July 17, 2010

Excerpt from: Medium Raw, A Bloody Valentine To The World of Food and The People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain

Selling Out

I was so supremely naive about so many things when I wrote Kitchen Confidential—my hatred for all things Food Network being just one of them. From my vantage point in a busy working kitchen, when I'd see Emeril and Bobby on the tube, they looked like creatures from another planet—bizarrely, artificially cheerful creatures in a candy colored galaxy in no way familiar to my own. They were as far from my experience or understanding as Barney the purple dinosaur—or the clarinet stylings of Kenny G. The fact that people—strangers—seemed to love them, Emeril's studio audience for instance—clapping and hooting with every mention of gah-lic—only made me more hostile.

In my life, in my world, I took it as an article of faith that chefs were unlovable. That's why we were chefs. We were basically … bad people—which is why we lived the way we did, this half-life of work followed by hanging out with others who lived the same life—followed by whatever slivers of emulated normal life we had left to us. Nobody loved us. Not really. How could they, after all? As chefs, we were proudly dysfunctional. We were misfits. We knew we were misfits, we sensed the empty parts of our souls, the missing parts of our personalities and this was what had brought us to our profession, had made us what we were.

I despised their very likability as it was a denial of the quality I'd always seen as our best and most distinguishing: our otherness.

Rachael Ray, predictably, symbolized everything I thought wrong—which is to say, incomprehensible to me—about the Brave New World of celebrity chefs—as she wasn't even one of "us." Back then, hearing that title being applied to just anyone in an apron was, particularly angering. It burned. (Still does a little.)

What a pitiable fool I was.

But my low opinion of the Food Network actually went back a little further in time. Back to when they were a relatively tiny, Sad Sack start-up with studios on the upper floors of an office building on 6th Avenue—a viewership of about 8 people—and the production values of late night public access porn. Before Emeril and Bobby and Mario helped build them into a powerhouse international brand. (In those days, such luminaries of the dining scene as Donna Hanover (then Giuliani) and Alan Richman, Bill Boggs and Nina Griscom, would sit around in tiny, office-sized rooms, barely enough room for the cameras—showing prerecorded promo reels—the type of crap they show on the hotel channel when you turn on the tube at the Sheraton). You know the stuff: happy "customers" awkwardly chawing on surf and turf, followed by "Chef Lou's signature Cheesecake … with a flavor that says ‘Oooh la-la!'" After which, Alan or Donna or Nina or Bill would take a few desultory bites from a sample of same—which had been actually FedExed from whatever resort or far flung dung hole they were flogging that week.

I was invited on to cook salmon. I was working at Sullivans at the time, and flogging my first born (and already abandoned by its publisher) book, a crime novel called Bone In The Throat. I arrived to find a large and utterly septic central kitchen/prep area, its sinks heaped with dirty pots and pans, refrigerators jammed with plastic wrapped mystery packages that no one would ever open. Every surface was covered with neglected food from on camera demonstrations from who knows how long ago, a panorama of graying, oxidizing and actively decaying food. beset with fruit flies. The "chef" in charge of this facility stood around with one finger jammed up his nose to the knuckle, seemingly oblivious to the carnage around him. Cast and crew from the various productions would wander in from time to time and actually pick at this once-edible landfill and eat from it. Once in the studio, cooking on camera was invariably over a single electric burner which stank of the encrusted spills left by previous victims. For my salmon demonstration, I recall, I had to scrub and wash my own grill pan, after retrieving it from the bottom of a sink as multi-layered as the ruins of ancient Troy.

This unimpressive first encounter in no way made me actively "hate" the Food Network. It would be more accurate to say I was dismissive. I didn't take them seriously. How could one?

And to be honest with myself, I never really "hated" Emeril, or Bobby, or even Rachael, as much as I found their shows … ludicrous and somehow, personally embarrassing.

My genuine contempt for FN came later—after Kitchen Confidential. After I was making a nice living making fun of Emeril and Bobby and Rachael. When I went to work for the bastards.

