Back to the beginning though and Bourdain was born in New York in 1956 to French/American parents.  Failing to graduate from Vassar, he enrolled instead at the Culinary Institute of America which he left in 1978.  It was while at Vassar though that he worked in the various seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, giving him the motivation to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America and take the first steps on a culinary career.

Anthony Bourdain’s culinary career involved a fairly speedy rise through the ranks of New York chefs following his graduation and he was soon running the kitchens at which he was employed.  During this period he ran, among others, the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, Sullivans and Brasserie Les Halles.

Bourdain’s kitchen career largely ended when he began to write;  Kitchen Confidential was an instant bestseller – the gritty story of Bourdain’s early years and rise to prominence struck a chord with the general public and led to an offer from The Food Network in the United States to host his own television show.

This was the beginning of a varied and interesting TV career in which Bourdain’s most memorable moments were his trips around the world in a sort of travelogue in which he sampled unusual local delicacies from different countries.  His no nonsense television manner, similar to the way he writes, has endeared him to an increasing number of fans.

Refreshingly he has also never made a secret of his use of a huge variety of drugs in his earlier years and was a habitual smoker until 2007.  Bourdain has always shied away from the ‘celebrity’ chef tag and has been pretty disparaging towards those who aspire to that title.

Restaurant Gordon Ramsey was just the beginning of what has become a pretty substantial global empire; other London venues followed (Petrus, The Connaught Hotel), followed by Glasgow (Amaryllis)  and then overseas operations such as Dubai, Tokyo and Canada.  The company Ramsey uses to operate his business affairs is Gordon Ramsey Holdings and in 2006 it was decided to launch a major culinary assault on the U.S.A.  Three new restaurants were launched within five star hotels in Manhattan, Boca Raton and West Hollywood.  In the same year more gastropubs were opened in London and despite occasional mixed reviews and tough financial times, the empire is still going strong.

On the television side, Ramsay has been a household name since 1998 when, like Jamie Oliver, Ramsay was featured in a fly-on-the-wall series called Boiling Point which followed his efforts to set up the aforementioned Restaurant Gordon Ramsey.  His fraught manner and impatience proved something of a hit with viewers, pointing the way ahead to a successful television career.  Faking It (2001) followed Ramsey as he trained a fast food employee to become a gourmet chef.

Show based on different themes followed; Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (2004) had our man given a week to turn round the fortunes of struggling restaurants while in the same year Hell’s Kitchen  was a notable success.  The show followed what is now a familiar format as ten ‘celebrities’ were put in the kitchen of restaurant in London’s Brick Lane for two weeks and made to suffer the abuse/advice of Ramsey.  The show continued in the U.K. without Ramsay but by this time the FOX network in the U.S.A. had picked up the format.  The U.S. version has now run for nine seasons.

The F-Word has probably been Ramsey’s other memorable series; it’s more of an education about the nature of food with some celebrity involvement.  These big series are just the backdrop to appearances in numerous shows over the years including what is perhaps the pinnacle of a public figure’s career – a guest spot on The Simpsons.

Gordon Ramsay

and tirades of abuse against those featured in them.  In fact he is perhaps more famous for the abuse than for anything else but it should not be forgotten that this is a man whose various restaurants have been awarded an astonishing 13 Michelin stars.

Gordon Ramsey was born in 1966 in Scotland and by the time he left home at 16, his parents had moved around the U.K. several times looking for work.  By this time his much talked about fledgling football career had begun and ended after series of injuries.  He puts much of his later success down to recovering from the disappointment of this period of his life.

Following the footballing disappointment he started to take an interest in cooking and enrolled in an Hotel Management course at a college in Oxfordshire.  This eventually led to a position as commis chef at the Roxburgh House Hotel and he worked his way up until he was running the catering side.  A dalliance with the owners wife led to his leaving for London where he eventually began to work under Marco Pierre White at Harveys.

Le Gavroche, Mayfair

White was an extraordinarily erratic employer and eventually Ramsay got fed up with the “rages and the bullying and the violence” and, with White’s blessing, left to work under Albert Roux at the influential French restaurant, La Gavroche, in Mayfair.  From here he followed Roux to a hotel in the Swiss Alps and then, citing burnout, spent a year as a chef on a private yacht called Idlewild.

By 1993 he was refreshed enough to return to London where White offered him a head chef’s job and a 10% share in the Rossmore.  In a little over a year, Ramsay had earned the Rossmore a Michelin star and then a second in 1997.  By this time though, the relationship between Ramsay and the other owners had deteriorated and in the same year he left to start his own establishment.  A new chapter was beginning.

Part Two follow….

Ken Hom and his wok

hundred years or more but, for U.K. audiences at least, one of the first introductions to this culinary species was Ken Hom, the American born Chinese chef who began to appear on British television in 1984.  He seemed to appear from nowhere at the time but was in fact the result of a two-year BBC television search for someone to host a daytime Chinese cookery show.

Ken Hom was bron in Tuscon, Arizona in 1949 and raised by his mother after his father died when he was just a baby.  He says that he began to work at his uncle’s Chinese restaurant in Arizona when he was eleven years old, learning the basics of Chinese cookery.  When he was old enough to go to university, he left behind the cookery to study the History of Art at the University of California but a need for extra income led him to teach, of all things, Italian cooking classes.  He was soon teaching Chinese cookery and in 1977 he joined the new California Culinary Academy  in San Francisco as an instructor.

