Twilight of the Imperial Chef

August 6, 2020 12:34 PM

Building on Alicia Kennedy’s On Restaurants and The Death of the Chef and Tien Nguyen’s What would a food media that de-centers employers look like?, Tejal Rao says it’s time to move away from the chef-auteur (NYT). “White male chefs who already fit neatly into the stereotype of the auteur are overrepresented, praised for a highly specific approach to fine dining, then rewarded with more investment and opportunities to replicate that same approach. So many alternative kinds of food businesses are never considered for awards or investments. They don’t fit into the chef-auteur framework, and in some cases have no desire to do so.”
posted by adrianhon (28 comments total)

To add to this;

Three of Bon Appétit's Most Popular Stars Are Leaving Video After Being Offered Unfair Contracts.

Looks like the pandemic is forcing a rethinking at many levels.
posted by indianbadger1 at 12:55 PM on August 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

About damned time.

True culinary innovation comes out of private kitchens and vernacular eateries, and has had very little to do with the crowd of self-inflated white clad dirigibles looming over the food scene in the US and Europe for more than a generation, blocking the light and drowning out real conversation with their irritating and omnipresent buzz.
posted by jamjam at 2:02 PM on August 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

Here's the Business Insider version of the Bon Appetit story; Sohla, Priya and Rick are not doing video anymore after (still!) being offered contracts for less than their white colleagues. And a behind the scenes with Rachel Premack at BI who has really been doing most of the research and footwork on the racism-in-the-BA-test-kitchen beat.
posted by Superilla at 2:25 PM on August 6, 2020

Really? Please illustrate one innovation that is now commonplace and did not have it's genesis in a professional kitchen. Sous vide? Pressure cookers? An ever widening selection of condiments? National cuisines now almost fully integrated into local foodways, (Italian and Japanese being the two biggest examples)
posted by Keith Talent at 2:27 PM on August 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

As touched on in Nguyen’s piece, Who Really Writes Chefs' Recipes? (Food & Wine, July 31, 2020) Even the most celebrated chefs have help from other people when they're developing recipes, but those names are rarely seen by the dining and cooking public.
posted by Iris Gambol at 2:29 PM on August 6, 2020

Really? Please illustrate one innovation that is now commonplace and did not have it's genesis in a professional kitchen

Pickles, fermentation, aquafaba, lots of "street food", bread maki- okay why am I even responding to this silly comment
posted by Karaage at 2:50 PM on August 6, 2020 [33 favorites]

There's something about the way that celebrity gets pushed so quickly in different fields.

Alicia Kennedy opens by asking

Imagine we let restaurants exist the way we let hardware stores exist. Has there ever been a rock star garden-hose expert, a celebrity buyer of hammers and drills?

Well, there are, though, kind of. There's all the HGTV celebrity renovators and flippers, with home furnishing and hardware lines at big box stores.

And I think that's not a coincidence. It's because you can scale marketing cheaper than you can scale other kinds of competitive advantages, and celebrity boosting is just a kind of marketing. Get a famous face (or get a face famous), and that's an immediate reason someone will look at and value your product over the rest of the market, especially if it's otherwise hard for a consumer to differentiate.

Same is true of restaurants. If it's attached to a celebrity chef, that already buys it cachet that differentiates it more than just another fancy-looking website or a menu in the window that tastefully omits decimals on its prices.

See also this bit from the Business Insider piece on Bon Appetit that Superilla links:

More than a dozen current and former employees of the publisher's video-production arm previously told Business Insider that Condé Nast Entertainment executives emphasized "scalable" content. That typically means videos that perform well in YouTube's search engine.

At most of Condé Nast's brands, that means celebrity videos. And at Bon Appétit, staffers said, the algorithm focus results in endless videos on mac 'n' cheese, American candy, and potato salad.

But the problem, Martinez said, is that Bon Appétit's magazine recipes are typically totally new, rather than something someone would search. He said the types of food he likes to make would not jibe well with the algorithm, even though his presence in the Test Kitchen videos attracts three new audiences to the channel: gay communities, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans.
...
Continued discussion at Condé Nast Entertainment about the algorithm — rather than more conversation about how to include more diverse food or cooks — also persuaded El-Waylly to sever her ties to the Test Kitchen videos.

"They kept speaking about the algorithm, but the algorithm just favors the kind of content that was created before: Western food and white people," El-Waylly told Business Insider. "That's the only thing that the algorithm would prefer."

It's about scaling exposure as cheaply as possible, with minimum effort. More recreations of nostalgic Gen X and Millennial junk food, less tlayuda and pani puri. Probably short-sighted, ultimately, but in the near-term, you boost those numbers for your quarterly engagement goals.

tl;dr advertising considered harmful
posted by pykrete jungle at 3:08 PM on August 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

And from this additional BI piece:

The executives who lead Condé Nast Entertainment, the famed publisher's video-production arm, are devoted to what's called the "scale check," according to current and former employees.

During a scale check, a select group of employees measures the various parts of a pitch against historical data. People and ideas deemed "scalable" are then ranked highly in an internal spreadsheet. For brand-new content, a rarefied group of about 30 develops the ideas that will become series.