I was still cooking every day and night. The book was on the New York Times bestseller list but a healthy distrust, a strong suspicion that I'd better keep my day job was still very much the order of the day. This couldn't last, I thought. It was surely a fluke. A flash in the pan. What possible appeal could my story have—something I'd written with no larger audience than New York area line cooks, waiters and bartenders in mind—beyond the tri-state area? And if 28 years in the restaurant business had taught me anything at all, it was that if things look good today, they will most assuredly turn to shit tomorrow.

While I doubted the longevity of my time in the sun, I was, however, aware that I was putting up some nice numbers for my publisher. I may have been a pessimist, but I was not an idiot. So, striking while the iron is hot, as they say, I went in and pitched a second book and a decidedly fatter advance—quickly—before the bloom was off the rose and I faded inevitably back into insolvency and obscurity. I brashly suggested a book about me travelling all over the world, to all the cool places I'd ever dreamed of going, eating and drinking and getting into trouble. I would be willing to do this—and write about it, I suggested. If my publisher would pay for it.

Shockingly, they were willing to pay for it.

Shortly after that, two unimpressive looking men walked into Les Halles and asked me if I'd be interested in making television. They had Kitchen Confidential in mind, no doubt, a property I had already sold off to Hollywood (to end up as a VERY short lived sit-com). Undaunted by this news, they expressed interest when I told them I'd be unlikely to find time in any case—as I was about to embark on a world wide bounce to fulfill my childhood fantasies of the exotic East and elsewhere.

I have to tell you that even at this early point, still wearing my kitchen whites, I was already dubious of anyone who claimed to be offering a TV deal. I had very quickly learned that when TV or movie people tell you "we're all big fans over here" or "we're very excited about this project," it usually means nothing more than that they're planning on paying for lunch. I was even more skeptical when they mentioned Food Network as a prime candidate for acquiring this round the world project. This notion alone suggested these two goofs had no idea what they were talking about and no juice with anybody. I'd been savagely trashing the Food Network's principle earners for some time—it was already shtick, part of a stand-up bit that would live on long after I stopped performing it. The fact that these two would even suggest Food Network hinted at problems far beyond the usual lack of imagination. The word "delusional" came to mind.

When, a week later, they called to tell me they'd set up a meeting, I was annoyed. Actively pissed off. No good would come of this. This, I was certain, was a waste of fucking time. I bothered to neither shave nor shower for the meeting.

I ended up with a show, titled, like the book, A Cook's Tour. Something that necessarily and despite our best efforts, quickly evolved into a sort of gonzo-travelogue of vérité footage and thrown together voice-overs. I had assumed my involvement with television would last no longer than the time it took me to write the book. And yet, amazingly enough, the show was picked up for a second season. Even more incredibly, the network, from the beginning, let me do pretty much whatever the fuck I wanted—allowing me to take the show anywhere I pleased, smoke on camera, curse as I needed—and even more remarkably, along with the camera people/field producers who I became increasingly close to over many miles and many months of traveling together—tell stories any way I cared to—making, as it turned out, pretty good television.

I have to admit, I grew to like this life—roaming the globe in search of nothing more than food and kicks. I also came to enjoy the new-to-me process of telling stories with the help of an all new chest of toys: cameras, editing boards, sound editing—and really creative professionals who knew how to use them. I like making things. And I like telling stories. I like going to Asia. And this TV gig allowed me to do all of those things

I got sucked in—not by fame, or money (of which there was precious little). I'd long ago had all the cocaine I'd ever wanted. No sports car was ever going to cure my ills. I became seduced by the world—and the freedom that television had given me—to travel it as I wished. I was also drunk on a new and exciting power: to manipulate images and sound in order to tell stories—to make audiences feel about places I'd been the way I wanted them to feel. I was increasingly proud of some of the episodes me and my married partners, camera people/producers Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, were making—and how we were making them. I began to appreciate what editors and sound mixers and post production people can do. Making TV was becoming … fun, and in more than a few cases, actually creatively satisfying.

I wrote the book and yet continued filming. The tail now wagged the dog. I was hooked on travel, on seeing the world, and on the terms I was seeing it. Simply put? I didn't want to share. The world had become, on one hand, a much bigger place, but contracted at the same time. Like a lot of travelers, I started to turn inward from the view out the window, started to see what was going on out there through an ever narrower lens. When I'd set out, I'd see a sunset or a temple and want, instinctively, to turn to my right or to my left and say to somebody, anybody, "Isn't that a magnificent sunset?"

