Food Network Star Anne Burrell, Found Dead at 55, Always Knew She Would Be Famous

Food Network Star Anne Burrell, Found Dead at 55, Always Knew She Would Be Famous

Anne Burrell, the Food Network chef found dead in her Brooklyn, home June 17 at age 55, was a TV star almost from the moment she first appeared as a sous chef on one of the first episodes of Iron Chef America in 2004, assisting Mario Batali. Her spiky hair and kitchen intensity fascinated viewers so much that she was eventually given her own cooking show, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef. When I interviewed her for my 2013 book From Scratch: Inside the Food Network, Burrell told me about her difficult upbringing, and her childhood fantasy that Julia Child was her friend. She spoke of a family member who struggled with drinking. Restaurant work often attracts people looking for surrogate families. I remember her in better times at karaoke singing “Country roads/ take me home…” You could not look away. She gave everything her all, including, as you’ll see below in this excerpt adapted from my book, on the set of her cooking show. Food Network is a still-powerful brand, and Burrell’s death hurts not only as a human loss, but because we’ll never get to see the riveting projects she might have done next.

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For his two sous chefs on Iron Chef America, Battle of the Masters, Mario Batali had chosen Anne Burrell, who was the chef at Italian Wine Merchants, and Mark Ladner, the chef at Casa Mono in Manhattan. Both had serious technical skills, and Mario enjoyed hanging around with them. Anne screamed so loud with joy when Mario told her she was in that people nearby thought she was hurt.

When Mario was pronounced the winner of his battle with Morimoto, he turned to Anne and Mark and said, “That’s it. You’re on my Iron Chef team forever!”

Six years later, a visit I made to the set of Secrets of a Restaurant Chef revealed just how challenging it could be to channel a professional chef into the expensive constraints of a modern half-hour cooking show. It starred Burrell, who by then was already a talented and respected veteran of professional kitchens. Anne grew up in occasionally unpleasant circumstances in a small upstate New York town. In her childhood home, she told me, she would never know when her father was drunk based on his outward appearance, “but then I’d realize I had no idea what he was talking about. Nothing made sense.”

As a little girl, she began telling herself that she was going to be famous when she grew up. She believed that she was special, that she had a “sparkly factor.” She also found succor on TV. When she was 3, she told her mother she had a new friend named Julie.

“Julie who?” Anne’s mother asked.

“Julie Child,” Anne said. The big woman on the television who was cooking beautiful-looking food. She felt like a friend to little Anne.

The enemy of the sparkly person, Anne figured, was the mediocre person, and she knew she wasn’t that. She started working in restaurants at 19 because she wanted to buy a car, but was quickly pulled into the life. The restaurant people would go out late after work every night and get wasted, talk about all kinds of interesting things, then sleep late and do the whole thing again the next day.

A few years later, Anne found herself trying to hold down a more “responsible” job as a headhunter for doctors in a dreary office in Buffalo, New York. After work one unusually warm evening, while walking her dog, she had an epiphany: “I am 23 years old and I am too young to be this miserable. I will go to the Culinary Institute of America, and I will have a restaurant in Manhattan.”

Thanks to her appearances on Iron Chef America, with her commanding personality and restaurant experience — and spiky peroxide hairdo — in 2008 the network gave her her own show, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, where she would teach home cooks useful professional techniques. Programmers recognized that something about her seemed true to the frenetic energy of a restaurant kitchen, and she added something different to the network’s “In the Kitchen” lineup. But she was not a smooth television presence like Rachael Ray, Giada De Laurentiis or Ina Garten. Anne was a handful.

When the network started in 1993, it cost about $2,000 to make a 30-minute cooking show, including roughly $300 paid to the talent. Secrets of a Restaurant Chef employed a fleet of professionals and cost around $50,000 an episode. At 10:30 a.m., cameras rolled on the first of four segments for the half-hour show. When it aired, the first segment would take about seven minutes. Minus commercials, 22 minutes of television needed to be made. If all went according to the schedule, shooting for all four segments of episode #LR0612 would be completed in three and a half hours. The crew would lunch from 2 to 3 and begin taping another episode (“The Secret to Garlic Chicken Casserole”) at 3:15 p.m.

First call in the main studio at the Food Network was 8 a.m. Anne arrived at 8:30. An hour and a half of primping later, she was due on the set, where she spent half an hour with the director and producers rehearsing.

The script for this episode called for the preparation of spinach and ricotta gnocchi with quick tomato sauce and apricot nectarine shortcake with vanilla whipped cream.

On the set, between takes, Anne needled her assistant, Young Sun, who was arranging ricotta gnocchi on a sheet pan.

“How is your boyfriend Dr. Weiner?” asked Anne. Her spiky blond hair gleamed like steel quills in the stage lights. “Paging Dr. Weiner. Paging Dr. Oscar Meyer Weeeeener.”

A cameraman chimed in: “I used to go to college with a girl named Mai [pronounced ‘my’]. Her parents named her that. Her last name was Johnson. Mai Johnson. She’s married now, so she’s not Johnson anymore.”

Young walked off the set toward the prep kitchen in the rear of the studio.

Upstairs in the control room, the producer and director ignored the banter and watched a replay of the segment Anne had just shot in which she made the batch of gnocchi. Was it as perfect as possible or did it need to be redone? Did the star use all the proper ingredients in the proper order? Did she stumble on any words? Did the cameras catch the dusting of the sheet pans and the squeezing dry of the spinach?

Anne called out for her hairdresser, Alberto Machuca. He ran up behind the cameras, spray can in one hand, plastic pick in the other.

