THENASTYBITS (17 page)

Perhaps, then, they should teach the cautionary tale of Rocco DiSpirito as an example of A Chef Who Went Too Far, one who went over the line—messed with the bitch goddess celebrity and got burned. Before television, Rocco was the well-respected chef of the three-star Union Pacific, a bright, charismatic guy with the world on a string. He was known for his skill in the kitchen, his innovative style, and his insistence on quality. As he became more recognized, he began expanding the "brand," consulting to other restaurants, signing multiple endorsement deals, showing up at openings and promo parties. Now, after his hideous, high-profile, post-ironic "reality" television venture,
The Restaurant,
has run its humiliating course, he's no longer the chef of his once excellent Union Pacific; he's banned from his own eponymous eatery (the cynical and soulless Rocco's); he's finally settled protracted litigation with his ex-partner, Jeffrey Chodor-ow (famously the last guy in the world anyone would want to face in court); and he can presently be seen hawking cookware with his mom on QVC. When last heard of, the once great chef was hosting a local call-in radio show in which he directs little old ladies to the best kosher chickens. It's been a long, hard, and painfully public fall. In a highly competitive business, a certain amount of backbiting and schadenfreude is to be expected. But, in Rocco's case, the reaction from his fellow chefs has been positively gleeful.

Where did he cross that line? When did Rocco go from being talked about by his peers as a hugely talented but ambitious knucklehead to a betrayer? Why is he seen to have broken faith with his profession?

Culinary students of the future will no doubt look deeply into this question, as it's an important one. They might ask as well, "Why not Emeril?" Emeril Lagasse would seem, at first blush, to have invited an even worse fate. Like Rocco, he is outrageously overexposed: two cooking shows, a line of cookware, a restaurant empire extending into Vegas and theme parks. He's famously inept at cooking (on television); can barely speak grammatically; still has a thick, working-class Massachusetts

iz6

IS
CELEBRITY
KILLING
THE
GREAT
CHEFS?

accent; and while hunched troll-like over his cutting board with gut ballooning over apron strings, he looks like a publicist's nightmare. More amazingly, he dared star in perhaps the worst television sitcom since Lancelot Link, Chimp Detective. Yet he's survived—and prospered. Why did the handsome, intelligent, and more culinarily girted stud-puppet Rocco crash and burn, and not Emeril?

Maybe it's because Emeril's real. (Tellingly, chefs
like
Emeril. They may hate his show, but they like him personally, and continue to respect him.) Like Rocco, he came up the hard way, in his case starting out in a bakery in Fall River, Massachusetts, making his bones as first cook, then chef of a number of well-regarded restaurants before landing a cooking show on the Food Network. But unlike Rocco, Emeril presides over a successful empire of very good restaurants. Unlike Rocco, Emeril looks like he's enjoying being famous (not whining about it all the time, or trotting out his poor mom for sympathy). Emeril's awkwardness on camera, his goofy delight in playing to an audience, is, well . . . kinda endearing. Unlike Rocco, when Emeril puts on a white chef's jacket, he bothers to remove the expensive button-down dress shirt he was wearing before—so on camera, he doesn't look like he's ready to bolt for a meeting with his agent or a date with a model should the opportunity arise. And Emeril caught a break: His ludicrous sitcom was canceled almost immediately, thereby saving celebrity chefs everywhere from being last week's fad. On television and in person, Emeril looks like a guy who
likes
to cook. Rocco looks like he'd rather be anywhere else. Though far more successful and famous, Emeril projects a public image completely devoid of greed, vanity, lust, or ambition—sins to be found in obvious abundance all over Rocco's more handsome but need-riddled face.

