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Celeb Chefs, MIA
Which celebrity chefs still cook in their own kitchens? That’s the question tackled Wednesday by Grub Street, which answered a query from a reader who wants to eat at a restaurant “where the chef whose name is on the door is still in the kitchen,” instead of in a joint like Lupa or Otto, where “Mr. Batali’s clogs haven’t graced either kitchen in some time.”
Grub Street responded:
Wylie Dufresne, as you have heard, hovers over his food [at wd-50], frequently tasting everything to make sure it’s right, and oversees the plating. April Bloomfield runs the kitchen at the Spotted Pig like a Daytona pit crew. The ultimate hands-on chef, of course, is Masa Takayama [of NYC’s Masa], who literally makes the food before your eyes and hands it to you, should you have the good luck to eat at his omakase bar.
Of course, the oxymoronic phenomenon of the celebrity chef who no longer cooks has not gone unnoticed. In the October 3 story “TV Chefs, Far from Reality,” New York Times food critic Frank Bruni writes:
When celebrity chefs show up on TV these days, at least during prime time, they are less likely to be sautéing than to be swaggering through exotic locales (Anthony Bourdain) or swearing at the lesser mortals stuck with the grunt work (Gordon Ramsay). They are outsize personalities tapped for the charisma they can project, not the skill set they are prepared to demonstrate.
The step-by-step cooking tutorials that were once chefs’ stock in trade on television are increasingly relegated to morning news shows and to home-entertainment gurus like Martha Stewart and her down-market, ‘Yum-O!’ successor, Rachael Ray.
Bruni also nails a particularly painful reality-television vignette on The Next Iron Chef:
The most priceless moment comes near the episode’s beginning, when one aspirant, Traci Des Jardins, the executive chef of the restaurant Jardinière in San Francisco, confronts an array of basic tasks that include filleting a salmon and deboning a chicken.
It’s a situation more firmly grounded in kitchen reality than a typical ‘Iron Chef’ stunt, and what’s fascinating is the way Ms. Des Jardins responds to it. Looking nervous, she says with admirable candor that she can only hope the requisite skills are still in her command, because she doesn’t handle such chores often anymore.
Oh, ouch.
Says Ed Levine of Serious Eats in his post ”’Top Chef’ Finale Is Serious Business”:
The bottom line is that just about every super-talented chef judge we have seen on Top Chef, from Colicchio to Daniel Boulud, from English to Eric Ripert, has the opportunity to realize their far-flung ambitions as a result of their celebrity status. The days of an André Soltner (Lutèce in New York) having one restaurant and literally living ‘over the store’ are gone forever, whether we like it or not. If ultimately that means we will now judge celebrity chefs as managers and business people instead of chefs behind a stove, so be it. Some will undoubtedly succeed, and some will fail (I beg you, Tom, make the eggs in the egg sandwich at ’wichcraft to order). All of us can be the judge and vote with our tastebuds and ultimately our wallets.
Posted by | Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 7:36pm | 2 comments
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"Looking nervous, she says with admirable candor that she can only hope the requisite skills are still in her command, because she doesn’t handle such chores often anymore."
It's like riding a bicycle, for crying out loud! If you ever really knew how to do it, you can still do it! I left professional cooking to work with wines 21 years ago, but the basic skills (such as filetting and beboning) are things that I can still do... just not as quickly as when I had two cases of iced chicken or five whole salmon to break down.
No one should be called "Chef" who cannot perform such basic tasks. I think that this idea of declaring yourself a Chef traces back to the 1980s, when owners with absolutely no culinary training and who lacked even the most basic cooking skills simply decided that, since Chefs were the new celebrities, that they would declare themselves Chefs. The European system of apprenticeship keeps such phonies out of the kitchen. Take the time to read " The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen" by Jacques Pepin to understand how it really works.
Traci Des Jardins in fact did quite well on that challenge. She got 60 out of 75 points (the only person who got more points was Sanchez, who won the challenge with a perfect score). She also didn't get disqualified on any of the tasks she attempted -- the only place she lost points was the last few things she didn't get to because she ran out of time. In contast, some of the other chefs "finished" everything, but got disqualified for leaving fins on and other sloppiness.