It’s hard to deny the allure of the celebrity chef. You get paid millions of dollars to cook. You’re on television. You visit your restaurants in Las Vegas and Miami. People buy your pots and pans and those weighty cookbooks. They adore you.
Of course the odds of this happening to you just because you like to cook and maybe even went to a culinary school are slim. When foodwriter Michael Ruhlman went to the Culinary Institute of America in 1996, he was one of 29,000 students across the country enrolling in a cooking program. Twelve years later, the number of students in culinary school shot up to 62,000.
“The downside of this phenomenon,” writes Ruhlman in The Making of a Chef, “is that aspiring cooks may be led to believe that the doors of culinary school open onto the land of milk and honey upon graduation. This is akin to thinking everyone who is a committed football or basketball player in high school has a pretty good shot at the NFL or NBA. The fact is, only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of people who enter a culinary program during the next five years will become rich and famous for their cooking or their businesses.”
The rest can certainly make a decent living. Some may struggle to get by. And others may not make it. Count Joseph Cerniglia among the latter. Some time last week, the restaurateur killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Cerniglia’s claim to fame was an appearance on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, in which Britain’s bad-boy chef berates owners of failing businesses—Cerniglia ran Campania, an Italian restaurant in Fair Lawn, New Jersey—in the hopes that tough love will save their eateries. Ramsay was particularly harsh to Cerniglia, telling him that his business was in such dire straits it was about to “swim down the Hudson.”
Cerniglia did turn things around and ultimately knew Ramsay had meant well. But it’s unclear in what shape were the restaurant’s finances at the time of the owner’s death. It’s also been reported that Cerniglia was having an affair with his pastry chef.
Cerniglia is actually the second chef to kill himself who also happened to appear on a Gordon Ramsay show. (In 2007, Rachel Brown, who competed on Hell’s Kitchen a year earlier, shot herself to death.) Sadly, this is not uncommon to the profession. In 1671, François Vatel, the chef to Louis XIV, fell on his sword after learning the fish to be served to the king had not yet arrived. (It supposedly arrived shortly after he stabbed himself.) In 2003, Bernard Loiseau shot himself during a bout of depression and anxiety over the threat that his beloved La Côte d’Or restaurant might lose a Michelin star. (It didn’t.)
The profession is not for the faint of heart. And it is worth going back to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential to heed his warning, in a chapter titled “Owner’s Syndrome and Other Medical Anomalies.”
