I’ll admit to looking askance at the review DVD for a new food show called “Chef Academy.” It’s easy to tire of these reality shows and I plead guilty. But the fact that this show is on Bravo, which is home to the wildly popular “Top Chef,” meant it had to be taken seriously.
When I finally popped in that DVD, I found myself laughing out loud at the premiere episode. It’s still reality programming and features a cast of characters who might well do anything to get on television. But there is something about this group that made them different from the usual models turned actors who inhabit the TV screen so much of the time.
The show stars chef Jean Christophe Novelli billed as a “world renowned Michelin and 5AA Rosette award-winning chef with restaurants in London, France and South Africa, and voted ‘World’s Sexiest Chef’ by the New York Times,” according to Bravo’s press release. French born and residing in London, his Novelli Academy Cookery School in the UK has placed in the “Top 25 Cookery Schools in the World” and now he wants to open a similar school on Venice Beach in California.
I’ll admit I had never heard of him and some of the contestants who want to cook with him said the same thing. But he’s excited to come to America with his pregnant fiancé and run this cooking school for passionate students. They are picked up at the airport by his new assistant Joel, who comes right out of central casting to be a foil in this cozy group of foodies as he doesn’t cook and knows nothing about food. But Joel’s qualified because he was Tori Spelling’s assistant.
Novelli doesn’t seem to know who the 90210 girl is but asks his eager new assistant to do whatever he has to arrange a meeting with Columbo, his favorite television detective. After a debate about whether actor Peter Falk is dead or alive, Novelli does his own impression of the actor. The subject of Columbo comes up again when he meets his chef students. Go figure.
So what made me laugh? Novelli and his stateside sous chef interview 15 candidates for the school. This almost goes by too fast as some of them are real characters, including the 47-year-old Valley Girl housewife who comes in with a food basket bribe; and the 26-year-old bride-to-be who has been ordered to learn to cook by her future mother-in-law.
Then the real laugh riot starts when chef brings in a little single burner and well-worn pan and rows of eggs and herbs, cheese and mushrooms. Cook me eggs, anyway, he tells each candidate. Most of them fail miserably, which, of course, begs the question of their passion for cooking. He is most horrified when several of them pick up the minced garlic in a jar to use instead of the fresh garlic. They burn things, don’t finish and one almost cries.
From this he selects a few real chefs: a Navy chef who cooked on a submarine and a culinary school grad, along with a motley crew who may succeed in the kitchen yet.
At least they’ve made me care if they do in this first episode.
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Ruth Reichl still reigns as queen of America's culinary scene
NOBODY KNOWS more about what Americans are cooking and eating than Ruth Reichl. As a food writer and restaurant critic for both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times as well as the author of several best-selling memoirs, she's established herself as a keen observer of the American culinary revolution.
She served as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine from 1999 until its demise this fall and picked up a James Beard Award for coproducing the PBS series "Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie." With all of it, Reichl has helped foster an American food culture that celebrates seasonal, regional and artisanal cuisine like never before. It would not be an overstatement to describe her as the most influential food person in America today.
"I don't wear the mantle lightly," she recently confided over lunch at Seattle's Tamarind Tree restaurant. "I mean, I feel so lucky. I can't believe I get to be me." At the same time, she is fully aware that her position didn't just happen. "I've probably done everything in the food industry you can do except go to culinary school."
The Pacific Northwest, she added, is one of the places that helped forge her sense of a food culture.
Born in 1948 in New York City, Reichl attended the University of Michigan, where she met her first husband, the artist Doug Hollis. In 1970, when she graduated with a master's degree in art history, she and Hollis came to Washington to work with sculptor Buster Simpson at what would become Pilchuck Glass School.
At Pilchuck, "we cooked communal meals. We would get this amazing salmon from the Lummi Indian tribe and cook it over an alder fire. I would gather berries and apples for pie, and we would have these feasts! It's no wonder that a potlatch culture developed here. It's one of the only places in the world where nature just gives you everything you need."
For years, after she moved to Berkeley, Calif., Reichl and Hollis would come up to visit Simpson, who moved to Belltown in 1972. "He built this crazy oven from the insides of a commercial washing machine, and we would come every Thanksgiving and roast a turkey in his Belltown loft."