Or take the case of Mario Batali. Before he became "Molto Mario," Batali cooked soulful, eclectic, and delicious Italian favorites at P6, a tiny restaurant in Greenwich Village. He was a man of many appetites, a guy who liked to cook, to eat, to drink
...
to live. He loved the neglected hooves and snouts and guts that form the heart and soul of much of traditional Italian cuisine. Now? Mario is still a man of Falstaffian appetites. Only he's an empire too. And what has he done with his celebrity? Other than enjoy it? Well, he still serves his beloved hooves and snouts and guts—only now, with the bully pulpit of television celebrity to add authority to his argument, he's seducing thousands more diners into giving them a try. He still serves soulful, eclectic, and delicious food—only now he does it all over New York. Every Batali restaurant has a different concept; and every one of them fulfills a need we might never have known we even had. Rare among chefs, Mario has used celebrity to do good works, to continue to do what he loves. Mario on TV is the same as Mario in person. (Except for the smoking and cursing, of course, but we all do that.) I asked Mario about his relentless drive to open more and more restaurants. I said, "Dude! If I were you, making your kinda bucks? You'd never
see
me again. I'd run off to an island! It would take a week to even find me by
phonel
Why do you do it?" His answer was simple. And honest: " 'Cause I
love it."

Chefs have publicists and agents these days. Alain Ducasse likely has a legion of them. The restaurant has one publicist, and the chef often has his or her own. As I pointed out to a four-star chef friend of mine who was having a hard time adapting to the rigors of book tour and self-promotion, there is nothing shameful about it. "It's not just for
you
that you're doing this! The insipid three-minute cooking demos on morning news shows, the posing for photos, all the self-promotion. Sure it's undignified!
But it's good for business!
Now stop whining and get out there and take one for the team!" I meant it too. It's not just you, the chef, out there, puffing himself up; it's all who sail within: the owners, the investors, the cooks, the long-suffering sous-chef, the floor staff. They like money too. They could use having the restaurant's profile raised a little. They'd like to move up too. All that work, all those hours, all that loyalty, in a business where the overwhelming odds are that you will fail; almost any strategy that helps tilt the scales is a good thing. Cooking professionally is

IS
CELEBRITY
KILLING
THE
GREAT
CHEFS?

hard. It ravages the mind and body. Hard-core purist foodies may gripe that a chef is not "keeping it real," but I invite them to try working a busy saute station six long shifts a week on forty-five-year-old legs. Chefs who are still doing that beyond fifty don't look forward to living much longer.

But where does one draw the line? Where, exactly, does a chef go over to the dark side?

I think that, as with any celebrity, it comes when you forget who the hell you were to begin with. When you forget that at the end of the day, even if you're not actually doing much of the physical cooking anymore, you're still just a
cook.

When celebrity chefs get too far away from the food (which is what got them all this way, wasn't it?), they run the risk of entering that terrible and transitory zone of D-list reality-show freakazoids. (Does anyone remember any of the original "stars" of
Survivor}
Or of last season's
Apprentice}
Should anyone even
care})
We like our celebrity chefs to still be, at the end of the day,
cooks.
This is not to say that Mario, or Jean-Georges Vonger-ichten, or Thomas Keller spend much time sweating behind the line these days. How could they? But presumably, they don't wander too far for too long. They
still
like to cook. They still like other cooks. They clearly love the business they're in. They haven't relaxed their standards. They first want people to eat and enjoy the food they love—in however many venues they serve it.

It may not be
all
about the food in the harsh, unforgiving business of celebrity chefdom, but it
is
still about cooking, about the pleasures of the table. Those who forget that, even the prodigiously talented, do so at their peril. As a TV chef/guy myself, I have always found it useful to remember that the good times could end at any second, that the next book could tank, that the TV thing could come crashing down with the arrival of the very next ratings book—or the next data from a faraway focus group—and that I could well end up right back behind the stove, flipping steaks and dunking fries until I keel over from the heat or alcoholism. I loved my time in professional kitchens, and it would not be a terrible thing to go back to it. The restaurant business, after all, is the greatest business in the world. Cooking is noble toil. And fun. No supermodel or television producer is
ever
going to say anything more interesting than my line cooks and sous-chefs. In the end it comes down to the very first question you ask yourself when enduring the hazing and drudgery of your first cook's job, or your first days at cooking school, when you look long and hard in that mirror and say, "Do I
really
want to be a chef?"

