had just taken a lease on a space in the Meatpacking District, around Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village, which was originally where wholesale butchers were concentrated, then became a zone of gay clubs in the 1970s and was now entering a new phase as an area of upscale boutiques and new restaurants. After a very good conversation with Jean-Georges, I asked Tata if he could provide a plane for Jean-Georges to fly around Southeast Asia researching all the different street foods. Jean-Georges asked if he could take Gray Kunz, the brilliant chef at Lespinasse, along with him. Getting the two of them involved was beyond my wildest dreams. Gray was one of the highest-rated chefs in the world. We flew to India, then the two of them went on to Singapore, Cambodia, and Thailand. The result was Spice Market, which they opened in 2004. It was another way to combat the American prejudice against Southeast Asian food; if Jean-Georges and Gray Kunz approved, it must be all right. Spice Market is still doing very well more than a decade later.
At the same time, the Taj Group was seeking to take on a prestige hotel in New York. The management contract for the landmark Pierre on Fifth Avenue was available. The Pierre is a mix of hotel rooms and condominiums. The condo owners’ association decided who’d get the management contract, and for whatever reason they would not consider an Indian management group.
Now, I knew that many Pierre condo owners were huge supporters of Citymeals on Wheels, the nonprofit started by James Beard and food critic Gael Greene to bring meals to the elderly. One of the biggest food festivals in New York City is the annual Chefs’ Tribute at Rockefeller Center Plaza, when the best chefs in the city donate their time and skills to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Citymeals. I told Tata and Raymond that if the Taj Group became a sponsor of the Tribute, at the same time that the new Spice Market was getting great reviews, at the same time that we were opening the first organic and sushi restaurants in India . . . then we’d have a real story to tell. So they did that, and I had very elegant invitations sent to all the Pierre condo owners. I can’t say for sure that we swayed them—but shortly after the Tribute, they voted to accept the Taj Group as the new management.
As I said, this all took place over a number of years. We must have had an impact, because American tourists are visiting India in record numbers. Maybe it’s even helping to build Tata’s U.S.–India bridge. I certainly hope so. For me, besides the satisfaction of high-fiving myself in the mirror for having conceived it all and pulled it off, the greatest benefit of my involvement has been meeting and becoming friends with Ratan Tata, as beautiful a human being in his own way as Roger Vergé and His Holiness are in theirs. He’s an enormously wealthy man but lives in a two-bedroom apartment. He never married—he was always too busy running his global empire, serving on the boards of numerous charities and corporations, jetting from meeting to meeting to meeting. For him, money clearly is only as valuable as the good he can do with it in the world. A number of cancer hospitals in India are funded by the Tata Group and serve their patients for free. He’s revered in India—people bow as he walks by. He could be their prime minister, but he’s done more good being himself. He’s one of the most powerful and influential men in the world, yet very humble, quiet, and unassuming. When he stayed with me in Maui, he walked around in bare feet and shorts like all the rest of us. A beautiful, beautiful individual. I’m so thankful I got to know him. One of my great joys was introducing him to Clint Eastwood, one of his heroes. They bonded over a mutual love of flying helicopters and continue to stay in touch.
Of all the American chefs I worked with, one of my favorites is Emeril. From that first time we grinned at each other in the busy kitchen of Commander’s Palace, there’s always been something naturally simpatico between us. He has a big coupon with me. The best coupon is not always a simple quid pro quo. Sometimes it’s exchanging something more intangible, like honor or loyalty. Emeril Lagasse proved to me more than once that he is a loyal and honorable person.
When he and I started packaging and marketing his spices, we were fifty-fifty partners. As usual, there was no paperwork on it; we shook hands. For honorable people that’s enough. I found us a hundred-year-old family company in Arizona to handle all the aspects of packaging, warehousing, and shipping. They were a tiny mom-and-pop company, but they held up their end. Emeril and I each made maybe $150,000 a year from it.
As Emeril’s career took off, so did the orders for his spices. William Morris became his agency. They wanted him to drop the family, whom we liked and enjoyed working with, and switch to B&G, the second-biggest spice company in America. They wanted him not only to leave the family behind, but me as well.
His agent called me. “What’re you willing to take?”
I said, “Willing to take? We’re fifty-fifty.”
“Do you have that on paper?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Well, look, we’ll get you a finder’s fee or do something else. I know you brought the client. We’ll take care of you.”
