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Plating Personality

Written By: David Snyder on Friday, July 20, 2007

The Cult of the Celebrity Chef

High profile chefs draw the crowds, but are they worth the hype?

It wasn’t too long ago that, for most of the dining public, the chef was an anonymous and uncelebrated part of the dining experience. Much like the cable guy and all of the other unsung heroes who keep our lives running smoothly, we rarely bothered to learn the chefs’ names. These days, though, all that has changed.

We now live in a food-worshiping culture. Thanks in part to television shows on the Food Network and Fine Living Channel, among others, it seems that no corner of the kitchen or the dining room is safe from the spotlight. So it was almost inevitable that the chefs who cook the food at our favorite restaurants eventually would be celebrated like rock stars.

Some restaurants have attempted to capitalize on this trend by hiring high profile chefs or even creating their own. But is this good for the dining public? Is there a downside?

For better or worse, the one thing our growing foodie culture has done is that it has made the dining public hungry for more than just food. They also want information—and lots of it. These days, diners are more sophisticated and more conscious about their restaurant experience as a whole. Now when people visit a restaurant, they are interested in knowing where the food came from, how it was prepared, and who prepared it. So when a restaurant highlights the men and women who prepare the food at our favorite restaurants, it feeds this hunger for information. But more importantly, by putting a name and a face to the plate, restaurants add a human element to the equation, which helps diners to connect more deeply to the meal, keeping them coming back for more.

But for restaurants, there is a bit of a risk—a risk that could be felt by consumers. By building the restaurant around the chef, the restaurant could be putting itself in a precarious situation should the chef decide to leave. Will the restaurant be able to keep its customers? Will the rest of the kitchen staff be able to execute the chef’s old playbook with the same degree of quality and consistency? If the answer to these questions is no, you could lose one of your favorite restaurants.

Another potential downside is that the restaurant doesn’t have total control with a high profile chef. For example, when the foie gras ban was proposed here in Philadelphia in May of 2006, famed chef Christopher Lee of Striped Bass—the flagship restaurant in restaurateur Stephen Starr’s empire—came out in support of the delicacy in the Philadelphia Inquirer. However, after Lee left Striped Bass to pursue an opportunity in New York, Starr announced that he would pull foie gras from the menus of all of his restaurants, including Striped Bass. Did Starr have the ability to pull foie gras from the Striped bass menu before Lee left? Perhaps. But in the December 4, 2006 issue of New York, where he talked about his decision to stop serving foie gras, Starr also had this to say about high profile chefs: “With a celebrity chef I don’t have total control. I have to respect him or her, which I would do, but I can’t totally dominate the decision as I could with someone simply as an employee.”

As people become more conscious of the food they eat, there is no question that it is rewarding to connect to the people who prepare the food we enjoy. But for me, it doesn’t matter whether the food was prepared by a celebrity chef or my cable guy (whatever his name is). As long as the food tastes good, you can bet I’ll continue to tune in.

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