The United States of Arugula (53 page)

NO SUBJECT, NOT EVEN
Las Vegas or the franchising of fine dining, stirs up more debate between the food world’s progressive and purist elements than food television. Right up until the 1990s, TV cooking was predominantly the domain of PBS, its audience a beslippered demographic of “wives and bookish men,” in the words of Geof Drummond, who produced Julia Child’s 1990s programs.

In the 1980s, Child finally relented to the overtures of the commercial world, appearing regularly on ABC’s
Good Morning America
to deliver short reports on American foodways and spar adorably with Charlie Gibson,
GMA’s
co-host. But by that point, no one was going to hold Child’s feet to the fire for working with one of the major networks; she hardly made any money off her
GMA
appearances, anyway, and she had become such a sainted figure in the food world, neither a promiscuous endorser like Beard nor a behaviorally erratic misanthrope like Claiborne, that she remained inviolate in the eyes of her fans. Her 2004 death was duly mourned as that of a national treasure.

Besides, Child returned to public television in the twilight of her TV career, collaborating with Drummond on two last-hurrah series in the early 1990s,
Cooking with Master Chefs
, in which Child worked with such professional figures as Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Nancy Silverton, and Michel Richard in their home kitchens (or facsimiles thereof), and
In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs
, in which famous chefs pilgrimaged to her Cambridge house, sparing the stooped, eightysomething Child the ordeal of schlepping across the country with a film crew.

PBS remains an important player in food television, and, in Jacques
Pépin and Lidia Bastianich (of the Italian restaurant Felidia in New York), it boasts the two chefs whose programs strike the best balance between authentic instructional value and sheer viewing pleasure. But, as of 1993, PBS had serious competition in the form of the TV Food Network, which was started up by Reese Schonfeld, the founding president of CNN. Because it was an unabashedly commercial, entertainment- and profit-minded enterprise, the Food Network, as it came to be known, became a lightning rod in the food world.

For some old-timers, like Judith Jones, Knopf’s grand dame of cookbooks, the notion of watching food television purely for entertainment’s sake is unpalatable. Jones says she was appalled to happen upon the Food Network’s
Iron Chef America
—an Americanization of a Japanese program in which two famous chefs are pitted against each other and the clock, each chef charged with creating a multicourse meal centered around a “mystery ingredient” whose identity is revealed only once the stopwatch starts ticking. (The play-by-play on
Iron Chef America
is supplied by the amiably dweebish cookbook author and TV personality Alton Brown, who, in a recent episode, breathlessly described a chef racing to make “a last-minute garnish grab.”) “I turned it on one night and I couldn’t believe it,” Jones says. “Bobby Flay running around—run, run, run! You don’t cook that way! It’s too hysterical.”

In its rinky-dink early days, when it wasn’t airing black-and-white reruns of old shows by Julia Child and her French-food forebear, Dione Lucas, the Food Network was “throwing everything to the wall to see what would stick,” as Schonfeld has recalled. Lagasse actually bombed in his first go-round with the network, shuffling awkwardly through his paces on
Emeril and Friends
, a program in which he was assigned the uncomfortable task (for a chef) of reporting on other restaurants, and appearing on another program,
How to Boil Water
, intended for a demographic of divorced men who wanted to learn how to cook for themselves. “What people don’t realize when they criticize me is that I didn’t get into television for the money,” he says. “Reese Schonfeld approached me himself. I think I was the third employee. They paid me fifty dollars a show.”

Batali made his maiden Food Network appearance as a guest on what
was then the network’s showpiece, a 10 p.m. “after dinner” program hosted by Robin Leach, arguably television’s cheesiest personality. Flay says that his initial attractiveness to the network was simply a matter of proximity—“They were looking for local people who cost no more than a taxi ride to get to the studio”—and he made his debut on a program called
Grillin’ and Chillin’
, cast as the “city boy” opposite Jack McDavid, a Philadelphia-based, Virginia-bred “country boy” chef who wore bib overalls and a trucker hat. Lagasse, Batali, and Flay all put in their time on a program called
Ready, Set, Cook!
, a sort of ultra-low-budget proto–
Iron Chef America
in which two chefs were given twenty minutes and ten dollars’ worth of ingredients to make a meal, with the winner decided by the audience. “There was a very college-radio feel to the whole thing,” says Batali.