If you'd rather be an actor, or a spokesmodel—or even a writer—it's time to get out.

WHAT
YOU
DIDN'T
WANT
TO
KNOW ABOUT
MAKING
FOOD
TELEVISION

it can't be that
bad, can it? I mean, let's face it, I'm doing another season. I know I have one of the best jobs in the world. A few weeks ago, as I was sitting on the porch of an old Antillean house in the Caribbean, waiting for my stuffed conch and Creole chicken to arrive, my waiter, a ten-year-old kid, asked me the kind of guileless, painfully illuminating question only a ten-year-old could ask: After watching me knock back around four beers, huff down a few smokes, and stuff my face with appetizers— pausing occasionally to babble witlessly at the cameras floating around like drunken hummingbirds—he looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Mister? What's your job?" I was absolutely flummoxed. What is my job? What the hell is it I do for a living? Am I a chef? Well. . . not really anymore, am I? My hands are so soft and tender from avoidance of manual toil that I could be a spokesmodel for overpriced emollients. Am I some kind of writer guy? I dunno. Don't like writers much. Given a choice between being trapped on a desert island with a group of writers or a family of howler monkeys, I think I'd pick the monkeys. At least I could eat them. And what the fuck is a "television personality"? Jesus! I hope I'm not that. I'd rather write "habitual masturba-tor" on my visa applications than admit to that.

Whatever it is I do these days, whatever you might want to call it, I do get to travel all over the world, going anywhere I want, eating what I want, meeting admired chefs who only a few years

ago would have thrown me out the door had I wandered into their kitchens looking for a prep job. I get to do a lot of cool stuff that not so very long ago I never dreamed I'd live to experience. I've made friends all over the world. And I get paid for it. All I have to do is make television, maybe write about it all once in a while. Compared to cleaning spinach and draining the grease trap, it's a pretty good gig.

But you don't want to hear me gloating about nibbling Iberico ham with Ferran Adria at a table in the back of a little Spanish ham shop, or describing the feel of tiny Asian feet working my back muscles in some faraway hotel, or weighing the comparative merits of Moroccan
kif
versus Jamaican
bud.
You don't really want to hear me moaning about the cheese course at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, or how Dale de Groff really does make the best goddamn martini on the planet. You want to picture me crawling across a cold tile floor, coughing stomach lining into something that only the hotel manager could refer to as a toilet, begging for mercy as my brutal overlords arm-twist me into choking down yet another mouthful of "pork ring" before submitting me to some new video-friendly humiliation, right? Who wants to read about some undeserving mutt having a good time for free when you actually have to work for a living? I wouldn't, believe me.

The show is produced, shot, "written" on a sort of fly-by-night basis by me, Lydia Tenaglia, and Chris Collins working for a production outfit called New York Times Television (they also produced and shot the Ruth Reichl shows). Working from a wish list (mine), we storyboard a kind of comic strip, blocking out the scenes in such a way as to incorporate the various destinations, dishes, restaurants, chefs, and cooks we seek to shoot. Assistant producers back in New York, researchers, and an on-site translator/fixer "enable" whatever unwise plan we make (often while intoxicated). Two shooters, usually Chris and Lydia, an assistant producer, and I set off to the destination, meet up with our translator, and try, as best as possible, to shoot what we need for a show. My impromptu ravings are recorded on camera, whether used in final cut or not, and a post-shoot interview serves as a basis for a later voice-over. We usually shoot about two meals a day. Each show takes about a week to shoot, anywhere from six to fourteen hours a day. There is no stunt food. If you see me eating it on camera, I'm really eating it.
All
of it. Often with seconds. A lot of very nice people go to a lot of trouble to give me their best, and I try to be a good guest. If I look happy on TV, I'm probably happy shooting the scene. If I look cranky, sweaty, nauseated, and unhappy, then that's probably my mood at the time. There is no makeup, obvious from the ever-changing panorama of pimples, bug bites, and scars visible on my rapidly aging mug, and if I haven't shaved for a scene, it probably means I just couldn't get it together that morning, 'cause my hands were shaking too badly.

