FAQ | Great Chefs

FAQ

What is Great Chefs?
Great Chefs is a television production, publishing, and website company. Great Chefs also publishes cookbooks, videos, and DVDs to accompany some of the TV shows. Based in New Orleans, home of both fine cooking and jazz, Great Chefs also has arrangements with Leisure Jazz offering music CDs, music videos, and DVDs.

Is this a recipe database?
The Great Chefs website gives you access to the recipes for virtually all the dishes prepared by the many Great Chefs over the years. We also make some recipes from the different cookbooks available free of charge on our site; these change from time to time.

How does a chef get on Great Chefs?
Although it is not exactly an award, being selected for Great Chefs is a recognition of a chef´s reputation among his or her peers.

Great Chefs contacts a network of culinary professionals and chefs with whom we have been working over the years and asks for nominations as to who is considered a ‚“Great Chef‚” in a particular region. We then contact the selected chefs to see if they are able to participate.

This is always a long process, but it has consistently brought the outstanding chefs to the fore.

Who selects what the chefs will make?
The chefs themselves select the dishes they will make and present. Most will make an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert (pastry chefs sometimes make several desserts, depending upon the preparation time). Most select signature dishes, or current favorites of their regular customers. The chefs joke that once selected and taped for a television program, a dish can never be removed from their menu ‚Äî someone will always come to the restaurant and ask for it!

Some chefs are not at the restaurant where they are listed on the TV shows or in the cookbooks or videos — why?
Moving up in the culinary profession often involves moving ‚Äî period. Chefs often commit a portion of their career to one location, then move on to accept new challenges. At Great Chefs, we have always listed the chefs on the TV programs (and in the companion cookbooks) at the restaurants at which they were taped for the programs. Often, in the video, you will see the restaurant´s name on the chef´s jacket. The dish serves as a snapshot of the chef´s style at that time in his or her career. If the same chef is later taped at a different location, we list that new location in the new program. In the chefs´ biographies we track their movements as best we can.

Because restaurants and chefs change often, we recommend that anyone wanting to dine with a particular chef check on-line or call ahead for reservations and ask at that time if that chef is still working there. And, if that chef has moved to another location, you may wish to make a culinary discovery yourself with the restaurant´s new chef!

Some of this stuff looks pretty fattening!
The chefs themselves admit, this is not first-and-foremost ‚“health food.‚” The chefs are making dishes for meals which are usually treats for their diners, not everyday fare. Save these dishes for your own at-home treat dinners and events. However, you may find it interesting to note how much the chefs are now using vegetable reduction sauces, for instance, instead of the meat-butter sauces used as recently as the early ‚Äò80s. And all of today´s chefs put an emphasis on fresh seasonal local produce and fish.

How many Great Chefs programs are there? How many recipes?
There are over 700 Great Chefs programs, counting all the programs in series plus the individual hour-long specials. There are over 1700 dishes. As for the number of recipes, the count would be astronomical — most dishes involve multiple recipes, for the main ingredient, side dishes, sauces, flavorings, and even garnishes. We stick with counting the number of dishes, but when you order and download a recipe for a dish, you get all the individual recipes needed to make the entire dish.