By JANET K. KEELER, Times Taste Editor

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 25, 2000

They've got us buying pricey ceramic knives, screaming "bam!" and cooking elaborate feasts for our slightly bewildered, but appreciative, families.

We invite them into our homes to chat about pesto and grilled chicken and the virtues of homemade mayonnaise. We buy zesters and blowtorches and all sizes of tongs, just like they have.

They are the celebrity chefs who have risen like hearty bread in the last decade to stake their claim as the millennium's new rock stars. In their hands, we are putty.

"We've actually got foodies who follow us from show to show," says Bill Boggs of the TV Food Network's Bill Boggs Corner Table and host of "Food Network Live," the cable station's chef tour that made a stop at the Tampa Convention Center on Sunday. He compares the traveling cooking show to a Grateful Dead concert tour.

"They smoked in the parking lot and we smoke in the parking lot," Boggs quips. "The difference is we're smoking sausage." Boggs kicked off each demonstration by throwing aprons into the audience, much like a drummer throwing drumsticks into a crazed crowd.

How big have the uberchefs gotten? People magazine recently named Ming Tsai of the Food Network's East Meets West to its "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" list and Emeril Lagasse kicked it up a notch to get a place on the magazine's "25 Most Intriguing People in the World" list in 1998.

Indeed People is beginning to chase the wildly popular Lagasse, who was among the celebrities chosen to be on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire for sweeps week, as if he were the sixth Backstreet Boy. This week's People has a two-sentence item and a photo about his May 13 wedding in New Orleans. It might not look like much, but it took the magazine a week to get the details, senior editor Larry Hackett says.

"I thought, "Man, this is a chef, not Courteney Cox,' " Hackett says. "What's going on here?"

The almost evangelical adulation heaped on these stars of the kitchen mystifies Hackett, though he suggests that for many baby boomers, food is safer than some of their previous recreational pursuits.

"It's like sex, drugs or Emeril's cooking," Hackett says. "It's easier, safer and you can operate heavy machinery."

The on-air personalities at the Food Network are not the first celebrity chefs spawned by television. Julia Child (The French Chef), Graham Kerr (The Galloping Gourmet) and Jeff Smith (The Frugal Gourmet), among others, pioneered the genre, each offering their own specialties and styles. But two things merged as the 20th century came to a close to create the right climate for the ascendency of the professional chef.

First, a decadelong economic boom put more money into the pockets of Americans to spend on food, travel and fun. Second, cable television scored with niche market channels, including the Food Network, where all day and all night viewers can learn everything from how to boil water to how to bone a turkey. The almost 7-year-old network is expected to reach 50-million homes by the end of this year.

The unbeatable combination of cash and exposure, along with the public's insatiable appetite for entertainment alternatives and a love of eating are at the core of the infatuation with chefs, restaurateurs, cookbooks and exotic ingredients.

What else would explain a woman who drove more than three hours to see David Rosengarten, host of the network's Taste, at a chef tour stop in the Midwest?

"It's beyond food," says Richard Gore, president and producer of "Food Network Live." "A woman driving all that way, alone. I had to talk with her. She was so drawn to him. She spoke in terms of him being an idol."

If that dedication amazed Gore several years ago, it's commonplace now, and not just among women, though that's what Gore says he expected when he started the traveling show. He estimates that the audiences are now about 40 percent male. The chef tour will make 20 stops this year, each one attracting thousands of foodies. More than 2,500 attended the Tampa show. A recent stop in Hawaii drew 5,000.

Karen Sella and Susan Santavicca, both of St. Petersburg, arrived in Tampa at 10 a.m. for the event, an hour and a half before the doors opened. They were first in the long line that snaked through the convention center lobby. Their mission? To hear chef Sara Moulton of Cooking Live and to taste the goodies prepared by Tampa Bay area restaurants such as the Peppermill, Mise en Place and Redwoods. Their fun would not be spoiled by the absence of favorite chef Ming Tsai from the schedule. (The biggest names on the network take turns doing the shows.) Santavicca bubbles about Tsai's line of ceramic knives. "The paring knife is $150," she reports.

"We like Sara though," Santavicca says. "She seems like a real person."

That real person drew some of the biggest crowds of the day -- about 250 in chairs and another hundred standing -- to watch her make shrimp pancakes with cilantro sauce. Moulton, wearing yellow canvas high-top tennies, asks for a show of hands from people who had a chef's knife and from those who made their own stock. "Nothing fancy, just chicken," she says. "And how many of you cook dinner five nights a week . . . seven? And how many sit down with their families to eat?" The show of hands diminished with each question.

Moulton, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., is the executive chef of Gourmet magazine and a regular on Good Morning America in addition to her own TV gig. Her enthusiasm, communication skills and easy-going manner make her an effective teacher, and she has a strong following among women viewers who can relate to her. She agrees that the healthy economy and the success of the Food Network are mostly responsible for the creation of the super chefs. She adds to the mix what she calls the lost generations, people in their 20s and 30s who did not learn to cook at home because both mom and dad were working. Many of them, she says, now are learning via TV.

She says she is both excited and distressed that the food industry is getting such attention. The concern comes from meetings with young culinary students who tell her their main goal is to become a famous TV chef.

"Their goal should be to be the best chef possible," she says. "Not to become famous."

So far, some of the nation's best chefs have ended up on TV, with formal training and experience backing them up. But not everyone on the network's shows is a trained chef. Hot Off the Grill sidekick Jacqui Malouf got her start as a stand-up comic, as did Sean Donnellan, host of the now defunct How to Boil Water.

Victor Gielisse, dean of culinary education at the vaunted Culinary Institute, says the school does not offer specific courses to prepare students to make the leap from sous chef to stardom. However, institute students get plenty of opportunity to see famous chefs in action when they lecture at the school. Gielisse credits TV exposure for elevating the status of the food industry in America. Students, he says, see great possibilities for themselves from owning and managing restaurants to writing cookbooks to running catering companies.

"It's okay to be a chef nowadays," Gielisse says. "When I arrived (in the U.S.) from the Netherlands in 1978 the industry was on the upswing but it still wasn't considered a very good field to be in. Now it's a dynamite profession, a dynamite industry."

Did he say dynamite? Gielisse could easily be talking about chef Curtis Aikens (Pick of the Day). A firecracker's got nothing on Aikens, who tickles the crowd with his boisterous bravado at Sunday's show. He pours champagne, poses for snapshots and dispenses hugs and kisses like he's at a family reunion. What did he make during his demonstration? Who cares.

Not Dionna Long of Clearwater, who got a glass of bubbly and a smooch from the chef. "He inspires me," Long says of the chef who learned to read at 26 and now promotes literacy every chance he gets. A culinary graduate of Johnson and Wales University in Charleston, S.C., Long has her own catering business and an opinion on how these folks who cook so well got so big.

"Cooking is no longer a vocation, it's a career," she says. "People are taking cooking more seriously and when you watch the TV shows, you can cook right along with them."

John Knuth of Sarasota, who watched Aikens before heading over to see Jacqui Malouf host the cooking game show Ready . . . Set . . . Cook!, says the ability to re-create the dishes demonstrated on TV helps to forge the bond between chef and viewer.

"There are no boundaries," Knuth says. "Anyone is capable of doing what they do."

Maybe in the kitchen, but the mahatma chefs have something the rest of us don't and that is the ability, along with the forum, to speak to food aficionados and novice cooks with confidence and appeal. They have charisma. And like any industry on a streak, the network suits are searching for the next white-hot star of the food world.

"Everybody's looking for the next Emeril," producer Gore says. "But there will never be another Emeril."

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