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  Copyright © 2013 by Allen Salkin

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Salkin, Allen.

  From scratch : inside the Food Network / Allen Salkin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63647-3

  1. Food Network (Firm)—History. 2. Food Network (Firm)—Biography. 3. Television cooking shows—United States—History. 4. Cooking, American—History. 5. Food—Social aspects—United States—History. 6. Food habits—United States—History. I. Title.

  PN1992.92.F66S25 2013 2013025095

  384.55'22—dc23

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Dedicated to Jay Salkin.

  He enjoyed a good meal.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE: Roll Over

  PROLOGUE: A Final Toast to Emeril Live

  1. Starting from Scratch

  2. CNN with Stoves

  3. “Chefs Are the New Rock Stars”

  4. Bobby, Sara, Mario, and the Too Hot Tamales

  5. BAM!

  6. Changing the Recipe

  7. New Owners Again!?!

  8. “Allez Cuisine!”

  9. You Reap What You Sow

  10. Comfort Food

  11. Noodle Roni with Blue Eyes: A New Kind of Star

  12. Competitors Sharpen Their Knives

  13. Channeling the Soul of a Chef

  14. A Ten-Billion-Dollar Prize

  EPILOGUE: June 2013

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  Roll Over

  Before there was a Food Network, there was no Food Network, or even a world in which it was obvious that there ought to be a Food Network.

  In the early 1980s, a handful of “celebrity chefs”—many of them connected to a miraculous restaurant in Berkeley, California, called Chez Panisse—rose to prominence with a revolutionary new philosophy of local, high-quality ingredients, prepared inventively. Like-minded chefs—Jeremiah Tower, Charlie Trotter, Wolfgang Puck—established themselves in gourmet pockets of Southern California, Boston, Chicago, and Manhattan, with mind-tickling innovations and fusion cuisine, such as gourmet pizza topped with duck sausage and chicken sun-dried tomato spring rolls. But by the end of the decade, many trend-watchers were pronouncing the celebrity chef fad as over as neon shoelaces and big hair. These brilliant chefs may have been appreciated by a smart set of food lovers, but it was unclear if the wider culture would continue to care.

  Well-known TV chefs were few, among them Julia Child, Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook, and Jeff Smith of The Frugal Gourmet, all of whom appeared on PBS stations. Some of them sold a lot of cookbooks, but the fact that they were on not-for-profit television conveyed the impression that there was no profit and little impact to be had. For the most part, they were relegated to stirring and tasting in spartan kitchen sets on weekends, except on those occasions when they were invited for six-minute cooking segments on Good Morning America. Even PBS wasn’t much interested in adding more cooking to its lineup.

  Few TV producers toiled in the ghetto of food shows, and by all practical measures, no food television industry existed. There were no talent agents focused on food talent, scant studio spaces fit for cooking, few product endorsements, and no massive food festivals attracting tens of thousands of fans.

  It is past cliché these days to refer to chefs as “the new rock stars.” The idea was born, as you will see, at the same time Food Network was. But the comparison runs deeper than the phrase implies. It took mid-century improvements in radio technology, recording, and television, plus a baby boom and a burgeoning middle class, to create the rock star. When the blues were electrified into rock ’n’ roll, a new generation heard something amazing, exciting, and true just as the entertainment industry was able to deliver it. So, too, appetites were awakened in the 1990s, when the expansion of cable TV and the Internet met a food subculture that was ready to find a hungry audience. When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, I had no idea that it was possible to make cookies at home except by opening a box of cookie mix or slicing a frozen roll of Pillsbury dough. Then one day I was on a high school trip with a friend whose mother had made him chocolate chip cookies “from scratch.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “She used flour and sugar and butter.”

  My brain exploded. Of course, it shouldn’t have. Nestlé had been printing a recipe for Toll House cookies on bags of chocolate chips since the 1930s. But this knowledge had been lost in my house and in a lot of others. I don’t think we had flour. We had Bisquick. Those from-scratch cookies were the best thing I had ever tasted. Thank you, Mrs. Merriman.

  There was no Food Network to overcome the lack of food knowledge in my house. On TV, I watched cartoons after school or, when we got cable, old movies. I certainly would have watched Food Network, though I can’t tell you why I was starved for such knowledge. A yearning for something authentic and true in an era when the noisy ideals of a previous g-g-generation were hitting a wall? A world where the government proposed ketchup as a vegetable for school lunches? I don’t know why I was hungry, but I was. We all were, it turned out. When I went to UC Berkeley and was surrounded by the flourishing food culture of the late 1980s, within a year I was perfecting my guacamole and baking my own bread.

