Idol Hour
Michael Ruhlman wakes to a world where every chef gets a chance to wallow in fame.
"I've basically wanted to be famous from a young age," says Corey Speed, widely regarded as a chef on the brink of true celebrity after his recent New York Times three-star review. The 30 year old wunderkind with the Johnny Depp moustache and controversial auburn mullet is at the beginning of a 15-city book tour promoting Corey Speed's Quick and Easy Menus Dégustation, hastily published to coincide with the rave notice. Speed is using both the review and the book to launch a cooking and lifestyles talk show, Quick and Easy with Corey Speed.
"If the Institute had had this program when I went to school there," Speed said, raising the glass divider in the limousine bound for a television studio for his appearance on the Charlie Rose Show, "I could have shaved five years off this process. Five years of cooking—what a waste."
News this week that the Institute for American Cooks (IAC) plans to build an annex off its New York City campus that would devote itself to teaching and developing celebrity itself—"how to get it, how to use it, how to make it work for you," according to promotional materials—has sparked heated discussion in the professional cooking community, from young high-end chefs such as Speed to industry pundits and businessmen. Is creating a formal degree program that teaches the acquisition and leveraging of celebrity an inevitable advance in the restaurant industry, or does it signal the end of a once-great craft? IAC president Harry Kovair has been quick to put a positive spin on his move that many believe signals a deterioration of the very meaning and understanding of what it is to be a chef in America's rapidly transforming food culture.
"We're not judging whether celebrity is good or bad, we're responding to our customer," Kovair says, speaking from his office Stairmaster. "There are a lot of kids out there who truly do love this industry but simply don't have the time or energy to do the work that traditionally brought a chef fame, fortune, and a line of designer socks. We're providing a means for those young men and women to achieve their goals without going through what some feel are inconvenient and time-consuming details."
Asked to elaborate on those details, Kovair replies, "Actually cooking in kitchens."
"I think it's an awesome idea," says Everett Gavage, arguably the most influential celebrity chef in the world. "I don't cook anymore, and I've never been happier! Or richer! I can't recommend celebrity more highly. Hey, why should my kids have to go through what I did? This is real progress."
Gavage has been retained by the IAC for print and television advertising campaigns to promote the new center, scheduled to open in the fall of 2007.
"This is appalling news," says Chas Mirepoix, one of America's first celebrity chefs. "I worked my behind off for two decades to achieve this fame. And you're telling me that now you can just pay 60 grand and have the same thing in a couple of years? It's not fair. I'm a little pissed off."
The news sent tremors through diners as well. "If everyone's a celebrity chef, who's going to make the chicken Caesars?" wonders Gladys Carnarolli, a chiropractor in Cleveland, as she leaves an Applebee's there.
Others questioned the IAC's move, asking just how many celebrities the industry can meaningfully contain.
"It's hard to believe," said Claudine Suvide, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute," but we have studies proving that the maximum number of celebrity chefs at any given moment is exactly 85. At 86, our models show that the entire movement collapses and chefs return to being fry and broiler cooks."
Others, including Kovair, believe that the total number of chefs who can become celebrities is unlimited. But few are daring to answer the question, "If everyone is a celebrity chef, who will do the cooking?"
"The Mexicans and Guatemalans," says one chef-turned-TV-personality who asked not to be named, drawing on one of his trademark Lark cigarettes. "And frankly the American diner will be better off with a Central American actually at the stove, rather than some white boy from Jersey looking around for the TV camera."
Indeed, media is the primary factor in the celebrity chef equation. The new program will feature extensive media training at the IAC's celebrity conservatory: classes in public demos, press conferences, talk shows, book publishing, and branding.
IAC spokesperson Jeff Belly is quick to point out that the celebrities-in-training will still have to know how to cook. "For television, for public demos," Belly says. "But only three dishes. It may be real food, and it may be plastic food they work with here. This hasn't been decided. But either way, taste isn't an issue. No one will actually be eating the stuff. It just has to look good, and the celebrity chef has to look soigné doing it."
Other courses of instruction include Keeping Your Sous Chef Loyal (As You Spend Less Time at the Restaurant), From Mutton Chops to Pony Tails—Hair Styles That Define Who You Are as a Chef, and Appropriate Designer Labels, a course that includes field trips to Milan and Manhattan to train chefs in meaningful sportswear and eveningwear decisions to accommodate a demanding social life.
"The 55 year old cardiac surgeon who chucks his practice for a life in the culinary limelight is not going to be a happy camper if he spends his golden years as a line cook making 12 bucks an hour," Belly adds. "Our celebrity chef degree is perfect for such a career changer."
The move by the IAC has other schools hustling to keep up. The Culinary Arts Academy (CAA) and the College of International Cooking (CIC) have programs in the works to train students to become celebrities and then capitalize on their fame, neither of which feature actual cooking instruction.
"We recognize that, with the predominance of chain restaurants and a growing monoculture created by agribusiness, we expect very little actual cooking to occur in the future," CAA president Mark Boudin says. "Everything today is pretty much heat-and-serve anyway. Frankly, it's tough to convince aspiring culinarians to fork over tens of thousands of dollars to learn the proper technique for removing a strip steak from its Cryovac pouch or how to open a bucket of sauce base."
"We don't view the end of actual cooking to be a negative thing," says Gino Primalcut, president of CIC. "Heat-and-serve is a real time-saver. And from a personal standpoint, well, my family loves The Cheesecake Factory. But working in the restaurant industry of tomorrow won't require the degree as it once did. That's why we're embracing this new direction initiated by the IAC."
What, then, will happen to the existing programs at these schools?
IAC's Kovair believes those ranks will be filled by home cooks who actually do want to cook. "That's definitely the great untapped market," Kovair concludes. "Committed home cooks will be the true culinary innovators of the future."
Now, as Speed exits the limo in front of Rose's studio building, he's working two cell phones, a Blackberry, and an iPod with the acumen of an ace line cook juggling sauté pans on a Saturday night. "Hey, Scott," Speed says, taking a call from his brand consultant and not breaking stride. "For the Milwaukee food show, I think we can up my demo price to a hundred, yes? And my line of non stick All-Clads will be there? Excellent. And who do you have working on sauces for the Quick and Easy sauces and marinades line? Carlos? Perfect, I hear he knows what he's doing in the kitchen."
Speed, traveling with a publicist, assistant, hairstylist, and this reporter, enters the elevators. Asked about the rumors in US magazine that he and Angelina, whose husband Brad is filming in the Azores, were intimately discussing more than gourmet yam recipes for poor African children, the publicist snaps, "A blurb in US and a perceived sexual scandal is far more valuable to Corey than an adoring profile in some esoteric food magazine."
The publicist, Mary Morris, a 30 year veteran in the industry, is the only one to acknowledge the distinguished gentleman in back of the elevator. The entourage disembarks, and she quickly catches Speed's ear: "That's Charlie Rose's other guest on tonight's show."
Speed glances back at the man momentarily. "Who is he?"
"That's André Soltner," she whispers. "Former chef/owner of New York's Lutèce, a monk, a legend. Believes chefs are craftsmen and ought to stay in the kitchen."
Speed snorts and says, "You can see where that got him. I never heard of the guy. Stick with me, babe, we're going all the way."
"Where exactly would that be?" Rose asks. "Just so I know."
Speed flashes her his pearly grin but, perhaps tellingly, fails to respond, as his assistant hands him a phone.
"It's Gordon Ramsay," she tells Speed, "calling to congratulate you."
