Super Chef: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires
Author: Juliette Rossant
Wolfgang Puck—Charlie Palmer—Todd English—Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger—Tom Colicchio: These are men and women who were not content merely to run a great restaurant; they wanted to create multinational food empires. And they did. In Super Chef, veteran journalist Juliette Rossant takes you on an unprecedented tour inside the business of the food business, one of the world's most glamorous—and little-known—industries.
You catch glimpses of them everywhere: on television, in tabloid gossip columns pictured at glitzy parties with Hollywood stars and power brokers, in national magazine stories about their latest business projects. You buy their products at your local supermarket or online, or maybe even stay at their hotels. Traditional chefs may have stayed in the kitchen and rarely ventured into the public eye, but a growing number of today's top chefs are utilizing skills seldom taught in cooking school—trading anonymity for celebrity and rising to build culinary empires.
Juliette Rossant goes behind the scenes with these new moguls to reveal the key ingredients that go into making a Super Chef. Culinary talent remains the base component, but today's Super Chef must be a whole lot more—equal parts entrepreneur, realtor, fundraiser, publicist, and media star.
In Super Chef, Rossant profiles six of the hottest names in the industry today. From Wolfgang Puck's Spago Beverly Hills to his pizza in your freezer, from Charlie Palmer's Microsoft-powered eWinebook to Todd English on the QM2, from Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger's appearing as the Food Network's Too Hot Tamales to New York's mostrecent contender Tom Colicchio of both Gramercy Tavern and Craft—Rossant spins their tales of haute cuisine and corporate conquest. Each of these culinary magnates has taken a unique path to the top, and Rossant adds up the variations in their experiences to offer a gripping and astute look at what it takes to become the cream of the crop.
Juliette Rossant knows food, celebrity, and business. She has covered extensively the empire-building celebrity chefs for Forbes, and has been granted unfettered access to her subjects, their staffs, financiers, and families. The result is a rollicking culinary adventure that food lovers, celebrity watchers, and business fans cannot miss.
Dirk Smillie - Forbes
How have star chefs built commercial empires? By juggling more than just pots.
Seems unthinkable, but chefs used to be ordinary working stiffs--greasy guys in funny hats who knew their place (and knew it was beside a stove). That changed with the advent of Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Palmer and the rest of today's kick line of celebrity cooks--each a commercial force and a brand, as important to the restaurant business as Gable and Garbo ever were to Hollywood.
Alongside Tiger Woods and J.K. Rowling on last year's Forbes Celebrity 100 list were Alain Ducasse, Puck and Emeril Lagasse. Emeril, who scored his own sitcom on NBC (it failed), now appears in Crest commercials. Their power reaches far beyond product endorsements. Celebrity chefs have turned Las Vegas, for example, into a food oasis. Try opening a luxury hotel on the Strip without an anchor restaurant presided over by a star.
How cooks became gods is told in Juliette Rossant's new book, Super Chef: The Making of the Great Mod-ern Restaurant Empires. Rossant, a former FORBES reporter, tracks the rise of six, explaining how each built an empire. Not all of them grew smoothly. "This is a trial-and-error thing. There's no 101 course on how to expand a res-taurant business," says Todd English. He should know. After trying to launch 11 restaurants and two TV series in less than four years, his empire imploded, thanks to a stinging review of his new eatery Olives New York in the New York Times, health violations and lawsuits from his partner and an investor.
While today's chef seeks wealth by playing to the masses, his predecessor got rich catering to kings. He now comes back to life in Ian Kelly's new biography,Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin CarAme, the First Ce-lebrity Chef.
CarAme, born in 1783 and abandoned at the age of 10, grew up in a seedy slum in Paris. His rise to star-dom began after the Revolution, when a lawyer named Grimod de la ReyniA re parlayed his own dining adventures into the Almanach des Gourmands. The Zagat of its day, it whet appetites for the sort of cooking at which CarAme excelled.
Every celebrity chef has signature dishes. CarAme's were dazzling confections, or extraordinaires. These were superstructures of sweets. Using salt-pastry, nougat, spun sugar and marzipan, he created Athenian ruins with fallen columns, ships in full sail, Roman temples and Chinese pagodas, writes Kelly. Passersby could peer into his storefront patisserie on the rue de la Paix to watch these marvels being made.
One who took notice was Napoleon's foreign minister, Talleyrand, who viewed the culinary art as crucial in the theater of diplomacy. At Talleyrand's chateau just outside Paris, CarAme began cooking for an average of 150 for-eign visitors a week.
Like superchefs today, CarAme produced his own line of cookbooks. The first, published in 1815, was a smash. Two 400-page volumes laid out recipes for babas and madeleines, fruit jellies and flans. The very incongruity of his name, which in French means "Lenten fast," probably helped sales.
After a stint with Louis XVIII, he got a plum offer from George, Prince of Wales. The Prince Regent, an un-popular spendthrift, gave CarAme a staggering salary, equivalent to $222,000 in today's dollars. The prince held his banquets on a 200-foot-long table, the longest in London. A gurgling stream stocked with goldfish traversed its length, adorned with moss and flowers.
The world's highest-paid cook later went to work for the Romanovs. At Peterhof Palace the czar had a giant pulley system that raised the dinner table from the kitchen into the dining room, like a massive dumbwaiter.
