And Another Things

Sun Herald

Sunday December 12, 2004

Mikey Robins, Comedian Mikey Robins was once a kitchen hand and dishwasher. It's possible this article was written out of a sense of revenge for a whole year spent being abused by pan-wielding artistes.

Just when did chefs become the new rock stars? Mikey Robins charts their rise to fame and talks up a homespun revolution.

I like chefs, always have done. They work and play hard, swear profusely and keep odd hours. They're my kind of folk. But something has happened to these pirates of the kitchen over the past decade or so. They've gone from being outsiders in society to darlings of the society pages. Just when did chefs become the new rock stars?

Remember, what we consider to be a restaurant is a relatively modern invention. Up until the French Revolution, any chef worth his salt was traditionally owned by one of the great families. It was only after the revolution that this changed, when suddenly these great cooks found themselves without jobs (seeing as their employers had recently found themselves without heads). They drifted into Paris and within 10 years there were 500 restaurants in that city. Soon, the new fashionable trend of "eating out" was spreading through Europe and the US.

The first so-called celebrity chef of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was Auguste Escoffier. By the time of his death in 1935, he had cooked for virtually every titled head in Europe. He revolutionised cooking and became almost as famous as his clients. Escoffier knew the value of celebrity - he would shamelessly court famous clients, creating dishes in their name so they would frequent his restaurants. He knew, long before Neil Perry or Jamie Oliver, the commercial value of fame. Eating out had become a mixture of being fed and high theatre: a special occasion.

But somehow I doubt that Escoffier would ever have dreamed of the proliferation of cookery books, television shows and associated merchandise with which we are bombarded today. Maybe he'd applaud it. Maybe he'd be rolling in his bain-marie.

What happened? Well, first the lifestyle television craze of the '90s had us all watching shows that made us better renovators, gardeners, quilt-makers and cooks. Then some bright spark decided it was time to "sex up" cooking on television. What had been the daytime domain of matronly women slaving away in studio-built kitchens suddenly became prime-time, lavishly shot explorations of the lifestyles of attractive young chefs who occasionally bother to cook something.

Nigella Lawson's latest cookbook launch had a guest list that read like a cross between roll calls for the Booker Prize and a Lenny Kravitz video. Lawson doesn't so much offer recipes as present a wonderful soft-focused life filled with attractive friends, a tastefully decorated house and delightful, moppetty children. Then, of course, there's her undeniable love affair with the camera and the sense that maybe she'll cook that meringue mix - or just maybe she'll spread it over her ample bosom.

Meanwhile, The Naked Chef, aka Jamie Oliver, has turned his cheeky-chappy, mockney-barrow-boy act into a business empire and garnered thousands of female fans along the way.

Now, I know these are English examples but it's just as bad here where newspapers, magazines and airlines loudly proclaim which celebrity chef is working for them. Chefs take up more print space and air time than virtually any other profession. Is it because we are all food-obsessed gluttons? (Well, that explains me but not necessarily the rest of the population.)

Obviously, we respect their skill and creativity and we are often engaged by either their television presence or writing ability. Yet, strangely enough, even as we fill our houses with their books, we rarely use their recipes. Rather, they stand in our kitchens next to our barely touched blenders and even less-used ice-cream makers as the status symbols of what's become the new epicentre of our consumption-obsessed society: the kitchen. These days it's not enough to have the right car in the driveway of the right house in the right suburb. Now we have the right toaster, the right frying pan... And what, in the name of God, was I thinking when

I forked out all that cash for a fish steamer? There it sits, gathering dust, used once and relegated to the shelf where it takes up too much damn space.

Food has gone from being sustenance to enjoyment to a statement of status. Look at menus in upmarket eateries. We are told not only what sort of meat we are ordering but where it came from and, sometimes, how the poor thing was killed. I was in a seafood restaurant in Hong Kong once where my fish (line-caught, I was assured) came with its own business card describing its various attributes. I am not making this up.

The madness has to stop, people. I'm not saying chefs should be consigned back to their medieval positions of glorified servants. But our elevation of them to godlike status is part of a larger runaway obsession with satisfying our supposedly jaded palates with more and more - dare I say it - just plain wanky eating.

There is a feeling in the air and the chefs of the world had better take note. Just as one war of liberation sent them on this path, one day we might rise up and storm their kitchens, loudly proclaiming, "Give us burgers or give us death!"

© 2004 Sun Herald

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