That impulse quickly faded. I felt proprietary about the world. I became selfish. That sunset was mine.

I was on the road for the better part of two years, during which time everything in my life changed. I stopped working as a chef—a job whose daily routines had always been the only thing between me and chaos. My marriage began to fall apart.

Sitting down in the Food Network's corporate offices back in New York, I was a guy with very different priorities than the ones I'd left my kitchen with. For better or worse, I now had the ludicrous notion that this television thing could be "good" and even, occasionally, "important."

On a recent book tour in Spain, I'd been introduced to Ferran Adria—and amazingly, he'd agreed to allow us to shoot him in his workshop "taller" and in his nearly impossible to reserve restaurant, El Bulli. Adria was already the most important and controversial chef on the planet—and his restaurant the most sought after reservation. More significantly, no one to date had ever had access to what he had agreed to show me and my crew:. Full access to his creative process, to him, his chefs, his favorite restaurants, his inspirations—and finally—the ability to eat and film the entire El Bulli tasting menu in the kitchen with Adria himself. It had never been done—nor has it since as far as I know.

But while I was away, something had happened.

Suddenly they weren't so interested in "foreign" based shows anymore at Food Network. The executives who'd enthusiastically taken us on and supported our more self indulgent and racy endeavors, didn't seem to have the juice they'd once had. Or the interest. When we told them about what Adria had agreed to do, they were indifferent. "Does he talk English?" and "It's too smart for us" were both mentioned as factors in their eventual refusal to pony up for such an episode—or any episodes outside the U.S., it now seemed.

A sour-faced network lawyer became a regular participant at "creative" meetings—subtly setting the agenda and guiding their direction. As warning signs go, this should have been a red alert. The biggest show on the network at that time, it was explained, was something called "Unwrapped," involving stock footage of cotton candy and Mars Bars being made. Episodes cost about a tenth of what it cost to make our show—and rated, of course, much much higher. Those few occasions on A Cook's Tour where we'd filmed in America, it was pointed out, particularly when I was seen to put anything barbequed in my mouth, ratings skyrocketed. Why couldn't I confine my wanderings to my own country—to parking lot tailgate parties and chili cook offs? All this foreign stuff—what with people talkin' funny and eatin' strange food … didn't, it was explained in perfect lawyerese, fit their "current business model."

I knew there was no light at the end of the tunnel the day we were joined by a new hire—the lawyer and the (it would soon be revealed) outgoing execs stood up and said, "Say hello to Brook Johnson … who we're all delighted to have join us from … (some other network)."

Ms. Johnson was clearly not delighted to meet me or my partners. You could feel the air go out of the room the second she entered. It became instantly a place without hope or humor. There was a limp handshake as cabin pressure changed, a black hole of fun—all light, all possibility of joy was sucked into the vortex of this hunched and scowling apparition. The indifference bordering on naked hostility was palpable.

My partners and I left knowing that it was the end of us at Food Network.

Of course, the FN "business model" for which Ms. Johnson was apparently the vanguard turned out to be a spectacularly successful one. With each incremental dumbing down of their programming, ratings climbed proportionately. A purge of the chefs who'd built the network followed. Mario and Emeril and nearly anybody else who'd committed the sin of professionalism was either banished or exiled like Old Bolsheviks—seen as entirely unnecessary to the real business of "Food"—which was, they now recognized, actually about likable personalities, non-threatening images and making people feel better about themselves.

With every critical outrage; the humiliating, painful to watch Food Network Awards, the clumsily rigged-looking Next Food Network Star, the cheesily cheap-jack production values of Next Iron Chef America, every obvious, half-assed knock-off they slapped on the air would go on to ring up sky-high ratings and an ever larger audience of cherished males twenty-two to thirty-six (or whatever that prime car-buying demographic is). In service to this new, groin-level dynamic, even poor, loyal, Bobby Flay was banished from cooking anywhere near as well as he actually could—to face off with web-fingered yokels in head to head crab cake contests—to almost inevitably (and dubiously) lose.