CarAme died 171 years ago, but remains a presence in the kitchens of today's Pucks and Palmers. The toque was his invention. Chefs' hats of the 19th century were floppy--unappetizingly similar to ones worn by physi-cians. CarAme stiffened his with cardboard so it would stand upright, and the look immediately caught on. He also invented the first taxonomy of sauces, dividing them into four styles: veloute, bechamel, espagnole and allemande.
That's the same classification used today in the all-too-numerous Francocentric cooking schools. Superchef Tom Colicchio, one of Rossant's six, isn't at all pleased. New chefs are preoccupied with hosting TV shows and getting rich, he grouses. Never before in culinary history has a pot so defamed a kettle.
Publishers Weekly
This plodding group biography traces the careers and personal lives of chefs Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Palmer, Todd English, Mary Sue Milliken, Susan Feniger and Tom Colicchio. Rossant, who has covered chefs for Forbes, begins unevenly by failing to define in her introduction what a "super chef" is, merely stating, "Most chefs who reach Super Chef level are well liked, hardworking, and irrepressibly optimistic people." She dedicates a chapter to each subject except for Milliken and Feniger, who work as a team and are covered together before reaching the conclusion that the hot topic among chefs today is branding. A glossary with definitions of terms like "Fast Food Restaurant" and "Hoisin Sauce" provides a puzzling finish. Rossant's style is often awkward ( "It was the height of disco, and a few months after his divorce Wolfgang met Barbara Lazaroff at a discotheque"). Although she discusses the chefs' failures e.g., Palmer recalls a partnership in a dairy that went poorly she glosses over unpleasant events, dismissing Colicchio's dispute with his Gramercy Tavern employer, Danny Meyer, over the opening of Craft, a New York restaurant, in a couple of paragraphs. Rossant conveys coziness with her subjects by using their first names, even referring to Milliken and Feniger as "the Girls," and frequently resorts to "some" sourcing ("Some have said that the 1999 Grimes article in the New York Times marked a serious embarrassment if not decline for Charlie"), thus never appearing to pass negative judgment. Even the inclusion of a transcript of English's MTV appearance and romance gossip fail to sizzle. Photos. (May 4) Forecast: It's hard to gauge who the audience for this collection of biographies might be. Even culinary students aspiring to super-chefdom are unlikely to cough up $25 for this rather slapdash hardcover, and fans of celebrity chefs probably aren't interested in the humdrum details of launching new ventures. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
What People Are Saying
Andrй Soltner
Knowing all these superstar chefs, I usually ignore stories about them. But I read Super Chef with great interest and pleasure, and I'm happy the public can know and understand what it takes to arrive at their stardom.
—chef-owner, Lutиce
Drew Nieporent
Juliette Rossant has written an engaging and insightful account into what drives the Super Chefs to excellence. She captures their passion with riveting prose that entertains and enlightens. I couldn't put the book down. Juliette, get started on the sequel.
—Restaurateur, Montrachet, Tribeca Grill, Rubicon, Nobu
Rick Smilow
For the six chefs profiled in this book, cooking is a heady mix of art, business, and passion, skill and success. That is why the stories in this book are valuable, educational and entertaining. We will recommend this book to our students, alumni and chef-instructors.
—President, The Institute of Culinary Education, NYC
Table of Contents:
| List of photographs | |
| Note from the author | |
| Introduction | 1 |
| 1 | Wolfgang Puck | 7 |
| 2 | Charlie Palmer | 49 |
| 3 | Todd English | 89 |
| 4 | Milliken & Feniger | 131 |
| 5 | Tom Colicchio | 175 |
| Conclusion | 207 |
| Glossary | 215 |
| Sources | 219 |
| Index | 225 |
New interesting book: Lessons Learned in Software Testing or Digital Sports Photography
Can You Say a Few Words?: How to Prepare and Deliver Award Presentations, Dedications, Eulogies and Prayers, Introductions, Retirements and Fare
Author: Joan Detz
-Your alma mater asks you to say a few words at an upcoming fundraising dinner
-You've won an employee award and will have to give a short acceptance speech at the ceremony
-Your parents are celebrating their 50th anniversary, and you'd like to make a toast at their party
Everyone's counting on you to sound polished, to be prepared, to speak with savvy-in short, to give a speech that's as memorable as the occasion itself.
Don't dread these invitations to speak. Instead, learn to prepare clear, concise, and engaging speeches that will live up to your audience's expectations and match the mood of the occasion.
Award-winning corporate speechwriter Joan Detz offers solid advice for tackling this nerve-racking task-with pointers, tips, and trade secrets that will help you make the most of every speaking opportunity.
Clearly written and fun to read, this invaluable guide provides all the practical advice and encouragement you need to deliver a winning speech.
What People Are Saying
Norman Vincent Peale
Can You Say a Few Words? by Joan Detz has helped me to speak better. I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to use words well.
Maria Cuomo
Joan Detz has gone a long way toward taking the mystery out of writing and giving an effective speech. For this, I will find it hard to forgive her.
Roger Ailes
Let me say a few words about Joan Detz: her books are great.
—(Roger Ailes, Top Presidential and Corporate Communications Consultant, and Author of You Are the Message)
