impossible not to talk about it—chef celebrity seemed to precede all topics.
Ultimately we sat down in his office at a round wood table, the very one where I’d grilled Mr. Metz and ended my obsessive quest eight years earlier for the proper color of roux for a classical brown sauce. It was a warm June day and the windows were open, the Hudson River visible in the distance.
Ryan prefaced our conversation about celebrity with what he considered to be related to but separate from celebrity. What can we say defines greatness? What does it mean to be a “great” chef today?
“You ask people ‘Who are the greatest artists?’” he said. “They say Picasso or whatever, and I ask, ‘Why do you say that? Because someone told you, just like they tell you Shakespeare is the greatest writer?’ Who is ‘they’? Critics and the like?”
Ryan listed the four criteria that define greatness in any artist:
They are excellent craftsmen.
They are innovators—they do something that no one has done before.
They are “on trend,” as he put it—their innovations are perceived to be of value; people buy their stuff; they aren’t tragic and misunderstood, appreciated for their innovations after they’re dead.
They are influential—others begin to do what they started.
By these criteria, the first chef in America to achieve greatness in this modern sense was Alice Waters, at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971. André Soltner was the well-known chef at his Lutèce, which opened in 1961. He was a superlative craftsman, chef, and restaurateur, but can we say he was great by Ryan’s modern definition? He was greatly admired, was a role model for young cooks, and was successful by any chef’s standards of the time; indeed, he remains an icon of the solitary chef working in his kitchen and practicing his craft (classic French cuisine) with monklike devotion and extraordinary stamina and longevity. He was not innovative, however, and thus he could not be said to be hugely influential, regardless of how revered he was and remains.
But Waters didn’t really develop fame until much later, after the influence of her Chez Panisse chefs began to reverberate throughout California and the country. The first true celebrity chef—and I’m referring only to restaurant chefs, not the early TV cooks and chefs, Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, James Beard and Graham Kerr, who had long been on the scene by now—may have been Paul Prudhomme, who opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans in 1979. A talented chef, he brought the heavy seasonings of Cajun cuisine into the national consciousness, and his techniques—notably, blackened fish—were, for better or worse, widely imitated.
Three years later, Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in West Hollywood, then fired up the steamroller and carried his California cuisine—American nouvelle gone rustic, but still created with classic French technique and served on fine china in a dramatic setting—across America, first with restaurants and innovations, such as the open kitchen in a fine-dining restaurant and Asian fusion cuisine, then with his pizza and fast food.
After these three chefs, whose rise and monopoly span about a decade, comes a slew of groundbreakers, but few stand out to match these forerunners, chef-restaurateurs whose influence on the American dining scene remains apparent even today (less so with Prudhomme, though his spices helped pave the way for celebrity-chef products). Who followed? Larry Forgione, An American Place, 1983 (American regional cuisine). Charlie Trotter, who opened his eponymous Chicago restaurant in 1987 (big tasting menus, small portions), and also in Chicago that year, Rick Bayless, who debuted Frontera Grill (popularizing an authentic artisanal approach to an ethnic cuisine, in this case Mexican). Jean-Georges Vongerichten (innovative techniques and food in exciting rooms, Jojo and Vong) and Nobu Matsuhisa (fine-dining Japanese) in
Ultimately we sat down in his office at a round wood table, the very one where I’d grilled Mr. Metz and ended my obsessive quest eight years earlier for the proper color of roux for a classical brown sauce. It was a warm June day and the windows were open, the Hudson River visible in the distance.
Ryan prefaced our conversation about celebrity with what he considered to be related to but separate from celebrity. What can we say defines greatness? What does it mean to be a “great” chef today?
“You ask people ‘Who are the greatest artists?’” he said. “They say Picasso or whatever, and I ask, ‘Why do you say that? Because someone told you, just like they tell you Shakespeare is the greatest writer?’ Who is ‘they’? Critics and the like?”
Ryan listed the four criteria that define greatness in any artist:
They are excellent craftsmen.
They are innovators—they do something that no one has done before.
They are “on trend,” as he put it—their innovations are perceived to be of value; people buy their stuff; they aren’t tragic and misunderstood, appreciated for their innovations after they’re dead.
They are influential—others begin to do what they started.
By these criteria, the first chef in America to achieve greatness in this modern sense was Alice Waters, at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971. André Soltner was the well-known chef at his Lutèce, which opened in 1961. He was a superlative craftsman, chef, and restaurateur, but can we say he was great by Ryan’s modern definition? He was greatly admired, was a role model for young cooks, and was successful by any chef’s standards of the time; indeed, he remains an icon of the solitary chef working in his kitchen and practicing his craft (classic French cuisine) with monklike devotion and extraordinary stamina and longevity. He was not innovative, however, and thus he could not be said to be hugely influential, regardless of how revered he was and remains.
But Waters didn’t really develop fame until much later, after the influence of her Chez Panisse chefs began to reverberate throughout California and the country. The first true celebrity chef—and I’m referring only to restaurant chefs, not the early TV cooks and chefs, Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, James Beard and Graham Kerr, who had long been on the scene by now—may have been Paul Prudhomme, who opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans in 1979. A talented chef, he brought the heavy seasonings of Cajun cuisine into the national consciousness, and his techniques—notably, blackened fish—were, for better or worse, widely imitated.
Three years later, Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in West Hollywood, then fired up the steamroller and carried his California cuisine—American nouvelle gone rustic, but still created with classic French technique and served on fine china in a dramatic setting—across America, first with restaurants and innovations, such as the open kitchen in a fine-dining restaurant and Asian fusion cuisine, then with his pizza and fast food.
After these three chefs, whose rise and monopoly span about a decade, comes a slew of groundbreakers, but few stand out to match these forerunners, chef-restaurateurs whose influence on the American dining scene remains apparent even today (less so with Prudhomme, though his spices helped pave the way for celebrity-chef products). Who followed? Larry Forgione, An American Place, 1983 (American regional cuisine). Charlie Trotter, who opened his eponymous Chicago restaurant in 1987 (big tasting menus, small portions), and also in Chicago that year, Rick Bayless, who debuted Frontera Grill (popularizing an authentic artisanal approach to an ethnic cuisine, in this case Mexican). Jean-Georges Vongerichten (innovative techniques and food in exciting rooms, Jojo and Vong) and Nobu Matsuhisa (fine-dining Japanese) in
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