Michael Chiarello, Worth His Salt

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

It was a dark day in the Schoenkopf household when Michael Chiarello won Top Chef Masters. It was not as dark a day as when Hosea won, or terrible Ilan, but it was dark enough. Really, wise kind old magickal-wizard Hubert Keller? Falling apart under pressure? And Rick Bayless, with your droll yet humble wit and your graduate degree in anthropology, being bested by this Italianate crewcut with his new-day-same-tricks Italian wedding food? I would expect that just as soon as I’d expect Alice Waters to serve me a heaping plate of Cheeto Chili Pie.

This is what I care about these days, having my emotional investments in reality television programs pay off, my stock splitting into baby stock, doubling my money like happened with Yahoo once when in the aftermath of September 11 my dad and I teamed up to save the American economy with all our muneez (one thousand dollars!), while all the loud and blustery patriots out there patriotically sold off their investments, because every one of them is all talk always, and if you tell them that you are a liberal and all up into “personal responsibility,” and in fact even pay your bills and adopt needy dogs and cats and kidlets, they look at you as if you are a poodle that has learned to speak flawless French, because they were just sure you had stuck a needle into your arm before heading off to cheat the welfare office, because that’s what all liberals must do: heroin, and welfare fraud.

I want my television, my only friend, to heap laurels upon chefs whose food I cannot taste, whose flavors and textures I can judge only by the amount of humble smiling the chef in question gifts upon the drooling home audience along with his or her helpfulness with other competitors (coopertitors!). New studies show even babies like people better when the people are helping the unsentient puppet up the hill rather than impeding its progress. This is hardwired. Your Machiavelli is showing? You didn’t come here to make friends? Your comeuppance is due.

But it is Tuesday, and I have been invited to South Coast Plaza for an event with Chef Chiarello at his store, NapaStyle, which is full of many kinds of salt, the kinds of salt which only two short years ago were regularly gifted among my circle of friends, because Food had become the most beautiful art on the block, far more compelling than any kind of painting or poetry or rock. It was beautiful, and you could eat it, paired with an insouciantly dusty Muscat from somewhere with blue skies and open fields as far as you could see, and you cannot eat a song. I would like to go to Napa, please, but the Napa of the ’70s, when it was hippies and crotchety farmers daring to take on the French—Who? Yahoos from where?—and sneaking up and kicking their asses, like the American revolutionaries/terrorists hiding behind bushes and Insurgenting the Redcoats, but with snooty French winemakers instead as the villains du jour and every jour.

And Chef Chiarello walks up as I chat with a much-missed friend over a Chiarello Vineyards wine, this one a cabernet called Eileen after his wife, and he is perfectly warm and genial and doesn’t once ask if I know what his name is (which happened on Masters, and the person didn’t, and he rather lost it, really, but he tells us that was in conjunction with an unaired bitsy in which an assistant cheflet named Dale (I think?) went to a refrigerator and ripped the tape with Chiarello’s name on it right off the front of the fridge, which no sir could not have been a “mistake,” no, it was premeditated, a grand Machiavelli move, the better to stuff his own master’s food in and then Chiarello would have been serving unrefrigerated salmonella cutlets to his very important guests, and Chiarello learned a lesson that day in unscrupulous reality show editing, didn’t he rather!, because now everyone thinks he’s a dick!), he is perfectly amiable, and I like him a lot!

It is important to always be smiling, and when I meet someone and she is smiling, I am naturally inclined to adore her, and I should remember this and smile more. Chef Chiarello is smiling in all the posters of himself that adorn the store—and they must adorn the store, there is nothing wrong with it, it is branding, and Emeril did it that’s for sure, though I had no idea Emeril wasn’t a buffoon until I went to his New Orleans restaurant for one of the great meals of my life. Martha does it and Oprah does it and it is the seal of goodness ... nay, not promised but guaranteed. Sheriff Mike Carona was always smiling and amiable, and to this day I love that man, while he rots in prison, which I love too.

They serve us delicious pizzas from Chiarello’s recipes, and a beautiful artichoke dip as thick as a porridge and all the wine our little systems can handle as we look at the salts, and wine glasses, and silver you can buy by the pound—which they walked door to door to ask if people would like to sell their wedding silver, and people did—and they even sell chairs there, in a special chair corner, and a bitchen giant outdoor game of picnic Connect Four (but with a generic name, like Scrabulous and Scrabble) that I would buy for my niecelets if it weren’t $59 and if I were employed.

And Chiarello takes to the front of the room for a question and answer with the media, and he will not tell us who won Top Chef, the first part of whose finale he judged and will air the next evening—Jen, you never again lived up to the day you rode herd on the entire troop, executing your battle plan with a glorious martial precision, and I am sorry for it, and sorrier still that Michael Voltaggio, bratty and sinister and so unhelpful even babies could see, remains to make his constipated faces of anger when anyone in the world is honored but he—but really we were only asking for sport. We knew he would not tell us. It was just a dance, a duel, we thrust, he parries, and we all go home well-satisfied, and full of delicious pizzas and wine. And he talks long and charmingly about sustainability and athletics—he is a jock, he says, and we believe him, it is a crewcut straight off a high school wrestler, it is a crewcut brimming with manliness—and he’s really funny, honestly, and self-deprecating in a hilarious fake-bragging-on-the-square way, though I forget everything he said. It was really quite a lot of wine, for lunchtime.

And then—

and Jon and Deb, stop reading right now please. Are you still there? Well GO AWAY TILL AFTER CHRISTMAS! Go on. Shoo!

—he showed us some 200,000 year old Himalayan salt blocks, and as soon as he was done spieling I grabbed up a salt block and asked the store manager how much they ran and he said “$78 I think,” and I said “Oh, how sad I cannot afford it,” and then Chef Chiarello saw me fondling the salt block and I told him my story about Himalayan salt blocks—it is always good to have at the ready a story about Himalayan salt blocks—and that I wanted to buy just such a Himalayan salt block as this for a Christmas gift for the friends who took me to dinner, and I said, “I can’t afford $78 but I would HAPPILY pay $50 for this Himalayan salt block!” and he winked and carried it to the register and told the pretty miss behind it “This is a $50 salt block,” and when she rang it up it was ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY EIGHT DOLLARS and I was mortified to pay so little for it, but not mortified enough not to accept.

There is a blog called the Daily Asker, wherein a woman asks a stranger for something every day, and when I first read it I was inspired and I tried it and it totally didn’t work and was humilating, but it’s been working lately, but she never addressed the shame of actually getting something you asked for—two for one to the rock music show, a Wii for Christmas for my very good boy, a hundred and eight dollars off a Himalayan salt block—but a man beside me who saw the transaction piped in, “It’s because you’re hot!” and he meant it charmingly, and it was true, I did look hot, but I responded blankly and politely that it was only because I had a story about Himalayan salt blocks; meanwhile, the pretty miss behind the counter almost went ballistic. Her nostrils flared. Her brow almost furrowed. Her voice rang out loudly as she denied it: “NOT AT ALL. HE DOES THAT ALL THE TIME.” So next time you see Michael Chiarello, smile, introduce yourself, and ask him for something. He is really very nice.

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