“Yeah, you’re taking good care of me. I got it.”
I called Emeril. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“Do you know what’s going on?” he said. “I got a memo telling me how I should fuck you. How you don’t deserve t
o be my fifty-fifty partner. And how giving you a small piece of something big is more than fair. What do you think about it, Shep?”
“We shook hands. We’re fifty-fifty partners. You do what you want to do. You want to cut me out, cut me out. I’m not going to sue you. You do what you gotta do. You gotta live with yourself.”
“They’re telling me I’m being fair to Shep Gordon. ‘We do these kind of deals all the time.’ Is this done all the time?”
I said, “Yeah. The industry is full of cocksuckers.”
He thought it over. And told them, “Screw yourselves. Shep’s my partner.” And having seen how they operated, he added, “And I want that on paper.”
That’s a supermensch. That’s someone with honor.
I know my strengths and my weaknesses. I’m not a great organizational guy. I don’t have a great attention span. I’m a very poor administrator, and I’m a horrible executive. But I’m fantastic at launching the rocket ship. It’s what I do best. I sit and smoke a joint and think, Wouldn’t it be amazing if . . . ? And then I start figuring out how to pull it off.
After several years of working my butt off for the chefs, I was ready to step away and let them fly the rocket themselves. I felt I’d done what I’d set out to do for them. Most of them were rich and famous now, which is what I do for you. In some ways I might have done my job too well. Most of my HRC chefs had grown to where they owned multiple restaurants on many of the same islands, so they were becoming competitors. Other chefs wanted in, but the group didn’t want to expand. Nerves got raw, and there were petty disagreements about what to do next and how. I was not interested in playing the negotiator. I stepped away, and the organization died.
But look at what we accomplished. Just as I had done for Alice and Teddy and others, I hadn’t sat around waiting for the culture to create opportunities for us. I created a culture in which chefs are celebrities and cooking is cool. A lot of what we did that was cutting-edge then is standard practice today. Now everyone takes it as a matter of course that great chefs are celebrities. Today, hotels everywhere bring in top chefs for culinary tourism packages. Culinary travel shows and chefs like my friend Anthony Bourdain are all over TV. Everybody is a foodie to some extent now. People clamor to get into a new restaurant the way they do for a big box-office movie on opening weekend.
It’s easy to forget that this phenomenon is only twenty-some years old. Twenty-five years ago, Americans didn’t know a single chef’s name besides Boyardee, and their favorite restaurants were McDonald’s and KFC.
I’ve given a lot of thought to what it was that made this food culture take off the way it did. Was it really just that we made the chefs celebrities? Or is it something about food itself? Food isn’t just food, after all. Food is culture, food is art, food is recreation, food is a trophy in your house, food is a way to have a social life. Music is a luxury. Food is the core of life. It’s more than something you shove in your mouth three times a day. I think that’s something Americans had forgotten. Europeans understand it. Go to Italy, to France, and good food is a daily preoccupation. It’s integral to their cultures and their lives. I think we brought some of that to Americans.
21
IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL MY RUNNING AROUND FOR THE CHEFS, I had the first big health scare of my life. I’d always been pretty casual about my health. I had lived the high life, done a lot of drugs, didn’t always eat right, and was a bit overweight. I didn’t have a doctor and never went for check-ups. Then again, I was going on fifty and had never had a major problem.
In the early 1990s the artist Peter Max, a really good friend of mine going back maybe a quarter of a century at that point, told me that he had just had this diagnostic procedure, a full-body scan. The machine was brand-new at the time. He encouraged me to do it. I said sure, then forgot about it.
A few years went by. Meanwhile the machines were popping up in hospitals everywhere. One day I was in Phoenix with nothing planned, and in my usual way I decided that what I’d do that day was go get scanned. The next day, on my way to play golf, I stopped in to get the results.
The doctor said, “You’re going into bypass surgery right now. It’s amazing you’re alive. You have ninety-nine percent blockage in the arteries going to your heart.”
I had been on my way to play golf. I felt fantastic. Now suddenly I was on death’s door? My reaction was nothing like I would have expected. For years, when trying to comfort someone who was confronting their own or a loved one’s mortality, I had a set speech I always said. It went something like this:
I happen to believe that the universe is not here by chance. I believe somebody created it—call him God, call him Allah, call him a mad scientist, anything you want. And there are only two things he guarantees to everyone in our species: you’re born, and you die. In between it’s completely random, and no two people are alike. You could be black, white, yellow. You could be tall, you could be short, you could be a guy, you could be a girl. Billions of us on the planet, and out of them all, you are absolutely unique.