If any further evidence is needed of the inevitability, the supremacy of the Food Network Model—the runaway locomotive of its success, the brutal genius of the Brook Johnson Five Year Plan—well, look at the landscape now: Gourmet Magazine folded and while the glossy magazine industry is in dire straits everywhere and distinguished, 180 year old newspapers are closing down across the country, Food Network Magazine, Everyday With Rachael Ray—and Paula Deen's branded magazines are booming, the Empire of Mediocrity successfully spreading its tentacles everywhere.

This, I have come to understand, is the way of the world. To resist is to stand against the hurricane. Bend (preferably at the hip, ass-cheeks proffered). Or break.

But, perhaps you need more visceral evidence of the Apocalypse:

Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket. So I stopped saying mean things about her. It's that easy with me now. Really. An unsolicited gesture of kindness and I have a very hard time being mean. It would seem … ungrateful. Churlish. To be nasty to someone after they sent you a gift of fruit doesn't fit my somewhat distorted view of myself as secretly a gentleman. Rachael was shrewd about that.

Others have taken a more … confrontational approach.

So, it's the party following the Julia/Julie premier and I'm standing there by the end of the buffet sipping a martini with my wife and two friends when I feel somebody touching me. There's a hand under my jacket and running up my back and I instantly assume this must be somebody I know really well to touch me in this way—particularly in front of my wife. Ottavia has had a couple of years of mixed martial arts training by now—and the last time a female fan was demonstrative in this way, she leaned over, grabbed her wrist, and said something along the lines of "If you don't take your hands off my husband, I'm going to smash your fucking face in." (In fact, I remember that those were her words exactly. Also that this was not an idle threat.)

In that peculiar slow motion one experiences in car wrecks, in the brief second or so it took for me to turn, I recall that particularly frightening detail—my wife's expression, significant in that it was frozen into a rictus of a grin, paralyzed with a look I'd never seen before. What could be standing behind me that would put this unusual expression on my wife's face—make her freeze like that—a deer in the headlights?

I turned to find myself staring into the face of Sandra Lee.

Ordinarily by now, a woman's hand up my back, Ottavia would have been across the table with a flying tomahawk chop to the top of the skull—or a vicious elbow to the thorax—followed immediately by a left-right combination and a side kick to the jaw as her victim was on the way to the floor. But no. Such are the strange and terrible powers of television's Queen of Semi-Homemade that we, both of us, stood there liked hypnotized chickens. The fact that Sandra was standing next to New York's attorney general—and likely next governor, Andrew Cuomo (her boyfriend) added, I thought, an implied menace.

"You've been a bad boy," Sandra was saying, perhaps referring to casual comments I may or may not have made in which I may have suggested she was the "hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson." The words "pure Evil," might have come up as well. It is alleged that the words "war crimes" might also have been used by me—in reference to some of Sandra's more notorious offerings—like her "Kwanzaa Cake." Right now? I have no contemporaneous recollection of those comments

Nor do I have any recollection of how I responded to the feel of Sandra's icy, predatory claws, working their way up my spine and around my hips—like some terrifying alien mandibles, probing for a soft spot before plunging deep into the soft goo of my kidneys or liver. Looking back, I imagine myself doing that Ralph Kramden thing: "Hominah hominah hominah …"

Actually … no. It was closer to Cape Fear. Gregory Peck and family mesmerized by the evil Robert Mitchum—standing there in the doorway—a barely veiled menace just skirting the boundaries of acceptable behavior, with every ticking second you're thinking, "Can I call the police … now? … How about … now?" Not crossing the line but letting you know, "I can come in any time I want."

She was probing below my kidney area now, looking my wife directly in the eyes while doing it too, and saying, "No love handles,"—not exactly true—but I don't think accurate meat grading was the point of the exercise. She was letting my wife—and by extension me—know that like Mitchum in Cape Fear, she could walk right into our living room at any time, and do to us whatever unholy and awful things she wished—and there was nothing we could do about it.

"Are your ears red, yet?" were her final words as she gave one of my lobes a tug. Then, having had her way with me, moved on. She'd made her point.

It's Sandra Lee's world. It's Rachael's world. Me? You? We're just living in it.

