Celebrity chefs move beyond the stove (and the camera) to corporate roles

U.S. News & World Report - Washington, DC, USA - Backstage at Lincoln Center, stagehand Adam Lewis was multitasking. Fiddling with a soundboard, he was also trying to snag autographs from his new favorite food celebrities, waiting to be honored at the 20th anniversary James Beard Foundation Awards ceremony. "This is going right up there next to Beyoncé and Metallica," said Lewis, clutching his official program, covered with signatures from chefs like Bobby Flay of the Food Network's Boy Meets Grill. "These people are on the money."

With the help of that cable network and other cooking shows like Bravo's reality show Top Chef, chefs are emerging from behind the kitchen doors and mushrooming into a new class of entertainers—and corporate pitchmen. More companies are courting these culinary stars to help add flavor to their brands and sell products. And foodie investors are betting on chefs' newly found star power to fuel restaurant empires. As a result, the people who perform the sweaty, blue-collar work of restaurant cooking are being transformed into white-collar professionals, complete with accountants and publicity managers.

Five chefs made the Forbes Celebrity 100 list this year, including Flay, whose 2006 earnings weighed in at $2 million. That's far above the $67,000 median salary of an executive chef, as calculated by Salary.com. Big-name chefs can earn about $1 million a year just to slap their name on a Las Vegas restaurant, says Dorothy Cann Hamilton, founder of the French Culinary Institute and host of the PBS show Chef's Story.

"Once you become a celebrity, you have something to brand," says Dana Cowin, editor of Food & Wine magazine. "Companies outside the restaurant world can get a little glamour from having a star chef," she says, pointing to hotels, cookware companies, and other businesses that have recently signed cooks to help market their products.

The deal cookware company Pyrex signed this year with Food Network siren Giada De Laurentiis was the first celebrity endorsement for the almost-100-year-old company. "We're trying to reinvigorate the Pyrex brand and reach younger consumers," says Michelle Maslanka, brand manager. This year Pyrex released a new line of baking dishes with contemporary-looking red silicone handles. "Someone like Giada lends credibility to the product line, because she represents everyday cooking and entertaining."

Glamour. For her part, De Laurentiis has been busy helping host the Today show and signing books. She concedes that her star power has grown beyond food. Now at book signings, "I answer questions about what color nail polish I am wearing," she says.

Smithfield Foods, trying to kick-start its business, went with Savannah, Ga., restaurateur Paula Deen, best known for dishing up treats laden with the likes of Miracle Whip and butter. Smithfield, the world's largest pork producer, was looking to make home cooking less intimidating; its sales had taken a hit as people started eating out more. The company thought Deen's grandmotherly southern flavor fit well with Smithfield. "The research shows she is approachable, makes food fun and meals easy to prepare," says Jim Schloss, corporate vice president of sales and marketing. Deen has so far done about 70 cooking videos for Smithfield's website and is on a company-sponsored tour this summer. She made $4 million last year, according to Forbes.

Deen has also helped the company branch out into new products, developing a line of sauces, marinades, and spice mixtures. The company now has a presence in 40 percent of the country, but Schloss predicts that Deen-endorsed goods will open up stores across the nation to Smithfield. Deen says such opportunities have caught her by surprise: "One day I looked up from the collard pot and said, 'Shazam.'"

The new high profile has been jarring for those more used to thinking about baking sheets than balance sheets. When veteran chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten wanted to open a restaurant in New York he found himself in a two-month crash business course at the City University of New York's Hunter College. "I knew how to cook, but I never knew how to run a business," says Vongerichten. "I was 33 years old, sitting with a bunch of kids, so it was pretty memorable for me."

The class paid off for the French-born chef. Vongerichten now owns seven restaurants in New York alone and has stamped his imprint on restaurants from Shanghai to London. He recently signed with Starwood Hotels to create restaurants for the hotel chain. "Now this brings us to an even bigger league," he says. "I am relearning the corporate deal."

For younger chefs, business savvy has become as requisite as knife skills. The high-stakes world of running a restaurant in a city like New York is no longer as simple as dishing out a perfectly cooked steak. Opening a restaurant in New York costs about $1 million, not including salary, which starts at $250,000 for the top 10 percent of the Big Apple's chefs, according to the French Culinary Institute's Hamilton. High real-estate prices and tough competition have brought in investors who are looking to expand successful concepts beyond one restaurant. It's no longer about "how many pasta dishes do you have to sell to make a profit," Hamilton says. "It's not for the fainthearted; it takes someone with business savvy who will do what it takes to get attention."

Back to school. Four years ago, the school added a restaurant management class, cherry-picking professors from Cornell University's top-rated hotel management program. It's gotten so popular that chefs from as far away as Washington State have flown to New York to take weekend classes.

Unlike Vongerichten, New York's latest phenom, David Chang, plunged headfirst into the business end of cooking from the get-go. At 26, when most of his Trinity College friends were studying for M.B.A.'s, Chang wrote up a business plan to start a casual downtown noodle bar. "No one ever tells you that you have to have certain business skills and watch what you say to the press," says Chang, who apprenticed in kitchens in Tokyo and New York. "Here the cost of making mistakes is too much."

He eventually raised $130,000, applied for all the needed licenses, and hunted down a 600-square-foot East Village location on his own. Managing Momofuku Noodle Bar presented new challenges. "The first time I had to pay sales tax, I said, 'What...is this?'" he says. Now Chang, this year's winner of the James Beard Rising Star Chef award, has 75 employees and is set to open a third restaurant. "Opening a restaurant isn't glamorous," he says. "It's basically like opening up a shoe store-cash flow has to be good."

Of course, chefs can't forget what brings them fans in the first place. Backstage at the James Beard awards, Bobby Flay was changing from a presenter's suit into his chef's whites, getting ready to man his cooking station for hungry audience members. Even though he owns six restaurants, including the Mesa Grill in New York and others in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and the Bahamas, and hosts multiple food shows, Flay says he spends about 90 percent of his time in the kitchen: "At the end of the day, it's all about the food."