How to Handle Publicity and Use the Press to Your Advantage

First Rule: they need you more than you need them.

Never start a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. — Unknown

Writers don’t work for free. News outlets, food magazines, and cooking shows

are for-profit enterprises. They live and breathe on fresh content so that they can sell subscriptions and advertisements.

You, Chef, become their content and their product. They need you. Without you, they have nothing to sell. They make money when they publish or broadcast your name, image, likeness, recipes, and interview. If you’re part of an event or a campaign for which you aren’t being paid and you’re unsure of what the product being sold is, I got news for you, Chef: the product is you.

How do you make money? By putting butts in seats. That’s it and that’s all. The buzz generated by the media, and the advertising dollars they bring in, may or may not result in you, in turn, making money off of their work.

But I, as a chef, crave recognition and validation. I yearned, I starved, for critical praise and peer admiration in my first years as a Chef de Cuisine and then an Executive Chef in the late aughts. I saw several chefs that I knew were hacks (because I’d worked with them)--and others who weren’t hacks but whom I had worked with or trained, shoulder-to-shoulder—smiling back at me from the “Best New Chefs” issue of Food & Wine every. God. Damn. Year. It infuriated me and it also kept me hungry.