Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/86796
a 198 BAL HARBOUR Julia Child was arguably the first chef to cookbook, first published in accessible. Her seminal make cooking 1961, remains a kitchen staple. bout 15 years ago, my best friend's adolescent son asked me if I'd ever dined at a Manhattan restaurant called Po. I was astonished. Taylor had always been a smart kid, but he'd grown up in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, and no one in his family could remotely be called a "foodie." I couldn't imagine where he might have heard about a tiny West Village restaurant whose specialties at the time included grappa-cured salmon and linguine with house-cured pancetta. The short answer is that Mario Batali was then Po's owner. Taylor had seen Molto Mario on the still-nascent Food Network, and Batali's rock-and-roll persona, dazzling skill and clear passion for his craft had gotten him hooked. While in college in Oxford, Mississippi, Taylor landed a job at a restaurant run by a chef who happened to be a Batali protégé; he learned how to make that same pancetta. From there he moved to New Orleans and trained with two- time James Beard Award winner Donald Link at his flagship Herbsaint Bar and Restaurant. Four years on, Taylor's still here, executing pasta dishes on the line at the brand new R'evolution, a joint venture between Louisiana icon John Folse and Chicago's acclaimed Rick Tramonto, late of Tru. I tell this tale to highlight the dramatic changes in the country's food landscape (as well as our knowledge of it) in the 35-plus years since I developed my own adolescent crush on Julia Child. In those days, there were but a handful of TV cooks, including Julia, The French Chef, and Graham Kerr, a.k.a. The Galloping Gourmet. Like a lot of people, I taught myself to cook out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and the various Junior League publications that were the only cookbooks on our kitchen shelf. My mother took me to New York to dine at La Grenouille when I was 14, but we had no idea who the chef was, and I bet no one else in the dining room did either. In those days, only a die-hard gourmet (or exceedingly devout customer) would have known—or cared about—the name of a single American restaurant chef. All that changed in the 1970s after Random House editorial director Jason Epstein dined at Chez Panisse and wrote Alice Waters a contract for a cookbook on one of the restaurant's napkins. The dashing Jeremiah Tower arrived at Chez Panisse to cook, changed the menu from French to English, and New American cuisine was born. He went on to open Stars in San Francisco; Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in L.A., followed by Chinois on Main, cookbooks and more restaurants—even a line of frozen pizzas. On the east coast, Daniel Boulud left Le Cirque, opened the simply named Daniel, and went on to build an empire. Today, being a top chef like Boulud or Puck also means being a brand. Batali sells everything from pasta sauce and pizza pans to T-shirts and key chains. But he still runs more than a half dozen remarkable restaurants and sends acolytes like the young chef who stayed in Oxford long enough to teach Taylor a thing or two out into the wider world. Oxford is currently the home of James Beard winner John Currence, and that's another thing: Talent used to be clustered in New York and California with Chicago in between. These days, so many talented chefs are spread across the country that the James Beard Foundation has divided the map into no less than 10 regions in which chefs vie for the top honor. The awards ceremony itself, correctly billed as the food world's Oscars, was first held in 1991, but the Beard Foundation is not the only entity that realized early on that chefs were our next cultural superstars. The Food Network is mostly about hyped up competition, but serious chefs have found outlets as diverse as YouTube (Eric Ripert) and the Travel Channel (Anthony Bourdain). Today, Taylor would hardly be the only precocious adolescent who could name Ripert or Bourdain, or certainly Batali. He's also not the only kid in a college town who was exposed to some high-end cooking. Boston, of course, has long been a concentrated food destination, but a University of Georgia student could dine equally well at Hugh Acheson's Five and Ten in Athens, Georgia. (Acheson is a 2011 James Beard Best Chef in the Southeast, as well as a Food & Wine Best New Chef). Finally, in the years since Taylor put down his pencil in favor of a knife, huge numbers of students have followed suit. Time magazine reports that enrollment in for-profit culinary schools were up by 31 percent last year, and countless more wannabe food stars have taken Taylor's route, initially signing on to dice potatoes or wash dishes just to be close to a master. And why not? Being a chef is the modern equivalent of being a rock-and-roll star. BH