In California, Reichl had joined the Swallow restaurant as a chef and co-owner. "I was really lucky in that I had the opportunity to do what I did when I did it, because I got to learn everything on the job. Now, you would have to have all sorts of training."
These days, she says, "I want to use my position to influence this emerging food culture." At Gourmet, she'd found an audience that needed to be converted. "Ten years ago, when I took the helm of the magazine, they would never have run stories about farmers and about social-justice issues."
Eating, she contends, "is an ethical act, and every choice we make in the kitchen impacts the world." She hopes that the new "Gourmet Today" cookbook — larded with little essays on topics ranging from heirloom vegetables to sustainable seafood — will encourage people to make better choices in the kitchen, but the first step is "just to get people cooking" again.
Even after she learned that Gourmet was folding, Reichl continued the cookbook tour, "tweeting" to report on what she was eating on the road and how people were responding to the book. In an e-mail sent a week after the magazine shut down, she wrote, "Gourmet was a magazine that meant so much to so many people, and they reacted as if a trusted family member had died." But that apparently has not slowed her down.
A new PBS series, "Adventures with Ruth" premiered in October; it chronicles Reichl's visits to cooking schools all over the world. (One episode was taped in Seattle with yours truly as the cooking instructor.) Now, she's planning a fifth book in her series of memoirs based on the years she spent at Condé Nast. One way or another, she says, she'll continue to spread the word about the importance of cooking and eating consciously.
Source
She served as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine from 1999 until its demise this fall and picked up a James Beard Award for coproducing the PBS series "Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie." With all of it, Reichl has helped foster an American food culture that celebrates seasonal, regional and artisanal cuisine like never before. It would not be an overstatement to describe her as the most influential food person in America today.
"I don't wear the mantle lightly," she recently confided over lunch at Seattle's Tamarind Tree restaurant. "I mean, I feel so lucky. I can't believe I get to be me." At the same time, she is fully aware that her position didn't just happen. "I've probably done everything in the food industry you can do except go to culinary school."
The Pacific Northwest, she added, is one of the places that helped forge her sense of a food culture.
Born in 1948 in New York City, Reichl attended the University of Michigan, where she met her first husband, the artist Doug Hollis. In 1970, when she graduated with a master's degree in art history, she and Hollis came to Washington to work with sculptor Buster Simpson at what would become Pilchuck Glass School.
At Pilchuck, "we cooked communal meals. We would get this amazing salmon from the Lummi Indian tribe and cook it over an alder fire. I would gather berries and apples for pie, and we would have these feasts! It's no wonder that a potlatch culture developed here. It's one of the only places in the world where nature just gives you everything you need."
For years, after she moved to Berkeley, Calif., Reichl and Hollis would come up to visit Simpson, who moved to Belltown in 1972. "He built this crazy oven from the insides of a commercial washing machine, and we would come every Thanksgiving and roast a turkey in his Belltown loft."
In California, Reichl had joined the Swallow restaurant as a chef and co-owner. "I was really lucky in that I had the opportunity to do what I did when I did it, because I got to learn everything on the job. Now, you would have to have all sorts of training."
These days, she says, "I want to use my position to influence this emerging food culture." At Gourmet, she'd found an audience that needed to be converted. "Ten years ago, when I took the helm of the magazine, they would never have run stories about farmers and about social-justice issues."
Eating, she contends, "is an ethical act, and every choice we make in the kitchen impacts the world." She hopes that the new "Gourmet Today" cookbook — larded with little essays on topics ranging from heirloom vegetables to sustainable seafood — will encourage people to make better choices in the kitchen, but the first step is "just to get people cooking" again.
Even after she learned that Gourmet was folding, Reichl continued the cookbook tour, "tweeting" to report on what she was eating on the road and how people were responding to the book. In an e-mail sent a week after the magazine shut down, she wrote, "Gourmet was a magazine that meant so much to so many people, and they reacted as if a trusted family member had died." But that apparently has not slowed her down.
A new PBS series, "Adventures with Ruth" premiered in October; it chronicles Reichl's visits to cooking schools all over the world. (One episode was taped in Seattle with yours truly as the cooking instructor.) Now, she's planning a fifth book in her series of memoirs based on the years she spent at Condé Nast. One way or another, she says, she'll continue to spread the word about the importance of cooking and eating consciously.
Source
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