Popular Culture Review
suspects—Travel Channel, Discovery Home, Home & Garden Television, and
Fine Living. The first to my knowledge was NBC’s 2003 launch of The
Restaurant, which featured the photogenic but severely stressed out Rocco
DiSpirito. Next came Fox’s 2005 initiation of Hell’s Kitchen, a chef competition
presided over by a verbally abusive Gordon Ramsay, theatrically playing
himself This was followed by Bravo’s 2006 release of the engagingly
competitive Top Chef. The same year. Take Home C/ie?/’began airing on The
Learning Channel (TLC). Noted Australian chef, Curtis Stone, prowls
supemiarket aisles seeking lone women who are invariably startled by the
presence of a camera crew and the powerfully tall and handsome chef He
proposes to buy their groceries and come home with them—and they do, nearly
always under a blanket of sexual tension—where he guides them through
preparations of a menu he has deftly devised for whomever they were originally
planning to cook. Even MTV gave a shout-out to the chef craze in 2003,
featuring Todd English grilling for a young poolside crowd. While it’s true that
Wolfgang Puck was acting as food correspondent to Good Morning America
back in 1986, it’s clear that chef media appearances beyond the foodie channels
have multiplied substantially since.
The public’s television-fueled fascination with chefs has been
manifesting itself well beyond the act of watching television. People are
reportedly flocking to the restaurant outposts of renowned chefs. The most
spectacular of the restaurant-rollout success stories is the late-1990s conversion
of Las Vegas from culinary wasteland to culinary mecca. Puck was the sole
celebrity-chef pioneer in 1992, when none of his ilk would touch the stuff.
Lagasse followed in 1995. The avalanche, however, came after 1996, with
openings, one after another, by an accumulating roster of acclaimed chefs
diverse enough to appeal to the varying pocketbooks of Vegas visitors,
increasing numbers of residents, and differing segments of the chef-savvy
public: Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Alain Ducasse, the “Two Hot Tamales”
Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, Todd English, Bobby Flay, Hubert
Keller, Thomas Keller, Melissa Kelly, Nobu Matsuhisa, Mark Miller, Michael
Mina, Bradley Ogden, Charlie Palmer, Joel Robuchon, Guy Savoy, JeanGeorges Vongerichten—and that’s not an exhaustive list.
The chef cult has a couple of specifically high-end manifestations, too.
For some diners, it has become a mark of distinction to reserve an exclusive
kitchen-side table. Consi \