Too Much Heat in the TV Kitchen?It may be that cursing is now seen as part of a chef’s public persona, not just accepted but expected.
By PETE WELLS
Published: April 16, 2008
FOR many chefs, a simple “bon appétit” no longer says it all.
The chef Gordon Ramsay is known for his heated language.
Last week’s episode of “Top Chef” ended in a volley of profanity, as half the contestants cursed the other half.
The first line of an article about the chef
David Chang in The New Yorker last month contained a profane quotation from Mr. Chang. So did the last line. So did many of the lines in between.
But even Mr. Chang at his most vivid comes across as an instructor at vacation Bible school compared with
Gordon Ramsay. On his shows “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Kitchen Nightmares,” Mr. Ramsay leaps outside the bounds of broadcasting rules so often that the Web site Television Without Pity begins its summaries of each episode with something it calls (give or take a word here or there) Gordon Ramsay’s Bleep-O-Meter.
There is, admittedly, a dog-bites-man quality to the news that chefs curse.
“For as long as I’ve been around restaurant kitchens they have been testosterone-fueled places where guys almost revel in their profanity,” said
Ruth Reichl, the editor in chief of Gourmet.
But these chefs and others are cursing in front of rolling cameras and reporters’ notebooks. It’s as if the dog called in the media before tearing off after the postman.
“You read Rolling Stone and you don’t see rock stars curse like this,” said the chef
Tom Colicchio, the lead judge of “Top Chef.” “And it’s recent, too. It’s something you’ve seen just in the past year.”
Mr. Colicchio blames a loosening of standards in the whole of American culture.
According to Ms. Reichl, chefs have been talking to reporters this way for years, but until recently they could expect an editor to reach for the scissors before publication.
Others assert that cursing is now seen as part of a chef’s public persona, not just accepted but expected.
“I’m making a living at it,” said Anthony Bourdain, who parsed the fine points of the stoveside lexicon in his book “Kitchen Confidential.”
“I do a lot of speaking engagements and sometimes I feel like I’m being paid to curse in front of people who haven’t heard it in a while,” he said. “I’ve been pushing it and pushing it and have unloaded like a marine in front of a vast roomful of blue-haired ladies, and they seem to get it.”
In the beginning, a chef sweated away in a kitchen filled with fire, smoke and danger. A certain amount of salty language fit the general milieu. In this sweltering inferno, the chef forged a meal for the rest of us to eat. And it was good. So good that we asked the chef to appear before us to bask in our delighted applause.
But as a party trick, reproducing kitchen argot outside the kitchen does not enchant all audiences equally.
As she read the David Chang profile, Barbara Fairchild, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, said that she “kind of sat there with my mouth open half the time. I think I was surprised by the relentlessness of it.”
L. Timothy Ryan, the president of the Culinary Institute of America, based in Hyde Park, N.Y., argues that the foul language is bad, in the end, for the profession. He said he reminded the school’s new graduates in his speech at commencement on Friday that just a few decades ago, chefs were not held in esteem. When he sees “shows where the chef is screaming and yelling and swearing and cursing,” he said, “to me, that takes us back.”
Dr. Ryan has not been watching this season of “Top Chef,” set in Chicago, which features a number of his school’s graduates indulging in all of the expected profanity. The bleeping began before the credits sequence in the first episode. After that it seemed to settle into a relaxed clip of a couple of dozen bleeps an hour, until last week. In the final minutes, several long-nursed grudges took flight at once. The resulting bleeps ran together like a test of the old Emergency Broadcast System.
Writing on his blog on the Bravo site the day the episode ran, Mr. Colicchio apologized for “the gutter language,” which he deemed “excessive.”
Mr. Colicchio said in an interview that commenters on his blog had criticized this season’s profanity from “day one" and that Bravo, which broadcasts “Top Chef,” had received complaints as well. He said he often heard from children and teenagers who said the show had inspired them to cook or to try new foods, and he was concerned that their parents might stop them from watching it because of the profanity.
He also suggested that one cause of the complaints might be “the way they’re bleeping.” Bravo’s censors leave much of the offending syllables intact. Words are not exactly bleeped out; they’re bleeped at. Instead of a fig leaf, the network holds up a sprig of parsley.
Andy Cohen, the senior vice president for programming and production of Bravo, said that the contestants in “Top Chef: Chicago” this season were notably more profane than those in earlier years.
“It’s struck us from the first cut we got of the first episode,” he said. “At the network all we can do is bleep like crazy and, you know, maintain our standards while maintaining the integrity of what’s going on in the kitchen. I mean look, it’s who these people are, and we try to show these people as they are.”
To find out how these people are, a reporter called one of them, Andrew D’Ambrosi, at the restaurant where he works as a junior sous-chef, Le Cirque.
The cook who answered the kitchen phone sang out, “Andrew, there’s a [expletive] guy from The Times calling.”
Taking the phone, Mr. D’Ambrosi said that while some of his friends and relatives were surprised by his vocabulary, “Top Chef” accurately reflected his on-the-job demeanor.
“When you’re in the heat of things, you need a little more emphasis in the words you say to a cook,” he explained. “If you say give me that lasagna, it’s not the same as” — and here he demonstrated a way of phrasing the request more emphatically.
Another contestant, Spike Mendelsohn, said that his language on the show had been a bit of a shock to his in-laws, a Southern family he described as “prim and proper,” and to himself as well.
“I was actually surprised myself when I watched it,” he said. “I didn’t want to be so foulmouthed.”
Does he wish he’d chosen other words? “Not at all, that’s who I am,” he said.
The current crop of would-be Top Chefs may reflect their generation, who grew up in an era of unfiltered media. Or they may simply reflect their age.
“I have sworn, yes, in the early days, going back 20 years,” said Marco Pierre White, the English chef once renowned for his scorched-earth rages. But then he tidied up his vocabulary. “It was just growing up.”
Last year, Mr. White took over the British version of “Hell’s Kitchen,” which had been a vehicle for Gordon Ramsay’s coloratura displays of anger. Mr. White immediately cleaned house.
“I encouraged everyone to work hard, and in the three weeks I did it I never swore once,” he said. “I never belittled anybody once. I got people to want to do their job.” (A publicist for Mr. Ramsay said that he was not available for comment because he was filming a television show in London.)
People who have worked with the chef Thomas Keller say that he rarely, if ever, curses in the kitchen, although in his youth he was known for his temper.
“When you talk to older guys, they’ll all say they were big yellers but they’ve toned it down now,” said David Chang. He said that he would like to do the same, in part because he was worried that his tantrums were damaging his heart.
“It’s not like I want to do it, I just want to get my point across and unfortunately I’m not that eloquent or articulate,” he said. “If I could find a better way — and I’m trying — to communicate, I will change in a heartbeat.”
Not so fast, Anthony Bourdain might say. Mr. Bourdain thinks that public profanity could be the ultimate sign that chefs have arrived.
“It indicates a real move from servant to professional status,” he said. “Better than professional. Who gets away with talking like that to their customers?”
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