The Cult of the Celebrity Chef Goes Global

By Lisa Abend

David Chang was asleep in his aisle seat on a recent flight to Melbourne when searing pain jolted him awake: a flight attendant had accidentally spilled boiling water on his arm. That the worst scalding of the Manhattan megachef's life occurred in business class rather than in a busy kitchen was perhaps surprising. But that was nothing compared with what awaited him on the ground. Soon after he landed, news of the accident made the Australian papers and then, thanks to the global hum of diligent foodies at their keyboards, quickly appeared on websites around the world. The shocking headline: "Chef Burned."

It's been a few decades since we started turning cooks into stars, and still the phenomenon continues to grow. These days, the Emerils, Marios and Gordons of the world scarcely need the qualifier chef — they are celebrities, plain and simple. But between the television shows, the food festivals, the Vegas outposts, the spaghetti-sauce labels bearing their names and the fans rabidly tracking everything from new dishes to failed love affairs and, yes, accidental airline injuries, it's easy to overlook the impact that fame has had on the once disparaged profession of cooking. In the Food Network era, the phenomenon of the celebrity chef has utterly transformed the restaurant industry and, in the process, changed the very nature of how we eat.


There's a reason restaurant food sales in the U.S. have jumped from $42.8 billion in 1970 to a projected $520 billion in 2010, and it's not just that more women have entered the workforce. As best-selling food author Michael Pollan recently noted, the age of the TV chef has coincided with a dramatic decline in home cooking. Pollan, who was named by TIME as one of this year's 100 most influential people in the world — as was Chang — argued that by making food a spectacle, shows like Iron Chef and The F Word have reinforced the message that cooking is best left to the professionals. By turning chefs into entertainers — whether performing onscreen or via the impeccable platings in their restaurants — we have widened the breach between ourselves and the once ordinary task of cooking.

And yet our alienation from food and its preparation is matched only by our obsession with it. Huge parts of the population now seek out artisanal cheeses at their local farmers' markets, and run-of-the-mill restaurants attempt to cater to their newly refined tastes, serving salads made of fancy lettuce. Lots of ordinary folk now aspire to have their own $1,100 Thermomix food processor and blog about every course of every restaurant meal they eat. (The camera-happy movement has gotten so bad that Grant Achatz, the famously avant-garde chef of Chicago's Alinea, recently chastised diners who take photos — and video — of the food he serves.)

These trends are fed by chefs' newfound prominence but also prod them to attain ever greater influence. In a world in which what and how we eat have become fetishized, celebrity chefs are finding new ways to harness their star power — and not just to make money.

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"Food Adventure" Clubs Embrace the Unusual

"Food adventure" clubs such as the New York-based Gastronauts are attracting members interested in trying unusual foods such as live octopus or goat kidneys. Pastry chef Jenna Volcheff said she attends Gastronauts events to experience food from different cultures without having to travel.

NEW YORK — Ben Raisher watches as the writhing Octopus on his plate has its tentacles clipped with giant shears, then squirms in amber sesame oil like a pile of bisected earthworms.

With a deft pinch of his chopsticks, the wriggling, still-alive limb is in his mouth and down his throat.

Raisher, 28, smiles. It's what brought him to his local food adventure club, one of a handful of groups dedicated to dining on exotic and bizarre foods from New York to Denver to San Francisco.

The iron-stomached champions of New York City are the Gastronauts, who meet monthly to feast on foods many wouldn't consider, such as pig hearts and intestine in vinegar, goat kidneys or sauteed lamb's brains.

"Nothing's off the table," said co-founder Curtiss Calleo, who grew up in Austria and Italy and wants to bring Old World curiosity to New York plates. "Any restaurant worth its salt has sweetbreads or tongue or pork bellies. There's a food renaissance going on."

Offal is old hat for groups like the Boston Gastronauts and the Organ Meet Society of New York City. There are groups devoted to eating only insects and some that venture into extreme territory, like the San Francisco Food Adventure Club that recently organized a human placenta tasting (the dinner had to be canceled due to potential formaldehyde exposure).

Most of the adventures are in good fun, but some have pushed boundaries. Last week, federal prosecutors filed charges against a restaurant and sushi chef accused of serving endangered whale meat in Santa Monica, Calif.

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Dinner is Served, But We Can't Tell You Where

By Jane Black

On Feb. 23, a select group of Washingtonians received an intriguing e-mail: "The orange arrow is pointing at you," the subject line read.

It was an exclusive invitation to "an exclusive underground anti-restaurant," the e-mail explained. "Because the DNA of the magical dinner is unmapped, these events will evolve, month to month, season to season, place to place & plate to plate."

The invitation alone wasn't enough for diners to make the cut, however. For the privilege of attending Orange Arrow's inaugural, $125-a-head dinner, guests had to agree to abide by certain rules.

"If you can't/won't eat certain things, this is not for you."

"No crybabies, whiners or buzz kills can come to our party. This isn't reality television."

"Don't try to sell your ticket on Craigslist. Failure to show basic decency gets you on the blacklist."

Reached by phone, Orange Arrow's co-founder, a James Beard award-nominated chef, made no apologies for the invitation's tone or defiant exclusivity. "We don't want them in if they're not fun or interesting," said the chef, who requested anonymity. "This is a private club. In a restaurant, you're a whipping post. This is a completely different thing."