If a video idea doesn't pass this process, it rarely goes online, five current and six former employees told Business Insider.

Explains why there's so many Conde Nast video segments directly derivative of each other--to the extent where I have to imagine that they get an interview subject and run them rapid-fire through the video paces to hit GQ, VF, Wired, etc, etc. in one shot in the studio.
posted by pykrete jungle at 3:25 PM on August 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

Really? Please illustrate one innovation that is now commonplace and did not have it's genesis in a professional kitchen

Pickles, fermentation, aquafaba, lots of "street food", bread maki- okay why am I even responding to this silly comment

You are correct about aquafaba, good example, but the rest? I have a hard time seeing any of these other examples as innovation, societies have been making these all around the world for millennia.
posted by Keith Talent at 3:42 PM on August 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

National cuisines now almost fully integrated into local foodways

Ascribing this to auteur or high-status chefs is really unpleasant. The hardest work is done by small cheap restaurants in the early waves of immigration. The name chefs follow along and collect the money.
posted by clew at 4:25 PM on August 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

You are correct about aquafaba, good example, but the rest? I have a hard time seeing any of these other examples as innovation, societies have been making these all around the world for millennia.

Isn't that kind of the point? I thought the initial sweeping claim going the other way was silly, too, though, for what it's worth.
posted by atoxyl at 4:36 PM on August 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

Innovation isn't the best way to measure the impact people have on food. Things happen outside the "innovation" paradigm in the food world, usually what is called an innovation is a well marketed way to do something that has been done before.
posted by chaz at 5:01 PM on August 6, 2020 [7 favorites]

National cuisines now almost fully integrated into local foodways, (Italian and Japanese being the two biggest examples)

That came from generations of immigrants setting up their own restaurants and serving their own national and regional cuisines. Not from 'chef auteurs' introducing the hoi polloi to the 'exotic' food through 'fusion cuisine' or whatever.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:01 PM on August 6, 2020 [16 favorites]

Maybe everyone can take a breath? Just save the mods some stress lol
posted by sixswitch at 5:03 PM on August 6, 2020 [7 favorites]

Momofuku Ando, inventor of the Instant noodle, owned a salt producing factory. The first pressure cooker was invented almost a hundred years before the restaurant. Sous vide is attributed to Count Rumford, an American loyalist who fled to Great Britain.
posted by Comrade_robot at 5:21 PM on August 6, 2020 [9 favorites]

Imagine we let restaurants exist the way we let hardware stores exist. Has there ever been a rock star garden-hose expert, a celebrity buyer of hammers and drills?

Lol, this person really needs to stick with food if they are going to come in with garbage takes like that. Perhaps I'm not exactly a foodie, but I can name 3 or 4 times as many tool review people as I can celebrity chefs.
posted by sideshow at 5:30 PM on August 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Pressure cookers were invented by a French physicist in the 1600s; the low temperature aspect of sous vide was first written about by Count Rumford in the late 1700s, and the 'under vacuum' aspect, which is of course the literal translation of the French terms, was the contribution of an industrial food chemist/engineer, not a chef.

Chefs are great at getting publicity and taking credit, not so great at coming up with new things to do with food.
posted by jamjam at 6:16 PM on August 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

I have a hard time seeing any of these other examples as innovation, societies have been making these all around the world for millennia.

JFC the point is that these things were innovations that did not have it's "genesis in a professional kitchen," which you demanded an illustration of. Your implication that common place food innovations in food must have come from professional kitchens is absurd.
posted by Karaage at 6:22 PM on August 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

I cooked high end for a bunch of years under some absolutely fantastic chefs in the Boston area. It was high pressure. It was fun. It was a rush every night. Inspiration for chefs comes from a few places, but this concept of celebrity chef fap-fap is mind numbing to me because the reality is so so much simpler than folks give credit for it.

1. In high end dining, every night the staff gets fed family meal. It is someone's responsibility *on top of their other prep responsibilities* to cook family dinner. You get scraps. You get day old stock. You get cheap cuts. You get about an hour to look at it, figure out what you are going to do with it, beg the chef for access to 2-3 *good* extras that are in the kitchen than you won't run out of. And you get to cook your socks off for 20-30 people. A really good restaurant winds up with weird scraps which wind up being things like 'braised pig cheek' in a pork demi with mango and currant chutney. Too much salmon? Suddenly someone comes up with a salmon seafood stew - which is generally rare as salmon usually overpowers food. Have a few extra hours to spare because you've prepped the shit out of your station? You make gnochi by hand every chance you get until you've perfected the tenderness and the chef admits you did a good job. When everyone raves about family meal - there is a good sign that you did something unexpected and new. And the chef will take note. Alternatively, you can get rave reviews by making those Chinese spare ribs with the jug of sauce that is lying around for just that specific purpose. But don't think every night is amazing for family meal. Some nights it is chicken, salad, rice and sadness - or worse, your big plans are awful and make people wish that you had made chicken, salad, rice and sadness.

2. Never underestimate failure. Before a chef makes it big, they make a lot of mistakes. You don't hear about their signature failures, only their signature dishes *because the dishes sell.* The failures don't.