Lagasse was without a show after
Emeril and Friends
failed, but Schonfeld liked him and thought he still had TV potential. He wasn’t the only one to believe this. When he was still little known outside of New Orleans, Lagasse had been one of the younger figures to appear with Child on
Cooking with Master Chefs.
Drummond recalls that “Emeril was just terrific with Julia, and she delighted in him. She loved guys—that was part of it. But he just
had
something—there was a twinkle there, a real graciousness and generosity. The show we did with him, a big crab-and-crawfish boil in the backyard, was so good that even though we had shot episodes with people like Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Jacques Pépin, and André Soltner, Emeril’s ended up being the lead show.”

In 1996, Lagasse got a second chance on the Food Network with
Essence of Emeril
, in which the New Orleans chef simply prepared Cajun and Creole dishes for the camera, Julia-style. It was on
Essence
that Lagasse happened upon his TV persona—a hammy, exaggerated version of himself that exclaimed “Bam!” or “Let’s kick it up a notch!” every time he seasoned something or threw a pork chop in a pan. The public loved it, and Lagasse suddenly found himself getting recognized outside of New Orleans; New York cabbies were rolling down their windows and shouting “Bam!” at him. But the food establishment, whose members had respected Lagasse when he
was their little regional secret, the guy whose restaurants you ate in when you were in the Big Easy, was not amused by his catchphrases and new showman shtick. Lagasse became, in essence, the new Graham Kerr, the people’s favorite and the intelligentsia’s whipping boy.
*

“I was humiliated at the Beard Awards,” Lagasse says. “This is maybe ’96. I was on the ballot for chef of the year, best restaurant, best pastry chef, best wine program for Greg Harrington, who was the youngest guy to pass as a master sommelier since Larry Stone [of Rubicon in San Francisco]. We’re all in the ballroom in our tuxedos, and my staff is so proud. Nobu, who’s a great friend, is next to us. And Tim Zagat comes up to me, with my colleagues everywhere, press everywhere, and he says,
‘You!
You oughta be ashamed of yourself! You’re like a used-car salesman on that television program! Why don’t you get your culinary dignity back?’ And he stomps away. There were only, like, 600 people watching.”

As his popularity grew, Lagasse was given a second program on the Food Network,
Emeril Live
, in which he cooked before a studio audience and bantered with his own
Tonight Show
–style band. He became a multimedia juggernaut, putting out cookbooks at a furious pace and launching a series of Essence spice mixes and rubs. But even as he raked in the dough and the Nielsen numbers, his credibility with the intelligentsia eroded further. In 1998, Amanda Hesser portrayed Lagasse in
The New York Times
as a sort of Lawrence Welk of the food world, a schlock merchant whose cornball brand
of entertainment played well with his adoring audience, a mouth-breathing assemblage of heartland rubes too dim to realize how tacky and talentdeficient he was. “Emeril Lagasse, more jester than cook, is catering to legions of gleeful fans,” Hesser wrote. “Who can begrudge all the joy he seems to bring?”

Showing no mercy, Hesser begrudged away. Emeril, she reported, spoke like a moron, explaining as he carved a turkey that “You want to slice the breast so that it’s, like, edible.” The turkey-and-cheese sandwich he proffered to members of his studio audience, which Hesser took a bite of, was “a very bad turkey sandwich. The bread was greasy, the turkey was dry, and the orange mystery cheese wasn’t even melted.” Michael Batterberry, the editor
of Food Arts
magazine, was tapped for a condemnatory quote, saying that
Emeril Live
“smacks a little bit of the wrestling ring or the roller derby.” The food Lagasse made on his show was fattening, gross, and unmethodically prepared, with little step-by-step instruction from the chef, Hesser concluded.

Lagasse was as undone by Hesser’s article as Vongerichten would be six years later by Alan Richman’s kiss-off. “She came when I was doing a Thanksgiving leftovers show, and because I was using leftovers, she flipped that into ‘He can’t cook,’” Lagasse says. “I knew that I’d be taking potshots; it comes with the territory. But has she been to one of my restaurants? I mean, I didn’t fall out of a plane and someone gave me
Emeril Live.
The bottom line is, go to one of my restaurants.”

