The Chef As A Brand

At a posh delhi school recently, almost 70 per cent of class IX students, when asked about their career preferences, said they wanted to be chefs! This is a true incident narrated by a parent. It is not as shocking as it sounds — at least not to those of us who’ve been tracking India’s food story.

To cook is the new cool. To be a chef, the new celeb. The profession is seen increasingly as a glamorous choice — regardless of the realities of manning a professional kitchen. But more importantly, the chef is also a brand: An increasingly marketable commodity.

The rise of a culture where food is entertainment has completely revolutionised the image of the chef. From being the taciturn, backroom boy, the chef is now the face of many businesses — not necessarily restaurants, though. He can sell everything from sugar-free supplements to kitchen equipment and luxury cars. So much so that sometimes he does not sell his food at all! Amidst this, TV chefs vs “real” restaurant chefs has to be the hottest debate these days. But before we jump in, let's take a look at the business of being a chef on reality TV.

The paradigm is simple: TV chefs have large followings, get mobbed by women and children, have huge followings on social media, cut book deals, and now garner fat endorsement fees too. If Sanjeev Kapoor was India’s first chef to build an empire based on his popularity as a marketable face, in the last five years, others have followed suit.

Food as a big part of reality TV — the phenomenal success of Masterchef Australia in India, its allied Masterchef India, and a host of other shows, including on the channel Food Food headed by Kapoor — has birthed a number of cooking stars with huge followings. But now for the first time, these stars also have their star manager in place. It is no longer Bollywood or the sports world that needs its agents, food too has savvy professionals who can align celebrities with brands and crack marketing deals.

Delhi-based Kavneet Sahni, who had a brief experience in managing Channel V artistes and a slightly longer one selling space at food trade shows, set up Culinary Communications in 2013. It is a novel idea: an umbrella company to manage chefs, get them endorsements as well as to organise consumer events.

Sahni at present seems the only such entrepreneur in India but is sure to be followed by more as the market grows. “While selling exhibition space, brands like Nestle, Marico and Pepsico were my clients. Then, for one of the shows, I got to know chef Vikas Khanna well…” says Sahni about how she began it all. The B2B exhibition folded up but it enabled her to be in a position to ally companies with big marketing spends with celebrity chefdom.

“The first deal we cut,” says Sahni, “was in 2013.” Vikas Khanna, then just beginning to be known to a wider audience outside the circuit that knew him from Junoon, was signed by Saffola Masala Oats. The two-year contract was his “biggest deal”. “While that was happening, we were also pitching him to Masterchef Australia to be a guest judge,” says Sahni. And it took her persistence of 6-8 months of following up with the production team that Khanna finally became the first Indian chef to go on the sets of the popular series.

From styling his clothes to looking after his grooming, accent and styling him as a brand, Sahni looks after the chef’s entire brand image. She says, “Because he is also the kind of person who can travel all the way from the US with just two black T-shirts and two jeans!” Khanna reportedly has about 10-13 endorsements in his kitty, including those for luxe brands like Mercedes for which he is called to do events.

So successful has been this association that Sahni now has a host of other clients. She was instrumental in introducing Sarah Todd, the Masterchef Australia finalist to Delhi-based restaurateur Ashish Kapur, when the latter was planning to open a restaurant in Goa. Sahni convinced Kapur to meet Todd and give her a try and the result has been Antares, the newly-opened gorgeous space in Vagator, Goa, with a great ocean view, buzzing bar and “modern Australian” food. Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore socialities have been queuing up all winter.

Sahni’s other clients include Amrita Raichand (with a TV show “Mummy Ka Magic”) and Saransh Goila, popular with the youth, with a huge following not just on TV (he did two shows on Food Food) but on social media too (75,000-plus followers on Twitter and Facebook each, slightly less on Instagram). While Goila manages his social media himself (“People do not realise how hard I work to do that and how much I actually also spend on that, they just think it is very easy to do,” he says), Sahni is now structuring his endorsements and events. Goila has just been signed on by Saffola Masala Oats.

It’s a commission-based business for Sahni. “We take 25 per cent of the fee for the work we get and 15 per cent if it comes directly to the chef,” she says. If the business of being a celeb chef is getting pretty well-organised, how does it compare with the traditional route chefs take within restaurant kitchens?

Goila, speaking to us from Allahabad, where he had been invited to address IIIT students, is pretty candid: “By now, all my classmates would be either sous chefs or at the most, executive chefs. The usual salary they would command would be about Rs 12 lakh per annum. A chef like me makes at least two-three times that and then it depends on how much you can extend your brand.”

In effect, you could be a celebrity chef quite profitably without the headache of running your own restaurant. But while judgements float around, fact is that being a TV chef and a restaurant chef are two entirely different career paths. While being a “chef” sells, each must choose what he wants.

“Everywhere in the world, the distinction between a TV chef and a serious restaurant chef exists. I have hardly seen someone do both equally without compromising,” says Indian Accent’s chef Manish Mehrotra. Interestingly, Goila agrees: “It is impossible to do both. On TV, you have to be an actor, that is what people don’t realise (Goila was always interested in acting and made a conscious decision to do TV after his hotel management, which allowed him to indulge both his interests in cooking and acting, he says). Also, both are pretty intensive careers and you cannot juggle.”

While TV may confer instant celebritydom in the mass market, it also comes with much scoffing — that this is not being a “real” chef. Goila, about to set up a takeaway business around butter chicken, the dish he is best known for, acknowledges that there is pressure to prove oneself with a restaurant.

Chef Ranveer Brar, popular as judge for Masterchef India, is an interesting case study in the TV chef vs “real” chef debate. “Everything and everyone who is in the market is a brand, we are all like toothpaste for people to pick up and judge,” he says. Brar, who worked up the hotel rungs (The Claridges, New Delhi and some sterling restaurants at the MBD Radisson in Noida, where he was executive chef), before venturing into TV, does not call his meanderings a “switch”. It is an “extension” of his creative expression, he argues: “A painter may want to take up sculpture. A chef can speak through his plates or on TV!”

Brar says that chefs on TV in India are at a nascent stage still and once they get more of a say in programming, we can expect better food-related content. “It took me two years to understand TV and the possibilities of brand alignments and how far to extend yourself,” he says, arguing it is possible to walk a tightrope between being a legit chef running a restaurant and a TV chef. He admits that a chef is no chef without cooking — and running his own restaurants. But adds that all chefs are brands, whether on TV, catering to the masses, or in “real” kitchens.

“You choose whether you want to cater to 200 people, or millions… in the end even a chef like Atul Kochhar is a brand, whether or not he has consciously positioned himself as such… for anyone opening an aspirational Indian restaurant in Dubai or wherever…”

In an impromptu survey, a majority of the people on my Facebook thought they go to a restaurant for “good food” regardless of the reputation of the chef. Many added that while chefs drew people to restaurants internationally, in India that does not work.

The reality is a bit more complex. While the quality of food and the suitability of the restaurant concept for its audience are two main pillars of restaurateuring success, the chef as a brand is increasingly important to food and beverages (F&B) marketing. There are chefs who have established their reputations (and hence brand value) for delivering innovative, creative food. And these are names that are followed by at least the more discerning audiences.

Given the cluttered market, as well as an aspirational audience invested in “personal connection” with “celebrity chefs”, top-of-the-line chefs need their people skills too. A star chef recently showed me the constant messages on his phone from various patrons. He needs to engage with them all. Others drink and party with influential clients. Most pay attention to their social media. But all this needs to be built on a bedrock of the credibility of the brand. The chef is a brand but the proof of the pudding is always in the eating.