National Public Radio
Americans’ Insatiable Hunger for Celebrity Chefs
by Ari Shapiro

All Things Considered, March 5, 2005 - The cult of the TV celebrity chef is larger today than ever before. It is now possible for chefs to reach millions of people through a multimedia empire — with books, restaurants, TV shows and even commercial endorsements.

Chefs have become so big that some — like Emeril Lagasse, the current titan of TV chefs — are recognizable by one word alone. Lagasse says he’s amazed at how much things have changed just in the last 10 years.

“Chefs weren’t really respected other than being in the kitchen,” Lagasse says. “You rarely saw them in the dining room interacting with people. . . Now all of a sudden, people have started looking at chefs and saying, ‘Wow! That person really is a craftsman, is really a business person, they can do publicity.’”

That publicity has helped some create cooking empires — books, TV shows, cookware lines and restaurants that pack in the crowds.

Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine, says that in our celebrity-obsessed culture, many of these diners are seeking a personal connection as much as a good meal. “The more people can identify with these chefs, the more they want to go to their places, buy their books, have some kind of contact with them,” Reichl says.

Linda Carucci, curator of food arts at COPIA, the American Center for Food, Wine and the Arts in California’s Napa Valley, says the rise of celebrity chefs has made people more aware of the foods they put into their bodies. It’s also helped draw more men to her cooking classes — and, she says, they talk about their favorite chefs the way other guys might talk about football stars.

“They’re rabid about it,” Carucci says. “I mean, they talk about them like they’re on a first-name basis.”

Please visit www.npr.org to listen to the entire story.

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THE TOP TEN
Emeril’s New Orleans
800 Tchoupitoulas St. 528-9393
Sunday, October 24, 2004

By Brett Anderson
Restaurant critic

At Emeril’s, it is hard to ignore that you are dining in a corporate enterprise. There are the logos and the famous dishes, some of which you may know from television. Often you’ll find the namesake’s latest cookbook on display. And there are the crowds, a fringe benefit of full-force, cross-media publicity. Fourteen years past its opening day, Emeril’s remains, in my experience, the most difficult-to-obtain reservation in New Orleans.
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Emeril Keeps It Real — at home the superstar chef indulges a passion for wine(cover story)
by Harvey Steiman

Emeril Lagasse hunches over a frying pan in his home kitchen, a pose familiar to anyone who has seen him on television. Chattling amiably with a visitor, he lifts four halibut fillets from a thin film of olive oil in the pan, turns gracefully and transfers them to plates, carefully spoons on a delicately flavored relish of corn, tomatoes and cucumbers. Not exactly what you might expect from a man who rouses his TV audiences with the mantra, “Pork fat rules!”

For the full story, please read the August 31, 2004 edition of Wine Spectator magazine