  By 1996, around 31,000 people over the age of eighteen were watching Food Network (the term used by those who work there; outsiders call it The Food Network) at any given time, and about a third of those viewers were from households with children. In New Hyde Park, New York, a shy teenager named Todd Mitgang was watching. His mother never used any green but iceberg lettuce and every meat was prepared the same way—a shake of salt, a shake of garlic powder, and under the broiler. The best restaurant he had ever been to was a Benihana; he ordered Rocky’s Choice. The stir-fry was a revolution to him—it combined steak and chicken. Over the next few years, he watched Food Network after school, and was spellbound as Sara Moulton demonstrated knife skills on Cooking Live, Mario Batali cooked with fresh garlic, and Emeril threw something spicy on meat and exclaimed, “Bam!”

  Fast-forward to 2012, when Todd opened Crave Fishbar, a seafood restaurant in Manhattan. A reviewer wrote, “Mitgang slices scallops thin and douses them in enough curry oil to heat up Manitoba. He adds sliced heirloom cherry tomatoes to black bass sashimi for the right amou
nt of zing. Then he ups the ante with king salmon that’s cut as thick as a corn-fed rib-eye.”

  Roll over, Benihana, tell McDonald’s the news.

  Somehow Food Network captured an audience that did not know that it wanted twenty-four hours a day of food television. Then, having roped in the early adopters, the network figured out how to create an even bigger audience. Food Network is not single-handedly responsible for the “food revolution,” but it took what was happening in some food-forward pockets of the world—including, fortuitously, those within a three-mile radius of its Manhattan headquarters—and delivered it to everybody. It made converts and, yes, sometimes in its greed and ambition, it perverted the message along the way. Then, it kept pulling out a divining rod to learn what fresh pockets had formed, and honed the message to fit the new reality it had helped create.

  For this book, I interviewed nearly everyone you will meet here and many you won’t: stars, executives, makeup artists, drivers, agents, producers, Web developers, prep cooks, and many others. I read original documents, strategic plans, research reports, old marketing pamphlets, press releases, and news articles. Among the on-screen talent I interviewed were Curtis Aikens, Sunny Anderson, Mario Batali, Mark Beckloff, Sissy Biggers, Bill Boggs, Anthony Bourdain, Anne Burrell, Tom Colicchio, Scott Conant, Cat Cora, Jane Curtin, Melissa d’Arabian, Mark Dacascos, Paula Deen, Dan Dye, Nora Ephron, Susan Feniger, Guy Fieri, Bobby Flay, Tyler Florence, Marc Forgione, Nadia Giosia, Duff Goldman, Nina Griscom, Donna Hanover, Chuck Hughes, Emeril Lagasse, Robin Leach, Lisa Lillien, Lisa Loeb, Jeff Mauro, Mary Sue Milliken, Masaharu Morimoto, Sara Moulton, Marc Murphy, Pat and Gina Neely, Jamie Oliver, Wolfgang Puck, Rachael Ray, Claire Robinson, David Rosengarten, Marc Summers, Michael Symon, Ming Tsai, Justin Warner, Geoffrey Zakarian, and Andrew Zimmern. Almost every star I asked agreed to be interviewed at length, except for Robert Irvine, Sandra Lee, and Giada De Laurentiis, although I did speak to each briefly at times and spent time in their presences observing and taking notes. Ina Garten and Alton Brown declined. In both cases, I found unpublished or little-known interviews they had done with other reporters, and I interviewed numerous associates. If a conversation is quoted, someone who was in the room at the time told me what was said. Thanks to help from Food Network employees past and present, I dug up recordings of old programs, photos, and promotional reels once thought lost.

  This is not an officially authorized Food Network book. The network generously made its executives available to me for long interviews, allowed me to attend tapings, to access some of its programming archive, and to sit in on some internal planning meetings. But no one at Food Network had any right of approval over the content, nor did I show them anything I had written, other than a two-page sample of the prologue when we were discussing how much access they would allow as the project went forward. Likewise, I am represented by the William Morris Endeavor agency, which also represents many Food Network stars. While my literary agent, Eric Lupfer, helped shape my original book proposal, no one at the agency, including agents who appear as characters in this book, was shown any material for approval, nor given any other special consideration,

  One other thing before you read on. There are a lot of characters, a lot of names in this story. I refer to most people, even executives, by their first names, because that’s how it’s generally done at Food Network—Bobby, Emeril, Rachael—unless it made sense because of duplicate names or common usage to use his or her last name. I know it would be easier to digest if I could have boiled the story down to two or three essential characters. But one of the facts of the story of Food Network is that a rich array of people had their entrances and exits, playing central parts along the way. The main character of this story does not change, and that is the network itself, which has had quite an interesting life so far.

  PROLOGUE

  A Final Toast to Emeril Live

  I have never met another guy who could walk into a room with, like, two hundred people and somehow find the one person that needed the hug the most,” says a tearful Susie Fogelson as she raises a champagne glass to Emeril Lagasse.

  The head of marketing for Food Network, Susie pauses to avoid choking up in front of thirty executives and staffers gathered in the network’s central kitchen in New York City. “He would be able to find the person, like a magician. ‘Someone told me it’s your birthday. How old are you, twenty-seven?’ And she’s like ninety-two.”

