Food Network: The early years

by Reese Schonfeld

The death of Julia Child brings back memories of the early days of the Food Network. We began with reruns of Julia’s old programs and contracted with her to appear as a columnist, live, on our news programs. The Food Network was designed like a woman’s service magazine, for instance Good Housekeeping or The Ladies Home Journal, with a large dose of entertainment in prime time. Robin Leach came in at 10:00 PM every night to do a live, after dinner talk show, complete with music, famous folks and food folks who became famous. We also ran Julia’s French Chef in prime. She did pretty well.

Daytime was chef’s time. Emeril was our greatest discovery but Mario Batali and Bobby Flay were there too. Essence of Emeril and Molto Mario were my personal contributions. We had our share of offbeat hits: “How to Boil Water,” with a New York comic acting as a recently divorced man on his own in the kitchen. “Ready, Set, Cook!”, a battle between two chefs who could spend no more than $10 on ingredients and no more than 20 minutes making dinner. The winner was chosen after the audience tasted the food.

Alan Richman of GQ and Nina Griscom, the Manhattan gourmand and socialite, reviewed restaurants. Richman may be the most amusing man in food and Nina acted the perfect foil. Sharon King, who had been a leading anchor at WBZ-TV in Boston, did our cookbook show. We also did a diet show with Gayle Gardner who was the first woman anchoring ESPN, and her diet doctor, who also looked after Sarah Ferguson. David Rosengarten hosted “Taste,” our upscale, tasteful program which did surprisingly well and ran for more than five years. Rosengarten now has his own food newsletter.

Food celebs like Ruth Reichl and Marian Burros were regulars. Tony Hendra and Ruth Kafka debated food from a conservative vs. liberal point of view and Marion Cunningham and John Ash, two of the best chefs on the west coast, had programs of their own. Sticking to our mission of public service, we did a daily show, “How to Feed Your Family on $100 a Week,” and a daily food news program, hosted by Donna Hanover. Our best story was the battle over FDA regulation of health foods, including live feeds from Washington. I think we covered that story as well as anybody else in the media.

It’s almost eleven years now since the Food Network launched. All things considered it’s been a smashing success. Financially, Scripps bought it for $175 million from Belo in 1997, a bargain; it’s now worth between two billion and two and a half billion dollars. The ratings have gotten better, too. Our first rating book came in at a .3 for the day, .5 for prime. Last quarter it did a .5 in total day and a .7 in prime. Those are great results by cable standards.

At the beginning we were throwing everything on the wall to see what would stick. Emeril stuck and so did Mario and Bobby. Robin Leach didn’t and Julia disagreed with my successor and left the network. What we didn’t do was buy the “Two Fat Ladies” from BBC or “Iron Chef” from Fuji Television and if I had stayed we wouldn’t have — which is why the Food Network is probably better off without me.

Reese Schonfeld has been in the television news and cable business for more than 35 years. He was the first president of CNN and got local cable news off the ground with News 12 Long Island. He keeps a weblog at meandted.com,
where this article first appeared.