If this wasn't clear to me then, after Aunt Sandy had turned me inside out, left me shaken and husked, a shell of a man—like the remains of a lobster dinner, it became absolutely clear just last week:

When Scripps Howard, the parent company of Food Network, outbidding Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, bought my network, the Travel Channel—for nearly a billion dollars.

I remember now, from a distance, my earlier, dumber self, watching Emeril, hawking toothpaste (and later, Rachael, endorsing Dunkin' Donuts and Ritz Crackers) and gaping, uncomprehending at the screen, wondering, "Why would anybody making the millions and millions of bucks these guys are making endorse some crap for a few million more? I mean … surely there's some embarrassment to putting your face next to Dunkin' Donuts—what with so many kids watching your shows—and Type 2 diabetes exploding like it is … Surely there's a line for these people, right?

Later, I asked exactly that question of my fellow chefs—backstage at Top Chef one evening, while waiting for the camera crew to set up for the next shot. I was talking with two chefs far more talented, far more creative—and more accomplished than I had ever been—guys with—unlike me—actual reputations to lose. Where does one draw the line, I asked of them? I mean … there they were, avidly comparing notes on which airlines gave you more free miles in return for "menu consultation," which products were offering what moneys—and at no point was either of them saying about any particular product: "Burger King … not ever … no WAY!" or, after considering the question for a moment, "Okay. Mmmm. Lemme think. Astro-Glide? No. I don't care how much money they're offering. I ain't endorsing that!" Like I said, I asked. Where. Exactly. Is the line for you guys?

The two of them looked at me like I had two heads. Pityingly. They mocked me.

"Are you asking, ‘How much would I have to pay you to taste a booger?'" said one, as if talking to a child. The two of them resumed their conversation, comparing soft drink money to frozen pasta dinners as if I were no longer there. This, clearly, was a conversation for grownups and they considered me too clueless, too dumb, too unsophisticated about the world to be included in the conversation.

They were right. What was I talking about anyway?

The notion of "selling out" is such a quaint one, after all. At what point exactly does one—really—sell out? To the would-be anarchist fan, invariably a white guy in dreadlocks, waiting to form a band and "keepin' it real" while waiting for Mom and Dad to send a check, maybe the second he gets a job is selling out.

Certainly, anytime anyone gets up in the morning earlier than one would like, drags oneself across town to do things one wouldn't ordinarily do in one's leisure time for people one doesn't particularly like—that would be selling out—whether that activity's working in a coal mine, heating up macaroni and cheese at Popeye's—or giving tug jobs to strangers in the back of a strip club. To my mind, they are all morally equivalent. (You do what you got to do to get by.) While there is a certain stigma to sucking the cocks of strangers—because, perhaps, of particularly Western concepts of intimacy and religion—how different, how much worse—or more "wrong" is it than plunging toilets, hosing down a slaughterhouse floor, burning off polyps or endorsing Diet Coke? Who—given a choice—would do any of those things?

Who—in this world—gets to do only what they want—and what they feel consistent with their principles—and get paid for it?

Well … I guess, me—until recently.

But wait. The second I sat down for an interview, or went out on book tour to promote Kitchen Confidential … surely that was selling out of a kind, right? I didn't know Matt Lauer or Bryant Gumbel or any of these people. Why was I suddenly being nice to them? In what way was I different than a common whore, spending minutes, hours, eventually weeks of my rapidly waning life making nice to people I didn't even know? You fuck somebody for money, it's cash on the barrel. You pick up the money, you go home, you take a shower and it's gone—presumably having spent as much emotional investment as a morning dump. But what about week after week of smiling, nodding your head, pretending to laugh—telling the same stories, giving the same answers as if they'd just—only now—occurred to you for the first time?

Who's the ho, now? Me. That's who.

Jesus—I would have given Oprah a back-rub and a bikini wax had she asked me when her people called. 55,000 copies a minute—every minute Oprah's talking about your book (according to industry legend)? I know few authors who wouldn't. So I guess I knew—even back then—what my price was.

