Medium Raw

The whole suggestion is predicated on a damnable fucking lie—the BIG lie, actually—one which Richman himself happily helped create and which he works hard, on a daily basis, to keep alive. See…it makes for a better article when you associate the food with a personality. Richman, along with the best and worst of his peers, built up these names, helped make them celebrities by promoting the illusion that they cook—that if you walk into one of dozens of Jean-Georges’s restaurants, he’s somehow back there on the line, personally sweating over your halibut, measuring freshly chopped herbs between thumb and forefinger. Every time someone writes “Mr. Batali is fond of strong, assertive flavors” (however true that might be) or “Jean Georges has a way with herbs” and implies or suggests that it was Mr. Batali or Mr. Vongerichten who actually cooked the dish, it ignores the reality, if not the whole history, of command and control and the creative process in restaurant kitchens. While helpful to chefs, on the one hand, in that the Big Lie builds interest and helps create an identifiable brand, it also denies the truth of what is great about them: that there are plenty of great cooks in this world—but not that many great chefs.

The word “chef” means “chief.” A chef is simply a cook who leads other cooks. That quality—leadership, the ability to successfully command, inspire, and delegate work to others—is the very essence of what chefs are about. As Richman knows. But it makes better reading (and easier writing) to first propagate a lie—then, later, react with entirely feigned outrage at the reality.

Underlying Richman’s argument, one suspects, is his real exasperation. Who are these grubby little cooks to dare open more restaurants? How could they be so…presumptuous as to try to move up and beyond their stations? Surely it is the writers of sentences, the storytellers—so close to poets—upon whom praise and riches and clandestine blow jobs should be lavished! Not these brutish, un-washed, and undereducated men whose names are known only because he, Richman, once deigned to write them down!

The line about “sous-chef Willie Norkin, who took one semester of home economics and can’t cook,” while entertaining from an ignoramus, is unpardonable coming from Richman.

The whole system of fine dining, the whole brigade system—since Escoffier’s time—is designed so that the chef might have a day off. The French Laundry, Per Se—ANY top-flight restaurant’s whole command-and-training organization—is built around the ideal of consistency, the necessity for the food and service to be exactly the same every time, whether the chef (famous or otherwise) is in or out. Richman knows full well that the chef, by the time his name is well-known enough to profitably write about, is more likely to be in the full reclining position on a Cathay Pacific flight to Shanghai than in the kitchen, when Richman next parks his wrinkled haunches into a chair in said chef ’s dining room. In any great restaurant, the food is going to be just as good without the chef as with—otherwise it wouldn’t be great in the first place.

Richman’s Commandment #19 is a fucking insult to the very people who’ve been cooking and creating dishes for him for years. What’s worse is that, once again, this uniquely gas-engorged douche knows better. But rest assured that while he has no problem giving the stiff middle finger to the people who actually prepare his food, he will be sure to remain in good odor with the “celebrity” chefs he claims—on our behalf, no doubt—to be outraged by. He needs that access, you see. He likes the little kitchen tours, the advance looks at next season’s menus, the “friends and family” invites to restaurants that have yet to open to the public, the occasional scrap of strategically leaked gossip, the free hors d’oeuvres, the swag bags, the extra courses, the attention, the flattering ministrations of the few remaining chefs who still pretend that what Alan Richman writes is in any way relevant.

Not to single out Richman.