The Cult of the Celebrity Chef Goes Global

David Chang was asleep in his aisle seat on a recent flight to Melbourne when searing pain jolted him awake: a flight attendant had accidentally spilled boiling water on his arm. That the worst scalding of the Manhattan megachef’s life occurred in business class rather than in a busy kitchen was perhaps surprising. But that was nothing compared with what awaited him on the ground. Soon after he landed, news of the accident made the Australian papers and then, thanks to the global hum of diligent foodies at their keyboards, quickly appeared on websites around the world. The shocking headline: “Chef Burned.”

It’s been a few decades since we started turning cooks into stars, and still the phenomenon continues to grow. These days, the Emerils, Marios and Gordons of the world scarcely need the qualifier chef — they are celebrities, plain and simple. But between the television shows, the food festivals, the Vegas outposts, the spaghetti-sauce labels bearing their names and the fans rabidly tracking everything from new dishes to failed love affairs and, yes, accidental airline injuries, it’s easy to overlook the impact that fame has had on the once disparaged profession of cooking. In the Food Network era, the phenomenon of the celebrity chef has utterly transformed the restaurant industry and, in the process, changed the very nature of how we eat.

(See TIME’s photo-essay “How Culinary Culture Became a Pop Phenomenon.”)

There’s a reason restaurant food sales in the U.S. have jumped from $42.8 billion in 1970 to a projected $520 billion in 2010, and it’s not just that more women have entered the workforce. As best-selling food author Michael Pollan recently noted, the age of the TV chef has coincided with a dramatic decline in home cooking. Pollan, who was named by TIME as one of this year’s 100 most influential people in the world — as was Chang — argued that by making food a spectacle, shows like Iron Chef and The F Word have reinforced the message that cooking is best left to the professionals. By turning chefs into entertainers — whether performing onscreen or via the impeccable platings in their restaurants — we have widened the breach between ourselves and the once ordinary task of cooking.

And yet our alienation from food and its preparation is matched only by our obsession with it. Huge parts of the population now seek out artisanal cheeses at their local farmers’ markets, and run-of-the-mill restaurants attempt to cater to their newly refined tastes, serving salads made of fancy lettuce. Lots of ordinary folk now aspire to have their own $1,100 Thermomix food processor and blog about every course of every restaurant meal they eat. (The camera-happy movement has gotten so bad that Grant Achatz, the famously avant-garde chef of Chicago’s Alinea, recently chastised diners who take photos — and video — of the food he serves.) These trends are fed by chefs’ newfound prominence but also prod them to attain ever greater influence. In a world in which what and how we eat have become fetishized, celebrity chefs are finding new ways to harness their star power — and not just to make money.

(See three of David Chang’s recipes.)

The Start of the Rock-Star Chef
The term Foodie was coined in the early 1980s, at about the same time Wolfgang Puck began serving gourmet pizzas at his buzzy Spago restaurant in Los Angeles. But it took another decade before Puck really kicked off the celebrity phenomenon by turning his attention to the culinary desert that was Las Vegas. At the time, everyone thought he was crazy. Crazy, too, the cable channel (today’s Food Network) that launched a few months later in 1993, in the remarkable belief that audiences would watch round-the-clock food programming. The same adjective would also apply across the ocean, to Britain’s enfant terrible Marco Pierre White, who by 1995 had not only become the youngest chef to earn three Michelin stars but also had a reputation for ejecting customers who were critical of his food. “Those stories you heard about him, about how he would be shagging someone’s wife upstairs while her husband was eating in the dining room downstairs,” says Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for the British newspaper the Observer, “that was the start of the rock-star chef.”

It’s not that there weren’t famous cooks before then. As far back as the 19th century, Europe’s aristocracy was agog about Marie-Antoine Carême’s elaborate dishes. And within more recent memory, Julia Child used television to help turn America’s housewives on to the glories of the French table and to turn herself into a star. But none of that comes close to the renown of today’s celebrity chefs, which can be attributed not only to the multiple restaurants and bad-boy personas but also to Food Network. Today the channel averages a million viewers a day and is so popular that in late May it launched a culinary spin-off called Cooking Channel, whose programming will include new shows with Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagasse. Culinary programs are also populating major networks like Fox, which this month began airing its seventh season of Hell’s Kitchen. In that show, Gordon Ramsay, the five-continent chef whose offscreen empire includes restaurants in Dubai and Cape Town, berates low-skill contestants into becoming better cooks. Ramsay and Bravo’s popular Top Chef series have prompted NBC and CBS to prep their own reality-kitchen shows.