“Alberto. Is there a hole right there?” Anne pointed to a spot at the back right of her head.

A “hole” meant a gap in the symmetrical pattern of spikes in Anne’s mane — as if her head were a medieval mace. Alberto sprayed and teased a spike back into place.

Behind the set was a small prep kitchen where a sous chef cooked along with Anne, in case something burned and needed to be swapped out.

Beyond that sat Rani Cheema, a graphic designer whose job was to make new labels for commercial products Anne used on camera. Rani was working on a label for the white wine Anne would need in an upcoming episode. She named it Fabella, fashioning a golden yellow and black label.

Wendy Waxman, the set designer, had created the perfect Anne Burrell kitchen, giving the viewer a range of hints about the chef’s personality, a temperamental chef-artist who surrounded herself with a mélange of the funky, the modern and the nostalgic — vases in muted tones, a copper-colored bowl and stacks of colorful tiles. Behind Anne’s kitchen set, a wide door led to another room. The cameras occasionally captured a glimpse of a 1950s modern wooden dining-room table like the one Anne might have had as a child in upstate New York. Her home had not been so sedately appointed, but it was pretty to think so.

Forty feet from the fake upstate kitchen was a cornucopia of junk food. Anne grabbed three Crème de Pirouline sticks (rolled crispy wafers filled with waxy hazelnut cream) and fed them into her mouth all at once as she padded back to the set in pastel rainbow flip-flops.

Up in the control room, producer Shelley Hoffmann, director, Mike Schear and a crew of eight people tethered to headsets scrutinized Anne’s performance. They were concerned about the shortcake-making in segment two.

“Mike, I think she’s off today in general,” Hoffmann said. “She keeps calling it shortbread again and again. It’s not shortbread. It’s shortcake.”

The two of them discussed whether they would have to reshoot the segment. They tried to find a spot where they could splice in a fix, but decided there was no good spot and that they would have to take it from the top.

The crew had been putting out new ingredients for segment three, while maintaining basic visual continuity with the end of segment two. A freeze-frame shot of the set as it was at the start of segment two was put up on one monitor in the control room, and Mike and Shelley compared the freeze frame to the live shot and gave instructions to the floor crew about where to place the baking powder, the butter . … “Put the cream to the left of the Cuisinart. No, closer to the sink,” Mike said. Five hours later, when Shelley was moments away from calling the work day done, Anne realized that she had forgotten the anchovies in the Caesar salad dressing. This required another major set reset. “We’re going to do a fridge walk to get the anchovies,” Shelley declared. “They can’t just suddenly appear on the counter.”

This business of the gathering of the ingredients is a serious business in the construction of a modern cooking show. It takes time to walk to the fridge. In the six to nine minutes of actual showtime between commercials, an extra trip to the fridge to fetch a forgotten ingredient can cost 30 seconds, ticks of the clock that are better spent instructing viewers how to cook. Everyone already knows how to walk to the fridge.

But it would look weird if anchovies that were not there at the start of the making of the dressing were suddenly there. So the fridge walk was the only choice.

Down on the set, Anne said: “We can do a Caesar salad without Parmesan, but we can’t do it without anchovies.”

A culinary producer, in a response only the control room could hear, said, “Oh, the irony of that statement.”

Later, as the gnocchi Anne had assembled in the first segment were bobbing to the surface of the simmering water, she quickly fished them out with a mesh spoon, her restaurant instincts taking over and depriving the cameras of a chance to capture a shot of the pasta floating and ready. Before anyone could react, Anne dropped the gnocchi onto a plate with tomato sauce, grated a chunk of Parmesan over it and delivered her final line: “Gnocchi-dokey!” as she stood smiling in front of her steaming pasta.

But the cameras needed that shot of the floaters. To add to the problem, Anne had come in 30 seconds under time.

As they explained all this to Anne through her earpiece, the control room team could see a close-up of her on the monitor, rivulets of sweat moistening the furrows of rage above her eyebrows.

Young brought out a pot of clean boiling water and a tray of perfect rows of uncooked gnocchi from the shadow kitchen behind the set. The star remained motionless, temples pulsing, staring down at a blank spot on the floor.

With Anne’s anger and frustration apparent to everyone, Leigh Rivers, whose job it was to type text into her teleprompter, said to the control room at large, “What would JCC do?”

That morning. Juan-Carlos Cruz, a former star of Calorie Commando — “Keep the taste while you trim your waist!” — which had had a 39-episode run before it was canceled in 2006, had been charged with hiring homeless men in Los Angeles to kill his wife. JCC had reportedly given two homeless men the halves of ten $100 bills and told them he’d give them the other halves if they slashed his wife’s throat with box cutters. The homeless men told the police, and Cruz was arrested at a dog park in Los Angeles. He eventually pled no contest to a charge of soliciting murder and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Anne could not hear the comment. When the retake of segment four finally rolled, she was ready. She let the cameras catch the floating gnocchi as she scooped them out of the water and plated them with a ladle of tomato sauce. She cut one with a spoon and quickly tasted it, a steaming, thick ball of pasta just out of the boiling water.

“Hot, hot,” Mike warned Anne in her earpiece.

Anne’s taste buds were apparently made of asbestos. “Creamy, delicious,” she said after swallowing quickly. “The cheese and the tomato go together so well.”

“Are we still in Happytown?” Shelley asked Anne into her earpiece at 1:48 p.m.

“I live in Happytown, USA,” Anne replied.

At 1:49, “Moving on” was called out, and “Lunch!”

Adapted from the book From Scratch: Inside the Food Network, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Copyright 2013 Allen Salkin