LAST month at the New York Food and Wine Festival’s Burger Bash, women dressed in short skirts and leather were looking for meat — and not just the kind that comes nestled in a potato bun.
“We thought boys, burgers and beers, in that order,” said Shanna N, a 31-year-old visiting from Miami who declined to give her name for professional reasons. “I’m terribly picky, but I would date a chef because I’d like someone to expand my horizons,” said Shanna’s friend, Melissa Getlen, 32, a producer. “They are celebrities!”
In these food-obsessed, dinner-Instagramming times, chefs are clearly the new rock stars — and they now have the groupies to go with their celeb status.
Women erupt in shrieks upon seeing their culinary crushes, get busy with sushi gods in restaurant kitchens, and hop naked into hot tubs with celeb chef and global brand Todd English — as three young lovelies did last year.
“People are passionate about seeing Mario Batali share his favourite recipe onstage the way they used to go crazy seeing The Beatles,” says Lee Schrager, producer of both the South Beach and New York Food & Wine Festivals.
The crazed fans are especially prevalent at Schrager’s bacchanalian megafests. At South Beach one year, a happily married Food Network chef recalls a young woman who suddenly started licking his shirt in the middle of it all.
“His wife was standing two feet away and her friends were cheering her on,” says one observer.
It’s not only the male chefs who have their zealots. At a New York Food & Wine Festival dinner prepared by James-Beard-Award-winning Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield and Dirt Candy’s Amanda Cohen last month, a table of young attendees made no bones about their intense interest in Bloomfield.
“Dating a chef like April is my absolute dream. Not only is she attractive, but her food is so creative,” gushed Dana Salvatore, a 25-year-old producer. “It’s my absolute goal to meet a chef; I’ve tried on Tinder.”
Some women aren’t just buying tickets to events with their kitchen gods and goddesses, they’re really putting themselves out there.
John Daley, the 36-year-old tattooed sashimi whiz behind the Lower East Side’s Sushi Ko, recalls a young woman who sat at the sushi bar one night. Her date was running late, so she and Daley got to chatting.
The date eventually arrived, Daley prepared sushi for them, and the couple left. Then, 20 minutes after the restaurant closed, the woman returned, alone.
“She was quite physically aggressive,” Daley recalls. “We drank and had sex in the back of the restaurant … She’s been back a few times, but the boyfriend wrote a nasty review on Yelp.”
While some of the big-name chefs in the ’80s and ’90s had crazed fans, Daley says it’s different now.
“When I was young I cooked and smelled like food, and I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me. It was only guys like Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] or [David] Bouley or Rocco DiSpirito who partied with models,” he says. “Now the field has been opened.”
Jonathan Waxman, who was one of the first celebrity chefs in the ’80s and just opened Jams in Midtown’s 1 Hotel, agrees.
“The attention is a thousand times more intense now,” he says. “Some people get completely crazy.”
Celebrated French toque Laurent Tourondel, who just opened L’Amico near Herald Square, tells of a friendly diner he recently had at the restaurant. She somehow got his phone number and texted him pictures of herself in lingerie from the dining room as he was in the kitchen.
“It was definitely the chef factor,” says the generally reserved Tourondel, who won’t say how the encounter ended. “I didn’t ask for that to happen, but I was not upset about it.”
Others tell of downright bizarre behaviour.
Restaurateur John DeLucie, whose clubby spots include Bill’s Food and Drink in Midtown and the Lion in the West Village, had a strange encounter with a superfan on a flight. “A woman on my plane started screaming, ‘It’s John, it’s John!’ ” he says. “I looked around to see who it was, and so did everyone else. Then she screamed, ‘He was the chef at Waverly!’ ”
“Sometimes it’s really great and sometimes it’s not so great,” Waxman says of all the attention. “The other day I took my son to the movies, and when I went to the bathroom, a guy in the next urinal leaned over and said, ‘Hey, aren’t you Jonathan Waxman? I’m a huge fan of yours.’ It doesn’t get much wilder than that!”
Or weirder — Artisanal’s executive chef John Creger had an even creepier run-in. He’d just appeared on the Food Network’s cooking- competition show Chopped, on which he’d been given a basket of odd ingredients, including a live eel, with which to prepare a dish. Soon after the episode aired, a 20-something woman showed up at the Midtown restaurant with a basket of the same ingredients — even the live eel.
“She was very flirtatious and said, ‘Let me cook with you — I promise it will be fun,’ ” Creger says. “She had gotten everything down to the live eels! I thought it was brave of her, but a little strange at the same time. I let her come into the kitchen, but I had a girlfriend, so it didn’t go further.”
Many cooks are surprised by the reactions they elicit.
“We have an open kitchen, and people start shaking and get overtaken with emotion that I am actually here. Where am I supposed to be? I am a chef and work in the kitchen,” says Marc Forgione, who has an eponymous restaurant and American Cut steakhouse in Tribeca, and won the Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef in 2010. “I didn’t realise how many people watch this.”
Even relatively low-profile fine-dining chefs like Gabriel Kreuther, the former chef at the Modern who just opened his own eponymous restaurant by Bryant Park, are dealing with the frenzy.
“It’s like being inside the eye of a hurricane, but I take things in stride,” smiles the chef.
Others — both chefs and diners — are doing the same.
“The other night a woman said to the server, ‘After the meal we just had, if the chef came out, I’d have sex with him in front of my husband!’ ” says Forgione. “Then the husband said, ‘After that meal, I wouldn’t mind watching!’”
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