Cooking Up Some Profits Celebrity chefs move beyond the stove (and the camera) to corporate roles
By Renuka Rayasam
Posted 8/5/07
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."
KITCHEN STARS. Chef Giada De Laurentiis has endorsed Pyrex.
(John Parra—Wireimage/Getty Images)
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. More
Bobby Flay should be making more than $2 mil a year wouldn't you think?
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