  Emeril could have used a hug himself. After a ten-year run, Food Network had just killed Emeril Live, his cooking show that had debuted in 1997 with a band and a live audience. It was a genre-bending formula that quickly made Emeril a household name and his kitchen catchphrases “Bam!” and “Let’s kick it up a notch!” a part of pop culture.

  But now, a few weeks before Christmas 2007, the cameras have been switched off in the sixth-floor studio and the last burner extinguished. The executives are trying to honor his accomplishments, but Emeril’s shock is setting in, his mind wheeling between disjointed thoughts: “Why are they doing this? Budget? Ken’s not here? He didn’t even call me? How can this be real?”

  Ken Lowe, the chief executive of Scripps, the parent company of Food Network, has been a dinner guest at Emeril’s home. But today Ken has not made the trip to New York from corporate headquarters in Cincinnati.

  The network president, Brooke Johnson, stands near Susie amid the orange cabinets and cutting boards. Brooke takes a small sip of champagne, and her calm feline eyes betray little.

  Susie, tall with curly chestnut hair, is having a hard time. By tradition, each on-air talent at Food Network has one executive he or she is closest to, the person they call for inside information. For Emeril it is Susie. When the head of marketing, who’d hired Susie, left three years ago, Emeril had phoned Brooke and insisted that Susie take his place.

  As she sees the famous chef’s heavy bulldog face, she flashes back to seven years earlier, when she moved to Food Network from Nickelodeon. Back then, most viewers thought Food was the Emeril Network. His show was on every weeknight at 8 p.m. and he overshadowed all the other stars. When the network, marginally profitable in 2000, wanted to raise its profile, it didn’t trot out Bobby Flay or Mario Batali. Emeril was its million-dollar man in chef’s whites, the first food TV star to be signed to a seven-figure contract. It was actually only around $333,334 a year for three years, but the network wanted to impress affiliates with its financial health and commitment to its ratings star, and trumpeted it as a million-dollar deal.

  Susie had gone on a forty-day promotional tour with him doing dinners and cooking demonstrations—Emeril Salutes L.A., Emeril Salutes San Francisco, Boston, etc. He would rush out to a kitchen station in a ballroom or convention center and the gathered advertisers, local cable company executives, and fans who had either bought or won tickets would stand and whoop with glee. He’d give a quick talk about what he loved about the city’s food, demonstrate one of his recipes, and then pose for photos with admirers.

  Emeril had friends everywhere. After each event, he would take Susie and his entourage to dinner. She had known his bombastic TV personality from watching him for years at home, but at the dinners, Emeril showed a sweetness and gentleness she had not imagined, his big soft hands gesturing slowly as he spoke, his Antaeus cologne radiating a warm, embracing scent. He had a sly twinkle in his eye and radiated the deep confidence of someone who knew who he was in the world. On Emeril Live, all he had to say was “let’s add some more gah-lic,” and the audience—his audience, the people who lined up week after week to fill his bleachers—would burst into applause and cheers. Before commercial breaks, Emeril would set down his spatula, rush over to the band, and grab a pair of drumsticks, showing skills on the skins he’d learned as a musical prodigy on the high school drum team. Everything had come together and he was on top.

  But now, as he is toasted in the Food Network kitchens in 2007, Emeril acknowledges the good wishes as his hea
rt grows heavier and his anger percolates. How did this day come? he asks himself.

  —

  Keeping Emeril happy had been the network’s priority from the moment it first saw the ratings for Emeril Live. When Brooke came to the network as head of programming in 2003, Ken Lowe told Emeril that her main focus was keeping his show at the top of its game. And from the day she started, she recognized that Emeril was king and she rarely made a decision about hiring new talent or green-lighting a series without consulting him. Brooke, a veteran TV executive who had helped the A&E network jettison its original arts programming in favor of dramatic series and crime dramas, was known for making aggressive changes that worked. She spent money on audience research to figure out the truth about what was and wasn’t working and how to fix it, and then she fixed it. Gut instincts mattered, but when the gut is fed facts, its instincts tend to improve. So when she took over as president in 2004, one of her first acts was to commission a study to find out how the viewing public perceived Food Network.

  The outside consultants found that to many television viewers, the network delivered little besides unexciting “dump and stir” cooking shows where a chef stood behind a counter demonstrating how to make a meal. Other networks were starting to offer more exciting food programming. They presented Brooke with a graphic, the Food Network logo as a pie. It showed that Travel Channel, TLC, and the broadcast networks had bitten off portions of her market with shows shot on the road, real-life wedding tales, and other “reality” programming. The consultants titled the graphic “Nibbled to Death.”

  The authors of the study might as well have put Emeril’s face in the conclusions, a big red X marked over it. When you looked past the live band and the quick opening monologue, his two shows, Emeril Live and his lower-key half-hour weekend show, Essence of Emeril, were basic cooking shows. If Food Network wanted to grow, it was going to have to become less of the Emeril Network.