Dining for Dollars

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Here's a question of the moment: Would you rather eat at one of French chef Alain Ducasse's pair of three-star restaurants or spend who knows how many hours preparing the spit-roasted lobster with caramelized salsify and almonds from his new cookbook, Ducasse: Flavors of France (Artisan; 288 pages; $50)? And would you rather dine at one of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's New York City food temples or make the apple confit from Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef (Broadway; 224 pages; $35)--a recipe that involves cutting 15 peeled Granny Smith apples into 1/8-in. slices, layering them with orange zest and sugar and baking the whole lot for six hours, only to find...fruit stacked in sugar water instead of the promised "dark, rich mille-feuille of caramelized apples"?

O.K., so those were trick questions. Buying books--or fancy products--stamped with the names of the world's finest chefs is just the latest form of gourmet porn. The consumer gets to fantasize that with aids like a dollop of Jean-Georges's special tamarind paste or one of Ducasse's $275 copper saucepans, one can whip oneself and one's guests to the heights of culinary ecstasy. And for the chefs--brash, dashing and at the pinnacle of their artistic careers--their extra-kitchen activities are about creating, and extending, their brand names in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Being a chef today, explains the French-born Vongerichten, is "more like [being] a businessman. It's a marketing thing."

Although both Ducasse, 43, and Vongerichten, 41, may have elevated their art a zillion notches above the usual run of Food Network stars, they are also typical of the new breed of chef-entrepreneur. Ducasse's unprecedented "deux fois trois etoiles"--achieved last March when Michelin inspectors gave his Paris restaurant its third star to join those already won by his Louis XV in Monte Carlo--has traditionalists sniffing that the master rarely actually cooks at either restaurant, but Ducasse likes to compare himself to an haute couture designer who depends on a team to execute his visions. "O.K., in France that's not normal," he says, "but I'm changing normality."

Ducasse and Vongerichten both began traditionally, apprenticed as teenagers to some of France's legendary chefs, but they refuse to settle for an old-fashioned career spent in just one kitchen. Vongerichten's Jean Georges won a rare four-star rating from the New York Times within three months of its 1997 debut; his Mercer Kitchen was the buzz of New York before it opened this fall; he has exported his French-Asian marvel, Vong, to London and Hong Kong. Both men have no qualms about lending their name. Vongerichten sells condiments through Williams-Sonoma, and Ducasse has just brought out a champagne label and a line of products ranging from $25 olive oil to $28,000 stoves. Ducasse dreams of cracking the New York market, and though he speaks virtually no English, he and top Chicago chef Charlie Trotter, a good friend, fantasize about doing road tours--"the way Bob Dylan and Van Morrison would go on a tour," explains Trotter.

Chefs at this level must tread a fine line between accessibility and mystique; revealing the trick behind that perfect spit-roasted lobster, after all, is a bit like a magician's showing just where he hid that bunny. But the drive to commercialize is inevitable. "We're working so hard, it's about time we make money!" Vongerichten exclaims. The famously perfectionist Trotter--himself no slouch in the self-marketing department, with half a dozen books, a new line of sauces and, in January, knives to his name--agrees. "It wasn't so long ago that being a chef was a blue-collar occupation," he says. "Now you decide, Am I going to spend the next 30 to 40 years working 15-hour days, six or seven days a week, in a very demanding physical role? Maybe I can be the artist and enjoy life too."

One way for the rest of us to tap into that dream is to play around with their new books. The apple confit may have been a disaster--"I don't know what happened," Vongerichten says sorrowfully--but other recipes from Jean-Georges, like the seared tuna with Szechuan peppercorns, prove remarkably simple, if lacking a four-star polish. Ducasse: Flavors of France is another matter. Stunningly produced and poetically written, it is also more intimidating: heavy on costly truffles and types of fish not available in the U.S. For even the more ambitious amateurs, perhaps the best approach is to splash out on a visit to these chefs' restaurants and leave their cookbooks where they work best: on the coffee table.