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The Internet has also played an important role: on websites like Grub Street (1 million page views per day) and Eater (2 million), chef groupies can breathlessly track every charity event and opening — sometimes before the chef has gone public with the news. A whole subindustry of agents and publicists has sprung up to manage everything from a chef’s media appearances to his hairstyle. And, yes, the chefs are mostly hes: although women are entering the profession in ever greater numbers, the vast majority of celebrity chefs are male.

All the fawning has propelled a profession once considered little better than servitude to the ranks of the glamorous and profitable. “I hate the word, but it’s all about establishing a brand,” says Mario Batali, whose endeavors include 15 restaurants, countless awards, a television show that had him tooling around Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow and a full line of cookware products. “Because once you have that, all these other opportunities open up, and you have this giant soapbox.”

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Food Revolutions
Perhaps no one knows that better than Jamie Oliver. In 1999 the lowly line cook began taping The Naked Chef (he wasn’t dressed down — his recipes were), which turned the 24-year-old into a national star in Britain. “I would make focaccia with semolina on the show, and semolina would sell out across the country,” he says. “You quickly learn that you have a responsibility.”

In between making gobs of money — doing endorsements for a supermarket chain, launching a dating website for food lovers, etc. — Oliver has worked hard to improve people’s eating habits. He collected more than 270,000 signatures in favor of improving school meals and delivered the petition to 10 Downing Street; eventually the British government pledged £650 million ($940 million) to the task. This spring he launched the TV show Food Revolution, which tracks his dietary-reform efforts in Huntington, W.Va., one of the most overweight cities in the U.S. He has also set up educational kitchens in Huntington as well as in Britain and Australia, to give families cooking lessons on how to prepare simple, healthy meals.

In other words, Oliver has become a culinary activist. “At heart, I’m probably no more political than anyone else,” he says. “But because of what I do, people listen to me. And right now there’s a massive need for information.”

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Oliver is hardly alone in trying to educate consumers and shape public policy. In recent years, the pioneering Alice Waters has seen her Edible Schoolyard project, which uses gardening to teach children about where their food comes from, spread from Berkeley, Calif., to New Orleans; Greensboro, N.C.; and Brooklyn, N.Y. Dan Barber, a New York chef leading the effort to make agriculture more sustainable, has become so influential that he has spoken at Davos. This month, Michelle Obama got more than 500 chefs — including Rachael Ray — to join her initiative against childhood obesity. And everywhere, lesser-known cooks are teaching locals about the value of eating well-raised food. If there are green markets popping up all over the U.S. and diners scanning menus for the name of the farm that grew the carrots they’re about to eat, we have chefs to thank.

Celebrity has had salutary effects on the profession of cooking as well. “Thirty years ago, most people who worked in restaurant kitchens had either just gotten out of the Army or were on their way to jail,” says Batali. “Now you get all these people who went to college, then found their passion in cooking. The level is suddenly much higher because the people cooking are a lot smarter.”

Most major culinary schools are going through an unprecedented growth spurt. For example, applications to the Culinary Institute of America, the premier cooking school in the U.S., have jumped 50% in the past six years. That may have something to do with the economy. At the venerable Cordon Bleu in Paris, communications director Sandra Messier notes, “we’ve seen a lot of students using their severance packages from their old jobs to pay tuition.”

Cheering as if He Were Mick Jagger
For every potential cook who puts herself through an expensive culinary program or grinding apprenticeship, there are many more who seek to bypass all the years of drudgery and enter the profession through a new channel: reality TV. This year thousands of people applied for 17 slots on the seventh season of Top Chef (which premieres June 16). Some of the applicants are well-trained rising stars with James Beard awards under their toques. But most are nobodies rolling the dice.

Jodie Thompson, 30, a British travel agent, managed to beat some 20,000 other applicants to become one of the lucky 500 who got to audition this spring for MasterChef, the British counterpart to Top Chef. In a London conference room, she unpacked a Tupperware container from her bag and carefully plated the rosemary-scented roasted duck breast she had prepared earlier. She waited nervously as, cameras rolling, a producer took a bite and asked why she had chosen this route to launch her culinary career. “My brother went to catering school for two years,” Thompson replied. “I thought this would be more direct.”

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And she’s right. These shows have a history of turning contestants into celebrity chefs. James Nathan is one of them. In 2008 he was working as a mechanic in Glastonbury, in the south of England, when, on a whim, he sent in an application to MasterChef. After wooing the producers at his audition with an onion-and-goat-cheese tart, he went on to win the competition. The attention was intoxicating. “Cabdrivers would lean out their windows and say, ‘Well done, James,'” he recalls. Best of all, he got the job of his dreams. Despite the fact that he had no experience outside the show, his newfound fame helped him land a position as junior sous-chef for two-Michelin-starred Michael Caines.

