TV producer gives glimpse into world of celeb chefs

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

The author of "The Chef, the Story & the Dish" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, hardback, $39.95) didn't grow up eating gourmet meals, and she isn't ashamed to say so.

"I think I'm just that average consumer," she said in an interview earlier this month at the Big Island Festival. "I used to think going to Sizzler was great."

The first time she met Mexican food expert Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill, Brown pronounced molé "mole," as in the animal. Her first taste of foie gras was at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, and she had no idea what she was putting in her mouth; her eyes bugged out at the potent flavor. When Sam Choy brought a mahimahi to the "Emeril Live!" set, she'd never seen one before; "it was the size of a couch," she recalls.

Today, Brown, 32, produces "Emeril Live!" on the TV Food Network and is on a first-name basis with pretty much every important chef in the country. But she still has a refreshing naivete about food, frankly admitting that she got into all this because she knew a lot about television, not about food.

Her book is a guilelessly simple introduction to 20 chefs — some very familiar names, such as Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay, and other less-known but important restaurateurs and figures in the food world. For each, there's a short behind-the-scenes biography, a recipe and a photo. She hopes to do a television special based on the book.

Brown is one of a handful of people on the planet who can tell you what the TV Food Network was like when it got its start in 1993.

Here's what it was like: The production studio was a one-bedroom brownstone apartment on New York's West 57th Street, and network head Reese Schonfeld's office was the bedroom. The staff of eight worked out of cardboard boxes. In those days, she said, when she was pitching folks on ideas for shows, "I used to almost not even want to say the words 'Food Network.' I'd talk all about how it was this great new network and it was going to be really hot and appeal to all kinds of people," she recalled. Then she'd name the network and get the reaction: "Huh? A whole network about food? Who's going to watch that?"

"That only lasted for about a month. As soon as people had time to think about it, they greeted us with open arms," said Brown.

Brown joined the new network out of desperation. Six months out of college with a degree in TV production, the best job she'd been able to land in New York was as a production assistant on a talk show where her duties included walking the host's dog. When she heard one of the producers that she respected was leaving to go to a new network, she vowed that this woman wasn't going without her. Turned down for the job, she sent a big food basket with a résumé written out like a menu. It got her the position.

She was about to enter a world that was as mysterious to her as the Mars Network would have been. "I knew television. I could cut a piece, I could report a piece. But food? I had no idea," she said.

Very soon, however, she felt at home — not because she became a food expert overnight (she's still learning every day) but because she found in the chefs and food producers that she met a work ethic, a dedication to excellence and a determination to succeed that she recognized. They are traits she tries to cultivate in herself, traits she has needed as a young black woman in the snippy world of television.

"I just don't take no for an answer," she says. "I'm never rude, but I just keep talking and working until I find a way."

Brown talks bluntly about the class issues that lurk in the shadows of the food world: the sense that fine food is just an affectation of the rich, the celebrity chef phenomenon that has distanced average people from some figures in the food world, the fact that, let's face it, these restaurants and ingredients are expensive.

But any ideas she had about the glamorous world of chefs were banished when, some years ago, she got the idea of doing a day in the life of a line cook for a show called "Food News and Views." Lagasse invited her to his New Orleans restaurant, and she headed south, blithely thinking only about story values and camera angles. That night, she went into the restaurant to a dinner that turned into after-hours drinks with the staff. "I'm 24 in New Orleans, hanging out with this up and coming celebrity. It's 2:30 in the morning and Emeril says, 'See you at 5:30.'"

She got there, bleary-eyed and hung over, at 6:15 a.m. The rest is a blur. "I have never worked so hard in my life," she said. After a day spent on her feet, prepping salad for five hours until she was bored stiff, sweating in the heat of the open flames, her hair turning to greasy strings, she was ready to defend chefs as the most workmanlike of the working class.

And the more she came to know of them, the more she realized that she wanted to tell their stories: how Sara Moulton has created a career that allows her to put her children to bed every night, how Charlie Trotter works with teenagers in the Chicago area, how Lagasse likes to de-stress by playing the bongo drums.

But also how these folks (including our own Sam Choy) got into cooking and — in very straightforward layman's language — what they try to do in their restaurants, what to expect if you ever go there.

"I really wanted to show what one person can do if they really try," she said. "These people didn't start out rich. They've earned what they have now. I really respect that."