When a Chef Gets Famous

Meanwhile, the celebrity chef fulfills his obligation to the business and public by interacting with people on a more social level. This can range from frequent trips to the dining room to chat with tables--shaking hands and kissing babies, as I jokingly call it--to bigger-picture, brand-building stuff like writing books, filming TV shows and commercials, participating on the lecture/demo circuit, and developing mass-market products like kitchen tools and canned soups, sauces, and spice mixes.

All these activities pull the chef away from the kitchen and therefore the food, but ideally make the restaurant, the brand, and hopefully the overall guest experience better. The diners gain access, the business is financially rewarded, and the employees benefit from freedom and resources not typical in an average restaurant.

The fact is, the very thing that positions chefs in the class of fame--the grinding out of the daily work in the kitchen while striving for perfection, the monotonous and sometimes menial tasks, and the relentless dedication to the expression of creativity and originality in food--ultimately lands them on magazine covers, in newspaper features, and on TV. Which in turn can catapult the chef into a life far different from the typical hundred hours a week in a hot kitchen.

This creates a direct conflict. Does the success of the chef and restaurant lead to the demise in the quality of the product? Is it a double-edged sword? Most people think that for a great chef--the "passionate visionary artist" the media proclaims--to compete at the highest level, the work has to come directly from the chef's hands, or at least close to them. When people pay to eat the food equivalent of Nude Woman with a Necklace, they want the real deal. A Picasso is a Picasso because he painted it. But cooking is not like music, television, or painting, where art can be immortalized: you cook the masterpiece, it's consumed, and the next day you do it all over again.

Does it have to come from the hands of the master? Or is coming from the mind of the master through the hands of his disciples enough?

What most people don't realize is that this conflict handcuffs the chef. Not having the freedom to venture away from the stove and pursue other interests, personal or professional, is a creative ceiling: the obligation of the kitchen is always present. Naturally, as you grow as a chef and ideally gain more popularity, different opportunities are presented to you.

Cooking at a high level is a young man's game: the time commitment, as well as the mental and physical sacrifices, make working at that extreme unsustainable. But more importantly to the chef as a person is personal growth. Naturally curious and creative, we are always looking for different ways to apply ourselves in other creative media.

I have been fortunate to fulfill a few outside interests recently like writing--this blog, cookbooks, a memoir, traveling, and even collaborating on various TV and film-related projects. These avenues of creativity not only make my life richer and more rewarding personally but also inform and inspire my cooking.

So in the end does it matter if the chef is not in the house? Purely from the standpoint of food execution...likely not. Assuming, that is, that he or she has a well-trained and passionate staff being led by a tight chef de cuisine, the occasional absence is not detrimental to the experience.

But are we even talking about the food? Isn't this about the impact of presence? What if I sat in my office all night long, every meal cooked for every diner without my touching one component of one dish, and then walked through the rooms and chatted with guests at the end of their meal? Would they leave the restaurant having had a better experience than if I'd been too busy cooking to make a single appearance?

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