Celebrity Chefs: 1970 to the Twenty-first Century

With the success of The French Chef, public television expanded its offerings of cooking programs. Some of them included other ethnic cuisines popular in the 1970s, notably Chinese and Italian. Joyce Chen, a Chinese immigrant restaurant owner, and Margaret and Franco Romagnoli, Italian cookbook authors and restaurateurs, hosted their own programs. They were exceptional because they were chefs in the classical sense, that is, they were the heads of kitchens, as well as public figures. But audiences have never recognized a distinction between chefs and nonchefs. Television cooking stars, such as Graham Kerr of The Galloping Gourmet, and cookbook authors, such as The New York Times’s Craig Claiborne, are all considered celebrity chefs.