There's that old joke, I've referred to it before, where the guy at the bar asks the girl if she'd fuck him for a million dollars—and she thinks about it and finally replies, "Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah …" At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. "Fuck you!" she says, declining, angrily. "You think I'd fuck you for a dollar?What do you think I am?" To which the guy says, "Well … we've already established you're a whore. Now we're just haggling over price."

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 turned them all down.

I 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 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 more people about this.

Among the more illuminating and poignant explanations came from—of all people—Emeril. We were guest hosts/roasters at a charity roast of 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? (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? 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 to be Responsible Emeril—all the people who'd helped him along the way—and 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, I knew, with 12 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 who 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 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 cause him to expire from boredom.

All Mario enterprises are co-productions. 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 mothership 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 loyal, long time employees who want and deserve to move up or to have "their own thing." It becomes the simple matter of expand—or lose them.

To some extent, I suspect, what is often the French Michelin star model might be at work here as well: The three star chef's mothership simply doesn't and can't ever make as much money as his more casual bistros or brasseries. (Those end up, in very real ways, subsidizing the more luxurious original—or at very least, offering a comfortable cushion should costs at the higher end place rise or revenues decline. You can't start laying off cooks at a three star, every time you have a bad week.)

Gordon Ramsay is a more classic example of the force that keeps well known chefs constantly, even manically expanding. In Ramsay's case, multiple television shows on both sides of the Atlantic—at the same time as a huge worldwide expansion of hotel-based restaurants. He already has the most successful cooking-competition show on TV with Hell's Kitchen. He is a millionaire many, many times over, and yet he kept expanding—to his eventual peril (none of the twelve restaurants he opened in the last few years have yet to turn a profit). No matter what your opinion of Ramsay's food, or his awful but wildly popular hit show, or his much better Kitchen Nightmares on the BBC, there is no denying that he is a workaholic. There don't seem to be enough hours in the day to contain his various endeavors and enterprises and yet he goes on.

In Gordon's case, one need only look at his childhood—as described in his autobiography. He grew up poor, constantly on the move, with an untrustworthy and unreliable dreamer of a father. No sooner had his family settled than they would have to move again—often one step ahead of the debt collectors. You know What Makes Gordon Run.

Very likely a similar impulse to that of his one time mentor and sometimes-nemesis, Marco Pierre White. Whatever riches they may have acquired or may yet acquire, there is and always will be the lingering and deeply felt suspicion that come tomorrow, it will all be gone. No amount is enough or will ever be enough because deep in the bone they know that the bastards could come knocking at any minute and take it all away.

David Chang, whose crazy-ass pony ride to the top of the heap has just begun, feels, I suspect all the above motivations; a deadly combination of too few seats at his high end standard bearer restaurant, an ever increasing number of talented loyalists, and a feeling that he'll never be truly good enough at anything.

And then, of course, there's the example of the iconic French Michelin-starred chef, one of the most celebrated and well represented (by sheer number of restaurants) in the world, who, in my presence, said simply:

"Enough bullshit. It's time to make money."

It was vanity that had kept me from being the Imodium guy. Not integrity. I wasn't "keeping it real" declining their offers—and similar ones. I was just too narcissistic and loved myself a little too much to be able to handle waking up in the morning, looking in the bathroom mirror—and seeing the guy from TV who complains about freckling the bowl with loose diarrhea (until Imodium came along to save the day!). I didn't take the cookware gig cause I didn't want to find myself in an airport someday—approached by a disgruntled customer of whatever crap central warehouse actually produces that stuff—complaining about my substandard saucepot scorching his paella. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like to be called on bullshit—unless I'm knowingly bullshitting.

So I didn't take the forty grand a month they offered me to slap my name on a South Beach restaurant cause I figured—even if I don't have to actually do anything for the money—other than show up once in a while—there's that exposure. I could be on the other side of the world—but if the bartender at this joint, run by strangers, serves one underage girl, one customer gets slipped a roofie, one aggressive rat pops its head up out of the toilet one night and grabs a chunk of somebody's nut sack, it's gonna be "OUTRAGE AT BOURDAIN RESTAURANT" in the tabloids. And that would conflict with my image of myself as somehow, above that kind of thing.

But when my daughter came along—and I continued to say "no," I knew I wasn't saving my cherry for principle. I'd just been waiting to lose it to the right guy.