Lagasse’s eyes redden and brim with tears.
“Then
see what a schlocky guy I am! I mean, I’m the only American in the world who has two
[Wine Spectator]
Grand Award wine lists. I mean, tell me I’m not serious?”
*

Batali says that it’s unfair for any writer or critic to review food that’s prepared during a taping, “because it’s being made for the cameras, not necessarily as restaurant-quality cuisine. That article made it sound like he was
pulling the wool over people’s eyes, when the truth is that he’s one of the best chefs in the country”—an endorsement seconded by such chefs as Trotter, Boulud, and Puck. Indeed, Hesser was entitled to her opinions about Lagasse’s TV persona and the quality of his cookbook recipes, but, given his track record at Commander’s Palace, Emeril’s, and NOLA, she was wrong to assert that “Before his meteoric rise on television, Mr. Lagasse had a fairly modest culinary career.”

But therein lies the (seven-spice) rub of commercial food television. In its zeal to entertain and find formats that will elicit good ratings, it often obscures the culinary gifts of its stars. Flay, on the basis of
Grillin’ and Chillin’
, got pigeonholed as the Food Network’s grilling guy, starring in the series
Boy Meets Grill, Hot Off the Grill
, and
BBQ with Bobby Flay
, even though he has proven himself capable of three-star cuisine in a variety of idioms in his restaurants Mesa Grill, Bolo, and Bar Americain. “I’m from Manhattan. It’s like, how much grilling am I doing in Manhattan?” he says. “It’s a funny relationship that I have with the Food Network, because my restaurants are not about that. I want to be thought of as a chef in my restaurants, which are where I am 90 percent of my time. You’re not gonna get the food that I cook on TV in my restaurants. Sometimes I have a love-hate relationship with the TV part of my life—but, at the same time, it’s also been a great, great thing.”

Even cooks who owe their fame entirely to the Food Network, like Giada De Laurentiis, the host of
Everyday Italian
, struggle with their identity. It’s easy to see why the Food Network hired De Laurentiis—she came from a famous family (her grandfather is the movie producer Dino De Laurentiis; her grandmother was the Italian film star Silvana Mangano), she ran a successful catering company in Los Angeles, she has an easygoing, camera-friendly manner, and she’s a knockout, setting aflutter more hearts even than the voluptuous British TV cook Nigella Lawson. But De Laurentiis is also a classically trained graduate of the Cordon Bleu school in Paris who has long harbored aspirations to open her own restaurant, and who didn’t even specialize in Italian cookery at GDL Foods, her catering outfit. “I’ve struggled with the Food Network thing,” De Laurentiis says. “Sometimes I think, ‘I
didn’t go to culinary school to become
this person.’
I have to simplify my technique and language when I’m on TV and not use chef terms. But then I think, do I want to be obscure? Isn’t this a good opportunity to get people interested in cooking and better ingredients?”

Says Batali, “Look, it’s TV! Everyone has to fall into a niche. I’m the Italian guy; Emeril’s the exuberant New Orleans guy with the big eyebrows who yells a lot; Bobby’s the grilling guy; Rachael Ray is the cheerleader-type girl who makes things at home the way a regular person would; Giada’s the beautiful girl with the nice rack who does simple Italian food. As silly as the whole Food Network is, it gives us all a soapbox to talk about the things we care about.”

Batali also notes that the fame and lucre the network generates are often put to nobler purposes than the purchase of beach houses or mint-green Vespa scooters. When his Italian-cooking program,
Molto Mario
, began airing in 1995, Batali had only one modest little Greenwich Village restaurant to his name, Po. It was the sizable advance he got for his first cookbook,
Simple Italian Food
, that enabled him to partner with Joe Bastianich (the son of Lidia) to open Babbo, the Italian restaurant that represents the apotheosis of his gifts as a chef-—half rustic-Italian traditionalist, half mad-dog freestyler. “I’d say,” he says, “that my book advance was predicated almost entirely on the fact that I was on TV.”