3. Persistence. Keeping at a dish and working on it can take months. Chefs working on a dish can change out components - add a crunch, remove the sweet, go from a pan sear to a sashimi, test like 30 different vinegars and oils, make a foam, add cream, monte au burre, blast with liquid nitrogen, smash, crush, chop, dice, julienne, fry, and so on and so on... A chef is balancing flavor, texture, appearance, and *above all else* cost.

4. Persistence from staff. As in family meal, you'll have sous chefs and tenured cooks vying for 1-2 spots on the menu a week. This can take weeks, months, years... but with enough time you hope to have a few successes under your belt. You hope your fellow chefs find success before the most amazing chef imagination you know, who at one point used to manage a Blockbuster video but became someone who could replicate a palate but also woo people for style, gives up cooking and becomes a tax accountant.

5. Luck and Timing. Yep. At the end of the day, someone has to be in the mood for it and collectively people need to change things out. If you are lucky, that someone will find one of your dishes and they will have missed the flavor or it will remind them of some part of their life, or it will be the new experience that they were looking for. If you are lucky, that person will be a critic.

So... Bon Apetit is occasionally a good read and they have some solid understanding of dishes, but they are not pushing boundaries. At best - they are reporting on something that is just the other side of what you thought was a boundary.
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:52 PM on August 6, 2020 [22 favorites]

I have a hard time seeing any of these other examples as innovation, societies have been making these all around the world for millennia.

🤦‍♂️ That’s kind of the point, dude.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 6:55 PM on August 6, 2020 [7 favorites]

True culinary innovation comes out of private kitchens and vernacular eateries

I think true culinary innovation comes from people cooking - and that includes "Imperial Chefs." To me the question isn't if chef-auteurs innovated, but were those innovations worth all the hassle?

I come from a fine dining background. I've worked with many JBF nominated chefs (and a few winners.) I even have an award or two under my own belt. I know the celebrity chef world intimately - on the level of the actual restaurants they own and sometimes cook in. My conclusion? When the music stopped and the chairs were all taken away, it wasn't worth it for most people.
posted by elwoodwiles at 7:02 PM on August 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

celebrity buyer of hammers and drills

This shall be my new sockpuppet name.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:34 PM on August 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

As mentioned in the NYtimes article, as much as Bourdain did to shine light on different cuisines and promote the immigrants actually making all the food, he definitely did a lot to reinforce/promote the idea of the toxic kitchen as an ideal of sorts. I’d be lying if reading Kitchen Confidential hadn’t been part of the wall of reasons why I tried to open a restaurant, and why I tried so hard to stay in kitchen work for the five years after that.

On the other hand, the number of assholes, toxic racists, and absolute fuckups that I had to work with, whose bullshit was always excused because “it’s restaurant work, it’s supposed to be like this” Bourdain certainly had a part in glorifying that. They read that book too, and thought, “awesome, here’s a place where I’m allowed to be as terrible as I want” which made me the asshole every time I tried to say things didn’t have to be as shitty as possible all the time.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:32 PM on August 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

I remember watching one of Bourdain's TV shows where he was clearly astonished and a bit flummoxed at how non-toxic Thomas Keller's (I think?) kitchen was. In his later shows and books he acknowledged coming to regret that Kitchen Confidential had glorified the toxic kitchen.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:50 PM on August 6, 2020 [9 favorites]

For whatever it’s worth, Indian housewives have been cooking with pressure cookers since the early/mid 20th century, long before pressure cookers became a fad in high end restaurant food.
posted by rishabguha at 8:57 PM on August 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

The first recipe in _Mastering the Art of French Cooking_ has timings for a pressure cooker. They were as common as housemade mayonnaise.
posted by clew at 11:08 PM on August 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

I think there's a thread drawing together the asshole chef tropes found in the likes of Kitchen Confidential with a wider notion of great authors/artists/creators being prickly-to-megalomaniacal. It excuses that behavior by positing a world in which great things can only be created by huge assholes. I don't buy this premise, but a lot of people do. Partly I think it's just that toxic assholes are much more willing to seize on excuses like "well Hemingway was a dick" and trumpet that loudly while the nontoxic, non-assholes quietly just do the work.
posted by axiom at 1:06 AM on August 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Part of all this is also the given conditions. The obnoxious chef also exists in Denmark, but they are a dying species, because labour laws are being enforced more rigorously than 20-30 years ago, and perhaps also because women are rising in the ranks and not having it. In Denmark, you have to pay everyone a living wage, including the dishwasher and the busboy, and that in itself leads to more respect for the individual worker. The work week is 37 hours, and while elite chefs work more, you can't force anyone to do that. That means prices seem high in Denmark, if you are visiting, but since the locals all earn living wages, it isn't that extreme.
René Redzepi of NOMA has admitted he thought it was part of the job to be mean, and has amended his ways. NOMA seeds a lot of new restaurants, almost every year, and one of the things you can experience in Copenhagen even if you can't afford the high-end places is how restaurant staff and owners genuinely support each other.
posted by mumimor at 1:40 AM on August 7, 2020 [8 favorites]