In a city best known for its see-and-be-seen culinary destinations, a new breed of underground restaurants is emerging. These supper clubs shun pomp, circumstance and plebian steak dinners in favor of more-offbeat dining experiences. Some operate as for-profit businesses. Orange Arrow plans to obtain location and liquor permits for its ambitious suppers, which will host as many as 150 select "hungry, hedonistic gypsies" at venues that range from a museum to an alleyway. Others lurk in a legal gray area, accepting "suggested donations" for the food and wine to get around requirements for business and liquor licenses. Hush, the brainchild of a former World Bank staffer, invites no more than 16 for an intimate evening of home-style Indian food and culinary storytelling. There are even traveling underground restaurants. On Feb. 20, 40 in-the-know hipsters surrounded a long table to eat garlicky shrimp (and learn to suck out the heads) at the area's first Wok + Wine event.

Already, demand is strong. Orange Arrow sold 30 percent of its tickets within 24 hours; it requires visitors to visit http://orangearrowdc.com to list a reference in order to get past the virtual velvet rope. After just one month of taking reservations at http://hushsupperclub.wordpress.com, Hush has an e-mail list of 300 interested diners, and every meal has had a waiting list. "The demand is unbelievable," said the host, who goes by the name Geeta and runs Hush out of her home in Northwest Washington. "I thought, you know, I'd join Twitter and send out some e-mails and maybe some people would check it out. I thought it would take six months to build interest, not 10 days."

Unlicensed restaurants have long prospered overseas. In Hong Kong, si fang cai, or speak-easies, in private homes are considered by many to have the best food in the city. But clandestine kitchens are a more recent phenomenon in the United States. The Ghetto Gourmet, which began serving meals in the basement of an Oakland, Calif., apartment in 2004, was one of the earliest. Soon, the concept spread to big cities everywhere. In Atlanta, RogueApron threw an event in an alley between boarded-up houses. In New York, patrons of A Razor, A Shiny Knife have together learned to carve a 150-pound boar. In Washington, two professional chefs launched a short-lived underground experiment, also called Hush, in Eastern Market in 2007. But it wasn't until this year that the trend took off in earnest.

Washington's new underground restaurants generally divide into two categories: amateur cooks who want to offer a new kind of experience and recovering restaurateurs who want to set their own rules.

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Suddenly, EVERYBODY's A "Foodie"

Parmigiano-Reggiano is the new Velveeta, prosciutto and pancetta share deli counter space with baloney, and pricey monogrammed kids’ aprons with themes like mermaid, dinosaur and princess are sold on cooking Web sites. If you serve iceberg instead of arugula, don’t be surprised if guests don’t clean their plates.

When did food become so snobby that even people who’ve never cooked a meal know what porcini and paneer are? At least two decades ago, experts say. Now "foodies" - a term coined in 1984 in “The Official Foodie Handbook,” according to Mitchell Davis, VP of the James Beard Foundation - support the Food Network and countless other reality TV shows devoted to food. Chances are, many will be flocking to see Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in “Julie & Julia,” opening Friday, which weaves together the stories of a young food blogger in Queens with the grande dame of French cooking, Julia Child.

Child persuaded Americans to swoon over dishes they hadn’t ever known existed, and she captured the nation’s collective interest in cuisine in her famous TV cooking shows.

As Americans familiarized themselves with exotic ingredients, they became more receptive to buying them. It was a no-brainer that exotic ingredients would fly off the shelves when marketing gurus like Steve Jenkins brought them into the country. Jenkins, Fairway’s cheesemonger and a part owner, introduced Americans to balsamic vinegar in 1978, sundried tomatoes in 1979, and olive oil shortly after that.

“It is really reverse snobbery because these foods are made by generations of peasants for other peasants,” Jenkins says. “Then Americans who are late to the party loot the peasant regions and they espouse peasant simplicity with foods eaten by peasants.”

Now, say some experts, the focus may be shifting from the chefs to the food.

“’Julie & Julia’ would not have happened five years ago,” says food trend watcher Phil Lempert, editor of SupermarketGuru.com. “Julia was a phenomenal person with a great personality but with her, the food came first. Now it’s the chefs who come first, and then the food. But I think we are starting to move away from cute and cleavage back to real food.”

Mitchell Davis says that the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is finally beginning to blur, and that a “food snob” is very different today than just a few years ago.

“You used to be a food snob if you knew all the different kinds of truffles and foie gras,” Mitchell says. “Now the snob is the person who’s at the taco truck in Queens or the pizza place in the Bronx. This cultural omnivorousness is central among people who want to distinguish themselves through food.”

As proof of the fact that snobbism is going into reverse, he points to Daniel Boulud’s DBGB Kitchen & Bar, the Bowery restaurant that sells more than a dozen kinds of sausages and burgers.

“This never would have happened five years ago,” Davis says. “A chef of his prominence would never have done that. But chefs and diners love it.”

They also love to know a food’s origin these days, says Dorothy Cann Hamilton, founder and CEO of the French Culinary Institute. “For years, our food has been manipulated by corporations that treat us like a feed lot,” she says. “It’s all about how to get us the fattest we can be on the cheapest food without any real taste. But now food has the attention of the President of the United States and his wife. It’s getting a lot less snobby.”

Food snobbism originated and pretty much stayed in large urban areas, says Barry Glassner, University of Southern California professor and author of “The Gospel of Food.” “It’s easier to get food in the cities,” he says. “And people will pay extra there for higher status food. Because food can be an indicator of a person’s social standing.”

But some experts say we’re in for some culinary changes.

“We have gotten carried away,” Lempert says. “And I think we’ll see that all these people who’ve been so chi chi about ingredients are in for a reality check.”