Home Food & Wine Food Wine 2005 TOP NORTHSIDE CHEFS

TOP NORTHSIDE CHEFS

Written by Susan Dyer Reynolds

Wednesday, 31 August 2005

“What’s been lost in all this food-crazy, chef- and restaurant-obsessed nonsense is that cooking is hard—that the daily demands of turning out the same plates the same way over and over and over again require skills other than, and less telegenic than, spouting catchphrases and schmoozing.” —Anthony Bourdain, in the new preface to his best-selling book, Kitchen Confidential I sang in a band during college, and my friends would always ask me about the four guys I played with—were they nice? Single? Funny? Now I’m a food writer, and my friends are asking the same questions about chefs. In a world increasingly fascinated by food and restaurants, chefs are the new rock stars. While chefs are all over the airwaves these days, it’s not a new concept. Marcel Boulestin became the first television cook when he presented the first of the Cook’s Night Out programs on the BBC in 1937, and the first television appearance of innovative comic Ernie Kovacs was as the chef in a live cooking show called Deadline for Dinner that aired on Philadelphia’s WPTZ. While she wasn’t the first television cook, Julia Child is certainly the most recognizable. Her show The French Chef, which debuted on PBS February 11, 1963, ran nationally for 10 years, winning Peabody and Emmy awards and making Child the first bona fide culinary superstar—at the age of 50. PBS cooking shows have continued to enjoy success for over four decades, but throughout most of the 90s, food TV maintained a somewhat cultlike following. When the Food Network debuted in 1993, it was a rough-around-the-edges how-to channel aimed at people who wanted to learn recipes to make at home, and then in 1997—BAM!—a charismatic cook from Fall River, Massachusetts, named Emeril Lagasse went live and kicked it up a notch. Lagasse had been a popular host from the beginning with his show Essence of Emeril, but producers knew they had something special in Emeril Live when 50,000 callers trying to get tickets knocked out phone service in a New Hampshire call center. By the end of the week, they had received half a million ticket requests. The Food Network now reaches more than 85 million U.S. households and 5 million Web site users, and it ranks first among ad-supported cable networks on year-to-year subscriber growth. And thanks to this new lust for food porn, we have our very first generation of food porn stars. There are fan clubs devoted to hunky Tyler Florence and Jamie Oliver, pinup shots of Rachael Ray cooking in lingerie grace the pages of FHM magazine’s 2004 Hot 100 Women issue, and glamorous Giada De Laurentiis, who looks like she never finished a bowl of pasta in her life, sensuously slurps noodles while gazing deeply into camera one. The Food Network, along with hundreds of Internet sites and a myriad of print publications, has helped to create an almost frenzied food fest in America. Even reality TV has gone to the foodies with shows like The Restaurant, Cooking Under Fire, and Hell’s Kitchen. Perhaps most ironic of all, Fox will debut a sitcom this fall from Sex and the City Executive Producer Darren Star based on Anthony Bourdain’s best-selling autobiography, Kitchen Confidential. Yes, Bourdain has become a superstar television chef just like the guy he loved to hate on the pages of that very book—the charismatic cook from Fall River, Massachusetts. Here in San Francisco, where gastronomy rules, the best chefs are also a source of much interest and curiosity. Diners admire their talent and want to know something about the person under the toque. While there are terrific chefs throughout The City, the majority of the finest are situated right here in the Northside. I have chosen 11 who I think represent the best of the best and divided them into three categories—Well Done for the seasoned veterans, Medium-Rare for those who have worked as executive chefs for others but are commanding their own kitchens for the first time, and On the Rare Side for first-time executive chefs. The Well Done chefs, as well being talented in the kitchen, have each accomplished something extraordinary: Roland Passot took the interior and the menu at La Folie through a major remodel and still came out with four stars, James Ormsby, George Morrone and Luke Sung all embarked on new ventures—Ormsby opened Jack Falstaff, Sung opened Lux, and Morrone opened both Tartare and Boca—and Gary Danko received his sixth Five Star rating from Mobil Travel Guidein as many years. The one thing conspicuously absent from the list of chefs On the Rare Side is a female presence. Even though women like Frisson’s Sarah Schafer (who was promoted too late to be considered for this issue) are making headway, there are still surprisingly few young women working as executive chefs. With Northside role models like James Beard award-winning chef Joyce Goldstein, Gloria Ciccarone-Nehls at the Big 4 and Annie Sommerville of Greens, let’s hope that changes in the very near future. As for this year’s top chefs, I found all of them to be fairly shy, humble guys who don’t seek the limelight, though it sometimes seeks them. None of them expressed any interest in becoming the Next Food Network Star, all of them spoke fervently about cooking and food. And while they are 11 very different personalities, all confess to having four traits very much in common: admiration for their staff, wanting to make people happy through their craft, loving what they do, and being a little bit crazy. As anyone in this business knows, all of these traits are essential to survive, and especially to succeed.

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