I saw a man, he cooked at his restaurant

Today's DI/DO piece on chef's tables seems like a curious echo of last weeks Rocco kerfuffle. Instead of dismay that Rocco would rather get paid for doing the limbo with Jerry Rice than busting his ass at the stove, we get amazement that Top Chef's Tom Colicchio is actually cooking at the restaurant that bears his name. The confusion and disappointment that attends such things seems to be a funciton of a semantic drift of the word "chef" -- it can mean someone who cooks in a restaurant, someone who owns a restaurant they always cook in, someone who owns a restaurant they sometimes cook in, someone who owns restaurants in Dubai and Vegas, as well as a flagship in some regular place, or it can mean a person who has essentially become a brand, or someone who gets a W2 from the Food Network.

It's almost Christmas, and maybe Benjamin is a bit heavy, but it seems to me as if food's resistance to mechanical reproducibility is part of the question here. If we compare a star chef to a star musician, the challenges facing the chef are apparent -- the recording artist can press up more CDs, or start playing larger venues, and people will be getting fundamentally, if not exactly the same experience. Obviously, your Santogold CD is not the same thing as seeing her in a basement in Williamsburg, but it is closer to the same experience than, say, the difference between Emirils' ca. a decade ago, and Emil's Steakhouse in Gulfport, MS.
In this light, the chef's table phenomenon, (which in its dodgier iterations sounds like one of those baseball camps named after a famous Red Sox player, but actually staffed by galoots from Northeastern ),  seems to be an attempt to leverage a name by charging a premium for what used to be the norm. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

Comments

[hugh]

yo, get off my case... I'm working on it. Cef without burns.... wow.

[Paula Forbes]

Semantic drift, I like that.

[James Rubinstein]

Poor Rocco, his reach doth exceed his grasp.
or
Rocco: Fame, ur doin it wrong.

I think people are irked at Rocco for trying to be famous because, well, he sucks at it.
Take Rachael Ray (please!). She's not that great a chef. She is a good TV personality, though, and she followed the tried and true methods for achieving fame through the media of the late 20th/early 21st century.
Same goes for Colicchio, Alton Brown, Mario Battali, etc

Rocco's empire toppled before it began, under the weight of his own ego.

And FWIW, CD's are more like frozen meals with Emeril's logo stamped on them.

[Tien-Ann]

Agreed. Somewhere I wrote something along the same lines about Thomas Keller:

"If Keller sees his work as art, the conditions of production of this meal, no matter how it is presented as, make it simply impossible for it to retain its originating aura. It is this aura for which we pay, and that we are promised through precise reproduction achieved through the use of technicians who master the components over which they are charged. It is a promise to duplicate the original; the aura. With such expectations, we are doomed for disappointment. As Benjamin famously put it, 'that which withers in the age of mechanical production is the aura of the work of art.'"

But, you know, what you said.

I hear that Bar Tartine is serving "New Olive Oil" ice cream again!