Hot on the trail of my celebrity chef weekend extravaganza at the 2009 Vegas Uncork’d festival, SmartMoney.com has a great list of Ten Things Celebrity Chefs Won’t Tell You.
While I’ll be the first to tell you how fun it is to get to know ‘celeb’ chefs, it’s long been a complaint of mine that most ‘celeb chefs’ really aren’t chefs at all. Sure, they’re nice and friendly, and they’re familiar with the kitchen to a certain extent, but most fans would be surprised at how few really have experience in a restaurant kitchen.
“It’s not necessary that there are professional chefs on the Food Network,” says Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential author and a celebrity chef in his own right. “But what they really need are good cooks, and they have precious few of those.”
Perhaps it’s my experience in catering that makes me a bit of a stickler with that regard, but I’m always more interested in the chefs who actually put in the hours in the kitchen – the Bartolottas, the Bourdains, the Buscaglias – vs. the Rays, if you will. I’ve noticed that even some of the more local celeb chefs aren’t always working the line. Nonetheless, the list of ten is certainly interesting to peruse.
Thanks to Slashfood for bringing this to our attention. It’s just too amusing not to post. I particularly like the part where he suggests you ’slap your troubles away’.
Serious Eats reminded us today that our favorite Bravo TV Top Chef judge, Mr. Tom Colicchio, will be on tonight’s Charlie Rose. If you haven’t had a chance to catch a Charlie Rose interview before, I urge you to check out the recent Ferran Adrià interview. Adrià, along with his go-to guy, José Andrés, both give wonderful insight into the world of avant garde cooking.
With chef celebrity saturating restaurant news this week – we have Top Chef set to air tonight and the Hottest Chef in NYC competitions in full swing – I decided to refocus attention onto what really makes restaurant news… outlandish prices and power chef collaborations.
Okay, just a bit of facetiousness there, but considering I have no Top Chef Season 5 previews or insider picks for NYC’s Hottest Chef to offer, I bring the conversation back to ridiculously overpriced meals a la the dynamic duo of Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz.
At Per Se this week the two chefs will take you on a gastronomical journey of a lifetime with a 20-course meal that will carry the mere price tag of $1,500.
No, I did not misplace a zero. Unsurprisingly all three dinners have already been booked. Don’t let the hefty bill fool you, tax, wine, and tip are all figured into the flat amount.
This also includes autographed copies of the menu.
And who knows, you might be able to reap the cost of dinner by selling the autographed menus on eBay.
