The Cult of the Celebrity Chef Goes Global

They start behind the counter and end up in the spotlight. How the phenomenon of the celebrity chef has transformed the restaurant industry and even changed the way we eat

By Lisa Abend Monday, June 21, 2010
    • Finlay MacKay for TIME

    From left, chefs David Chang of New York City's Momofuku; Jamie Oliver, aka Britain's Naked Chef; and Ferran Adria of Spain's El Bulli.

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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.

    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?"

    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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