Medium Raw

It’s a crude, hateful, sexist wheezer of a joke—but it’s as applicable to men as to women. To chefs as to any other craftsmen, artists, or laborers.

What was my problem with my peers—no, my betters—grabbing the endorsement dollars left and right: the branded pots and pans, kitchen utensils, ghostwritten cookbooks, commercials for boil-in-a-bag dinners, toaster ovens, California raisins? I’d turned them all down.

I’d deluded myself for the longest time that there was…“integrity” involved…or something like that. But as soon as I became a daddy, I knew better.

I’d just been haggling over the price.

There’d never been any question of integrity—or ethics—or anything like that…For fuck’s sake, I’d stolen money from old ladies, sold my possessions on a blanket on the street for crack, hustled bad coke and bad pills, and done far worse in my life.

I started asking people about this. I needed guidance from people who’d been navigating these murky waters for years.

Among the more illuminating and poignant explanations, one came from—of all people—Emeril. We were guest hosts/roasters at a charity roast of a mutual friend, Mario Batali. In a quiet moment between dick jokes, we talked, as we sometimes do, me asking with genuine curiosity why he continued to do it. He was, at the time, being treated very shabbily by the Food Network—I could see that he’d been hurt by it—and I asked him why he gave a fuck. “You’ve got a large, well-respected restaurant empire…the cookbooks…the cookware line”—which is actually pretty high-quality stuff—“presumably you’ve got plenty of loot. Why go on? Why even care about television anymore—that silly show, the hooting audience of no-necked strangers? If I was you,” I went on, “it would take people two weeks to reach me on the phone…I’d be so far off the fucking grid, you’d never see me in shoes again…I’d live in a sarong somewhere where nobody would ever find me—all this? It would be a distant memory.”

He didn’t elaborate. He smiled tolerantly, then began listing the number of children, ex-wives, employees (in the hundreds) working for Emeril Inc., establishing for me in quick, broad—and slightly sad—strokes the sheer size of the Beast that had to be fed every day in order for him to be Responsible Emeril—and do right by all the people who’d helped him along the way and who now relied on him, in one form or another, for their living. His success had become an organic, ever-expanding thing, growing naturally larger, as it had to, for to shrink—or even stay the same—would be to die.

Mario has twelve restaurants and counting, watch and clog endorsements, the cookware, the books, the bobblehead doll, NASCAR affiliation, and God knows what else—nothing ever seems to be enough for the man. Above and beyond the fact that he raises millions of dollars for various charities—including his own—he’s clearly not in it for the money. Always expanding, always starting new partnerships, trying new concepts. In Mario’s case, I think, it’s about ego—and the fact that he’s got a restless mind. It’s not, and never was, enough—or even interesting—to Batali to make money. If that had been the case, he’d have never opened Babbo (or Casa Mono, or Del Posto, or Otto, or Esca); he’d have opened his version of Mario’s Old Spaghetti Factories, coast to coast—and been swimming in a sea of cash by now. No.

Mario, I know for a fact, likes to swing by each of his New York restaurants at the end of the night and take a look at the receipts. He’s excited by the details. He gets off on successfully filling a restaurant that everyone said was doomed, of bringing the food cost below 20 percent. He likes to do the difficult thing, the dangerous thing—like take a gamble that what America needs and wants right now is ravioli filled with calf brains, or pizza topped with pork fat. For Mario, I’m quite certain, to be ten times richer—twenty times—and NOT take crazy-ass chances on restaurant concepts that no one ever expressed a desire for would mean to expire from boredom.

All Mario enterprises are coproductions. Every restaurant begins with an alliance, a moment of truth, where Don Mario evaluates the creativity and character of another person, looks into their heart, and makes a very important decision. In this way, the success or failure of whatever venture he’s embarked on is already determined long before he opens the door. So it’s never just business. It’s always, always, personal.

Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud—both with successful, revered, and respected mother-ship restaurants, have talked at various times about the necessity of holding on to talented people; the need to grow with the talents, experience, and ambitions of loyal chefs de cuisine, sous-chefs, and other longtime employees who want and deserve to move up or to have “their own thing.” It becomes a simple matter of expand—or lose them.