Chris, Lydia, and I spend a lot of time together on the road, both working and hanging out. After all the hours in crummy hotels and airports, shooting scenes that just don't "work" but that we continue to "French shoot" (meaning they turn off the camera but mime shooting anyway to be polite), a sort of hysteria sets in. Some tiny little detail will become endlessly hilarious. While in Japan, the word
chanko
—for no good reason at all—had us all spastic with uncontrollable laughter for hours. I am now often referred to in internal memos—or when being difficult—as my evil, egomaniacal action-film-star alter ego, "Vic Chanko"—as in "Vic doesn't want to come out of his trailer" (though we of course don't have trailers). If I'm unhappy, I will torment them by referring to myself in the third person, as in: "Vic doesn't like this scene. Vic is checking out and checking in to the fucking Sofitel down the road." For episodes with a disturbingly homoerotic subtext (as in the Rio show), I become Vic's porn-star brother "Tad Chanko." It doesn't—as you've probably guessed—take a lot for us to laugh, not after we've been softened up by countless "hang-yourself-in-the-shower-stall" hotel rooms.

Speaking of hotels, you definitely
don't
want to know how much time we spend talking about lower intestinal activity and the peculiarities of the local plumbing. In Brazil, for instance, the "capacity" of the hotel toilets is lamentably weak. Used toilet paper, horrifyingly, is to be deposited in a plastic bucket next to the crapper. This goes against the grain of everything we've come to believe in in American urban upbringing—who wants the room-service maid giving you the thumbs-up on a good day, or looking worriedly at you after the results of too much dende oil? Such matters should be between you and your porcelain,
n'est-ce pas}
Not on the road. We are all-too-familiar with our respective contributions, and the viability of our flushing apparatus. Checking in and being greeted with a toilet that roars and whirls like a turbine engine is a much-prized event, discussed with a fervent appreciation that borders on the tragic.

Additionally, when a subject/host/restaurateur for what was supposed to have been an important scene turns out to be as exciting as a slice of American cheese, or exhibits webbed fingers, an unpleasantly ripe odor, evidence of inbreeding, or an inclination to sweaty embraces, the theme from
Deliverance
is often heard under somebody's breath. You will notice in season two the occasional humming of the particularly annoying and ubiquitous incidental music we endured throughout season one—a private joke between us and the editors back in New York.
Simpsons
references, Cher jokes, shameless cribbing from movie scenes are slipped in whenever possible. Chris and Lydia love shooting nightmare/dream sequences—as they get to play with their toys in post-production—and they also love to see me looking ridiculous whenever possible. Head injuries, blunt-force trauma, scenes of me on boats or looking like Mister Roper in a bathing suit are much enjoyed by crew and editors alike.

Why do I love working with this particular couple? 'Cause they're really talented. 'Cause I think they're really good at what they do. 'Cause they make the show look good on the cheap. 'Cause they like the same movies I do, will eat grubs if I insist they share my pain, and drink like champions. Both are absolutely fearless in the cause of good "B-roll," leaning out of moving cars, walking backward in mine fields, bullshitting their way through roadblocks, shoving their way through some very scary streets in favelas in nighttime Rio or in red-light Phnom Penh. We're considering a "chowing with the warlords" show in Central Asia and I know they're the right folks for the job.

At the end of shooting, back in New York, we watch rough cuts, argue about revisions, rewrite, tweak, and do final voice-overs in a studio. (By the way, recording studios are one of the last workplaces where I can
still
smoke! Sound engineers know that smokers' voices need the occasional hit.) The episodes then go to the network, which usually asks for surprisingly few revisions: a couple bleeps, cut out the sodomy jokes, the direct drug references, the offensive-to-major-religion stuff, the McDonald's-as-center-of-all-evil type of thing. "They're sponsors, for Chrissakes! You can't say they cause rectal tumors in lab rats! This isn't
60 MinutesV
You know, reasonable.

In short, shooting the shows is a dysfunctional family affair— much like working in my old kitchens.