San Francisco was where he stayed until 1982  when the BBC came calling; the resulting TV show was Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery and proved a huge success.  A book to accompany the show is still in print now and has sold more then 1.5 million copies.  This series was followed by other equally successful shows, notably Ken Hom’s Hot Wok.  These early series arguably set the scene for the popularity of Chinese food in the U.K. and a Ken Hom branded wok has sold millions around the world.

The books and the series continued and Ken Hom now lives in France but frequently visits Bangkok where he has a restaurant, Maison Chin.  He has received an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University but his biggest legacy must be his contribution to the promotion of Chinese food in the U.K.  Check out his first BBC show:

Although Jamie Oliver seems to have been on British television for years now, he is in fact still only 36 and it must a measure of the impact he has had in the world of the television chef that Oliver is one of the first names that spring to mind when one thinks of a celebrity chef.

Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver’s rise is not unlike that of Rachael Ray, a modest beginning followed by a spot of good luck and then hard work which have culminated in enormous success.  Jamie Oliver was born in Clavering, Essex in 1975; his parent ran a pub called ‘The Cricketers’ in that village.  Following an unsuccessful attempt to obtain any qualifications at Newport Free Grammar School (possibly because of dyslexia), he earned a qualification in Home Economics from Westminster Kingsway College, following which he managed to get a job as a pastry chef at Neal’s Yard, an Italian restaurant owned by Antonio Carlucci.

Oliver then upgraded his role to become a sous chef at Fulham’s River Cafe and it was

Jamie's Kitchen

here, in 1997, that the BBC noticed him when they were making a documentary called ‘Christmas at the River Cafe’.  His appearance in that show was unplanned but it prompted the BBC to talk to Oliver about hosting his own television show and, in what must have seemed like some sort of fairytale, his show ‘The Naked Chef’ was debuted that same year.  Not only that, a cookbook based on Jamie Oliver and the television show was published, becoming a best-seller in the United Kingdom.

Fourteen years later and Jamie Oliver has now appeared in something like twenty different television shows and is a well-known face of the culinary art in many countries around the world – English speaking and non-English speaking.  He has said of his food philosophy:

“My philosophy to food and healthy eating has always been about enjoying everything in a balanced, and sane way. Food is one of life’s greatest joys yet we’ve reached this really sad point where we’re turning food into the enemy, and something to be afraid of.”

Charity Work

In more recent years, Jamie Oliver has undertaken several high profile charitable ventures.  These have all been based on food and his most notable is probably the Fifteen charity.  The charity advertised for fifteen young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to to be trained by the charity for a  future career in the catering and hospitality industry.  The succes of the venture has led to the inauguration of the Fifteen charity in several other countries around the world, including Holland and Australia.

Jamie’s School Dinners was another attempt to perform a good deed for the community and this was an effort to introduce cost-conscious, healthy school meals for children which would replace the junk food that he saw being served in schools.  Jamie’s School Dinners made politicians sit up and take some notice of what children were being fed in schools and it marked Oliver’s first (unintentional) foray into politics.

Jamie Oliver has not always been popular with the entire television-watching population, largely because of his supposed ‘cheeky chappie’ Essex character but surely also due to an element of jealousy.  As long as he keeps doing good things, who are we to complain?

The best place to start is with the cooking superstar who’s given her name to our website.

Rachael Ray

Born in 1968, Rachael Ray is something of a phenomenon within the world of lifestyle programming in the United States.  She’s also a television ‘personality’, whatever that ma be and an author.  If you’re from outside the U.S. and not familiar with the name, we’ll give you all the details you need to know in the article below.

She was given a pretty good start in life; her family owned four restaurants in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, so cooking was somewhat in the blood.  Arriving in New York City in 1995, Ray really did start at the bottom of the ladder, working basic jobs at Macy’s Department Store before rising to become a manager of one of the food sections.

The Sagamore Hotel

Following her stint in the Big Apple she moved back North to manage a pub within The Sagamore Hotel on the shores of Lake George.  Later, as a buyer for a gourmet market in Albany, she appears to have first conceived the idea of the 30 minute meal.  She says she started offering classes to people who were not willing to spend much time cooking; the purpose being to persuade them that it was possible to create a healthy meal in less than half an hour.

The local television channel WRGB liked the idea and asked her to host a weekly spot on one of their news programmes and her natural charm meant her popularity began to take off.  She produced a book which led to an appearance on the The Today Show (the famous morning news and talk show) and suddenly she was popular nationwide.  In 2001she was contracted to the Food Network.  We’ll get to the 30 minute meals in a second but since those modest beginnings Ray has moved from success to success.  A number of television shows have been based around her and her adventures and in 2006 she moved away from food and began to host her own daytime talk show on CBS.

30 Minute Meals

Rachael Ray cites her Italian roots as the influence behind her recipes.  Never claiming to be a chef she says of herself:

“I have no formal anything.  I’m completely unqualified for any job I’ve ever had.”

Measuring things has never been a big part of what she does and for this reason she feels she is unable to bake things or make coffee.  This process gives her recipes a more creative (some would say mysterious) element and her ingredients are measured in such things as ‘half a palmful’.

Some of her concoctions have been given names of their on by Ray and these include descriptions such as Choup (more than a soup but not quite a chowder) and Stoup (a combination of a soup and a stew).

Rachel Ray is a chef/cook/presenter who has made it big through hard work and taking her opportunities when they presented themselves.  Good luck to her and all of us who can’t be bothered to spend much time cooking.