Chefs Don't Earn Impressive Salaries

With fewer Americans eating out at fine-dining establishments these days, it's not easy for people to find jobs as restaurant chefs. And even those who already have those jobs may not be doing all that well financially.

The website Chow produced this bar graph listing the average salaries of three workers -- a school bus driver, a trash collector and a chef de cuisine. The chef's estimated salary ($56,868) looks pretty decent. Until, that is, you divide that salary by the total number of hours that a chef de cuisine works.

Yikes! This has me feeling more sympathy for the executive kitchen staff at such restaurants.

Frozen French Food

I guess one weird food-related story (see my last post) deserves another. Police in the French city of Lyon have discovered the body of renowned chef Jean-Francois Poinard -- in an apartment freezer. The body may have been in the freezer for two years.

Poinard represented the fourth generation of a cooking dynasty, and a French newspaper hailed him as one of the "great names" in gastronomy. He was 71 years old when he disappeared. A former girlfriend has been taken into custody.

Meet Mrs. Celebrity-Chef

A frustrated woman seeks advice from relationship columnist Carolyn Hax:

Dear Carolyn,

Husband is a local celebrity chef, who quickly gained notoriety during our first few years of marriage. This created some conflict with "food groupies" and my husband's inability to lay down boundaries when they hug, kiss or hit on him at local events.

I am accused of being jealous and insecure when I mention that it makes me uncomfortable. Duh. ... How does one act at [social or public] events, especially when women elbow me out of the way to get to my husband?

Ah, the hazards of living with a celebrity chef. I wasn't all that impressed with Carolyn's response. It would have been far more entertaining if Carolyn had closed her response with a phrase like this: "And, honey, if all else fails, you may solve your problem by turning to your hubby's knife block."

A Worthy Choice?

Esquire magazine has named Barton Seaver as its 2009 chef of the year. Seaver is the chef at Blue Ridge, a restaurant in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. After eating two meals at Blue Ridge, this decision makes me shrug my shoulders.

Did Esquire's critic ever eat at Seaver's Blue Ridge? Don't get me wrong. I had good meals there, but they were far from exceptional. Far from what you'd expect from the chef of the year.

Although I think Tom Sietsema's 1.5 star rating (out of 4 stars) for Blue Ridge may be a little low, I share some of his observations about Blue Ridge.

The housemade potato chips with charred onion dip were excellent. My trout was good, but the burger I ordered the next time was totally blah. The sweet potato fritters were okay, but they were misnamed. They were more like dumplings than fritters. And the apple pie turned out to be more of a crumble and was mediocre -- especially considering how much our server praised that dessert.

I will probably dine at Blue Ridge again at some point, but it won't be a "destination restaurant" for me. And if Seaver is as talented as they say he is, then he must not be a regular presence in Blue Ridge's kitchen. Anyway, I'm not the only one who's raining on Seaver's parade.

Oliver's Latest Challenge

British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has his work cut out for him. His challenge? To try to change the eating habits of the residents of Huntington, West Virginia.

According to the N.Y. Times, Oliver faces a daunting task:

Last year, an Associated Press article designated the Huntington-Ashland metropolitan area as the unhealthiest in America, based on its analysis of data collected in 2006 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nearly half the adults in these five counties (two in West Virginia, two in Kentucky and one in Ohio) were obese, and the area led the nation in the incidence of heart disease and diabetes.

The poverty rate was 19 percent, much higher than the national average. It also had the highest percentage of people 65 and older who had lost their teeth — nearly 50 percent.

Oliver succeeded in getting British school children to change their eating ways. We'll see if he has the same luck in Huntington.

A 10th Restaurant for Boulud

Celebrity chef Daniel Boulud just recently opened his 10th restaurant, and this one (like four others) is in New York.

The location of Boulud's DBGB Kitchen and Bar is 299 Bowery -- not what you would call an upscale, showcase address in Manhattan. In fact, the Wall Street Journal's Raymond Sokolov writes that Boulud is

slumming it a bit on this stretch of a rapidly gentrifying Skid Row, but he's slumming with the swagger of someone who knows the neighborhood.

. . . The DBGB concept is simple on the surface: charcuterie and other down-home dishes from Mr. Boulud's native Lyon. Even people who know that gastronomic capital of central France well won't be disappointed.

Sokolov is probably right about that. But I wouldn't describe Lyon as a city in "central France." Lyon is a half-hour closer to Marseilles than it is to Bourges, which is almost perfectly in the geographical center of the nation.