Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh Unknown (books to read for 13 year olds .txt) 📖

I tried to find them. I looked everywhere. I did what every glued-to-the-tube food fanatic wishes he could do. I traveled around the country visiting their signature restaurants. I made my way to Beverly Hills (Wolfgang Puck’s Spago), Berkeley (Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse), Boston (Todd English’s Olives, in Charlestown), and New Orleans (Emeril Lagasse’s Emeril’s). I also ate near home, in New York City (Rocco DiSpirito’s Rocco’s on 22nd and Mario Batali’s Babbo). I went 0-for-America.

Not one of them was in his or her restaurant when I showed up.

There was a time when cooking was a calling, and chefs believed they should be nowhere but in their restaurants. André Soltner, chef-owner 2 2 6

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of Lutèce, lived above his and missed five nights of work in thirty-four years. These days, chefs are more likely to be out taping a show, getting photographed, or preening at a food festival. Yet truancy has done nothing to diminish their popularity. It wasn’t easy making a reservation at any of the restaurants, and when I finally did (under a false name), it was rarely at the time I would have wanted to eat. Finding one of these chefs behind a stove is hard, but dining in one of their restaurants at eight p.m. is even more difficult.

In this country, celebrity dining has three interpretations. (The French and Italians may think they’re superior to us in culinary matters, but they’re way behind in celebrity cuisine.) We have celebrity-owned restaurants, which boast some sort of financial or promotional involvement by a well-publicized figure and are generally short-lived.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Schatzi on Main in Santa Monica is one that has endured, although once he became governor it changed from celebrity-owned to politician-owned. We have celebrity-patronized restaurants, which are dining spots where famous people go to reaf-firm their right to occupy the best tables, even if ordinary people have begged for them weeks in advance. Le Cirque 2000 in New York is one such restaurant, as is The Ivy in L.A.

Unlike the other celebrity-dining phenomena, the celebrity-chef restaurant is mainstream, a melding of food and fame directed at the common man. Because of franchising, it is enormously influential—

at last count, English was a partner in seventeen restaurants. And thanks to your local supermarket, you need never deny yourself the pleasure of dining on celebrity-chef food, even if you’re merely opening a jar of Lagasse’s pasta sauce or heating up one of Puck’s famous pizzas. Due to television, celebrity chefs are more recognizable than news anchors.

The six chefs whose restaurants I visited are certifiable stars, although not all in the same way. At age sixty, Waters is above it all, a celebrity with a cause, that being “sustainable agriculture.” More than any other chef-owner, she has forged bonds between restaurant and farmer. Her good work started with the opening of Chez Panisse more F O R K I T O V E R

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than thirty years ago and continues with the Chez Panisse Foundation.

DiSpirito, thirty-seven, had embarked on a conventional career path, concentrating on running the kitchen at Union Pacific in New York, when he signed up for the NBC reality show The Restaurant and opened Rocco’s on 22nd. In doing so, he provided a rapt American viewing public with an unlikely adventure, a red-sauce Italian restaurant careening out of control. No man before him has ever looked so bad in a television series in which he starred.

English, forty-four, almost single-handedly altered the moribund Boston restaurant scene with his inexplicably tasty, pile-it-on presentations, more heap o’ cuisine than haute cuisine. With a cooking style perfectly suited to the ever-expanding tastes (and waistlines) of American diners, he has emerged as the most entrepreneurial of the celebrity chefs, with restaurants in hotels and airports and on the Queen Mary 2.

Batali, forty-four, is the most successful interpreter of Italian food ever to work in this country and the host of three (at last count) Food Network shows, the most beloved being Molto Mario. He is sure-handed in all things except his short-pants-in-winter wardrobe. Puck, fifty-five, is the man behind Spago, the most renowned American restaurant west of New York. He introduced designer pizza, recast American food as casually chic, and established California cuisine as a benchmark of fine dining. Finally there’s Lagasse, forty-five, host of The Essence of Emeril and Emeril Live and the most triumphant television cook since Julia Child. Lagasse is as warmhearted as his television image, and, despite a penchant for pork fat, far more gifted at the stove than is generally believed.

The problem with celebrity chefs is not their skill; every one of them has created praiseworthy, crowd-pleasing food. What is worrisome about the trend toward idolization of chefs is that the more beloved they become, the less likely they are to be found in the establishments that benefit from using their names. To me, dining in a restaurant where the chef never shows up can be more discouraging than dining in a restaurant where the green beans are canned. For some of these chefs, a bad day is one when they aren’t on the road opening another bistro.

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The original Spago, in West Hollywood, transformed fine dining into A-list entertainment. That Spago is gone. The new Spago, in Beverly Hills, is a California-European-Asian fusion restaurant with a few Austro-Hungarian items, such as goulash, from Wolfgang Puck’s past.

When I arrived, I was immediately shown to the sort of table I always get—the worst in the house. There is something about me, perhaps a look of passivity, that tells maître d’s I have come to be abused.

Spago has a number of convivial dining areas, but I was seated in the gloom of a passageway leading to the men’s room. When I expressed dismay, I was told