Anthony Bourdain, Marco Pierre White, Michael Ruhlman (as Moderator), The Role of a Chef, 2008

In lieu of a registration fee, pay-what-you-can donations can be made to C-CAP: With the exponential rise of public attention focused on cooking, the meaning of the chef profession has changed. At the 2008 StarChefs International Chefs Congress, culinary author Michael Ruhlman moderated a chat between two very different food personalities. Marco Pierre White arguably began the era of chef publicity with the 1990 publication of the gritty White Heat cookbook/memoir. Anthony Bourdain won the industry over with his talent and candor, but he admitted that he hadn’t worked as a chef for nine years and was entrenched in the “undignified business” of television. White, a former quintessential “bad boy chef” who spoke in flowery terms about the romance of food, stood in contrast with the irreverent Bourdain, who always had a finger on the pulse of the culinary world and enough perspective to laugh at it. The two argued over the expectation that the chef whose name is on the r