“We’ve created a symbiotic relationship between the television chef and the serious restaurant chef, where each furthers the efforts of the other,” says Ferran Adrià , perhaps the world’s most famous chef. Each year more than 1 million people try to get reservations at El Bulli, a small, 50-seat restaurant in northeastern Spain he started running in 1984. When the dean of molecular gastronomy speaks at chefs’ conferences, people rise to their feet and cheer as if he were Mick Jagger. When Adrià announced in January that in 2012 he would be closing his restaurant for two years, every major media outlet in the world covered the news.

(See the top 10 TV chefs.)

Adrià , 48, has achieved all of this without ever starring in a television show or opening another restaurant. His reputation stems almost entirely from his wildly innovative cooking, which by playing with diners’ expectations — serving, for example, a cocktail that manages to be simultaneously hot and cold — forces people to re-examine their ideas about food. But he knows his prominence owes at least a small debt to the audience for great food that Jamie and Mario and all the others have helped create.

He, in turn, is pushing the boundaries of the chef even further. In March, Adrià was named the new face of a major Spanish tourism campaign. In the fall, he will co-teach a course in science and gastronomy at Harvard. And in 2014 he will launch a culinary think tank to train new generations of cooks to approach food with maximum creativity.

Yet Adrià is still in his kitchen every night during the six months of the year that El Bulli is open. If both Batali and Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio have recently made news for getting back into the kitchen, it’s because most celebrity chefs spend far more time these days doing media appearances and traveling from restaurant to restaurant than cooking. “You can’t blame them,” says Rayner, who has become a bit of a celebrity himself, thanks to his role as judge on Top Chef Masters. “Before, cheffing was a bloody hard job and poorly paid at that. They’ve found a way to make it work.”

Cook It Raw
still, there’s a fine line between making it work and selling out. Not many chefs have crossed it — Rocco DiSpirito probably should have skipped Dancing with the Stars — but the threat is always there. “The one thing that will turn back the tide of celebrity is being seen as inauthentic at the thing that made you famous in the first place,” says Joshua Gamson, a sociologist at the University of San Francisco. “So the question is, Can you be a celebrity chef and maintain your authenticity as a cook?”

(Watch TIME’s video “Low-Calorie Cooking with Rocco.”)

It’s a question that keeps Chang up at night. If chefs are today’s rock stars, few of them more closely fit the model than the 32-year-old behind the extraordinarily popular Momofuku restaurants in New York City. His style of intensely flavorful, technically proficient cooking, served in restaurants stripped of haute cuisine’s pretenses, has coincided perfectly with the dining zeitgeist and catapulted him to fame. (His outsize temper, colorful language and penchant for late-night drinking may also have played a role.) In the six years since opening his first restaurant, Chang has been accosted by autograph seekers while working out at the gym, had his underwear preferences publicized in Vanity Fair and read reports (all untrue) of restaurants he is supposedly opening in Seoul, Tokyo and London.

But now, in the wake of his fifth opening in New York, as he fends off investment offers from around the world and grapples with the ever present question of whether to do his own television show, Chang says his health is suffering from the stress and that he hardly ever cooks anymore. He still cares about making delicious food, but these days he sees his primary responsibility as taking care of the people who work for him, including helping them set up their own restaurants so that, with any luck, they can become famous too.

In January, Chang stopped to catch his breath and joined 12 other acclaimed chefs at a gathering in Italy called Cook It Raw. The event — it hopes to become a movement — prompts participants to think about the future of gastronomy by encouraging them to explore the connection between environmental consciousness and creativity. The chefs fished from local lagoons, met with the region’s winemakers and farmers and even attended a pig slaughter.

On the final night, they cooked a dinner together, one course per chef. In keeping with the environmental theme, the recipes were supposed to use as little energy as possible. As each dish came up, the chefs would gather round and marvel at their colleague’s technique. “To see each guy’s creativity, to watch his perfectionism, was amazing,” says Chang, who contributed a kimchi made from local radicchio. “It was so great to be actually cooking with them. You forget that’s what it’s all about.”

The 50 or so guests who dined that night in the candlelit cellar of an Italian castle were similarly dazzled. But even those who were not at the dinner can experience it. Like everything else in a world that has turned food into fetish and cooking into spectacle, the highlights are available on YouTube.

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