Now, if there is a creator, why would he go to all that trouble to make each and every one of us unique, and to give us everything that happens to us between birth and death? Is he a scumbag? Or is it all a gift? Birth, death, and everything that happens to you in between? Accept it. Embrace the miracle.
I really believe that. But now I was the one who was dying, and my philosophy didn’t do me any good at all. I fell apart. I went into a complete, terrified panic. Holy fuck, I’m going to die. Some gift. I felt faint, I broke out in a sweat, I was angry, I was scared, I was filled with self-pity, everything.
The doctor wasn’t kidding around. He had me undressed and in a hospital gown in no time. In my panic I found the presence of mind to think, There must be someone else I can talk to before I let this guy cut me open.
I remembered a man I’d met on a plane. I had been in New York talking to American Express about getting involved with ACR. My flight to L.A. was on the runway when a flight attendant got on the speaker and asked if there was a doctor on board. The guy seated next to me got up and went forward. An ambulance rolled out to the runway and they took somebody off. While this was going on, I glanced at the book the man had been leafing through. It was called Week by Week to a Strong Heart.
When the man sat back down I asked him what had happened.
He said, “I think he had a little heart attack.”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Yeah, I’m a cardiologist in fact. I teach at Yale and have a private practice.”
It turned out he was Dr. Marvin Moser, the coauthor of Week by Week; he had been leafing through it to bone up for a TV interview.
I had one of my moments when things just clicked in my head. I told him who I was, that I represented all the great chefs in America, and wouldn’t it be great if he collaborated with them on a heart-healthy cookbook? He said he’d already written a dozen books on hypertension and didn’t think he had anything new to say on the subject, but I was on a roll. Wouldn’t it be good to clarify some of the myths and misconceptions about diet? Antioxidants, garlic, food additives, heart disease, cholesterol? But at the same time demonstrate how people could remain on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet and still enjoy recipes put together by America’s leading chefs?
He started to warm to the idea. I grabbed the phone in front of me—they still had phones on planes then, before the age of cell phones—and started calling some of my chefs. By the time we landed in L.A. I had gotten agreements from Larry Forgione, Alice Waters, and Jimmy Schmidt, and found us a publisher. Heart-Healthy Cooking for All Seasons came out in 1996.
So now, sitting there in my hospital gown facing death, I called Dr. Moser. They got him out of class to speak to me. I explained my situation.
He said, “Do you have any pain?”
“No.”
“Have you had any in the last few weeks?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said. “I want you to li
sten to me really carefully, Shep. You are not going to die in the next day or two. Do you understand me? You are not going to die. Calm down. You’re more likely to die from sheer nervousness. I can hear it in your voice. Now, you’re going to go to the doctor and tell him that you’re not having the surgery. You’re going to go get dressed, then book a flight to New York. You’re going to calmly fly to New York. I guarantee you’re not gonna die on the plane. And you’re going to go see my partner at his office in Connecticut.”
So I flew there to see Marvin’s partner, who looked at me, looked at the results, gave me a stress test, and said, “Yes, it’s true you have very high cholesterol. There will come a time when you will probably have to do something about it, but you’re not at risk now. You should do no procedures whatsoever. I know one great cardiologist in Hawaii, Irwin Schatz. He’s retired from private practice and teaching at the University of Hawaii, but maybe he’ll see you.”
He hooked me up with Dr. Schatz. Every six months I would fly over to Honolulu and he would check me out. After six or seven years he said, “Now you’re at risk. Your blockage is getting serious.” We called up Dr. Moser, who arranged for me to fly to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where they put in three stents. Dr. Moser had made sure the top doctors there did the procedure, and it went beautifully. A couple of years later I went back to have two more put in.
After that I got lucky again and came under the care of Dr. Robert Huizenga, who blew the whistle on steroids in the NFL after being the team physician for the then–Los Angeles Raiders, and whose work on obesity led to the TV show The Biggest Loser. A couple of years ago he advised me to get a stent put in my carotid artery. There’s a small chance of stroke, like a 3 percent chance, if the carotid gets blocked. I said, “I have a fairly large estate. If I put you in my will, will you kill me if I have a stroke? Because I wouldn’t want to live after a stroke.”