In the weeks leading up to his 60th birthday in December 2024, Bobby Flay is doing what he probably does second best: shining on camera. He’s been making the rounds from station to station, promoting a new cookbook – his 18th – entitled Chapter One. He explains how he went through the thousands of recipes he’s developed and compiled the most important 100 for this new bestseller. But the multifaceted restaurateur never fails to mention where his true strengths and real passion lie: “Whether I’m at home or in one of my restaurants, my apron is my protective shield against the world. The kitchen is where I feel the most comfortable.”
Image: Caesars Entertainment
Singing taste buds
Robert William Flay grew up in Manhattan – specifically, on the Upper East Side, the Big Apple’s ritziest and priciest neighborhood. Even today, The City that Never Sleeps still definesBobby Flay’s pace… and his cooking philosophy. “New Yorkers are very brave,” he says. “We love big, bold flavors that make our tastebuds sing with excitement – and I believe that’s exactly what my creations offer. I like spicy, sweet, sour ingredients – taste experiences that aren’t just one-note, that change texture and direction during the meal.”
The Irish-American is as restless as his hometown. He’s opened quite a few restaurants over the course of his career… and closed his fair share, too. “If you want to keep developing,” he explains, “you just have to keep re-inventing yourself.” Currently, Bobby Flay is focusing much of his culinary attention on two restaurants: the high-end Italian Amalfi and the French-inspired Brasserie B, both of which are at the legendary Caesar’s Palace hotel-casino in Vegas. He’s also juggling an ever-growing legion of Bobby’s Burgers locations – including one at Yankee Stadium, the home of his favorite team.
Only recently, during an interview regarding his upcoming publication, did Bobby Flay reveal what all his restaurants have in common: “I need to be able to sum up a restaurant’s style in a few words. For example, the Mesa Grill, which I ran in New York and Las Vegas for a few years, offered contemporary Southwestern cuisine. It may have to do with the learning disability I was born with – I need a clear focus.”
The link between hand and brain
Bobby Flay knew early on what he didn’t like: namely, school. “I was absolutely not interested in opening a book and learning from it.” At the age of 17, he dropped out of high school. When he started working – first as a busboy and then as a kitchen assistant at Joe Allen, a trendy restaurant in Manhattan’s Theater District – he realized that his learning disability wasn’t the source of all his troubles:: “I needed that link between hand and brain. Only when I can create something with my hands do things really come alive for me.”
Alongside his work at Joe Allen, where his father Bill was conveniently a partner, Bobby Flay honed his craft at New York’s newly founded French Culinary Institute, where he became part of the first graduating class in 1984. From the very beginning, he was driven by his curiosity to create new taste experiences or perfect existing dishes – including good old burgers, in his case. “I don’t have a job,” he says about his work. “I wake up and think about food. I think about ingredients and how I’m going to use them that day. What should I do with the citrus I bought yesterday at the market? Should I develop a new chili mayo for a roast chicken sandwich?”
His unbridled creativity is also reflected in his extensive archive, which now includes over a thousand recipes of his own creation. His newest cookbook, Chapter One, compiles the 100 that are the most important to him personally, including king crab gumbo with crunchy okra, tamales with shrimp and roasted garlic, glazed salmon with a spicy black bean sauce and roasted jalapeño crema, black rice paella with seafood and leeks, and Spanish-style steak fries with cabrales (a Northern Spanish blue cheese) and Rioja sauce. “I know, I say this about every new release, but this really is the book I’m most proud of. I have to say, though, that these are complex recipes you can’t easily whip up at home.”
Image: Caesars Entertainment
The Iron Chef
Bobby Flay, who looks back on three failed marriages (including one to actress Stephanie March of Law & Order: SVU fame), has long since flouted all convention. The father of one (Sophie, his daughter from his first marriage, with whom he runs the podcast “Always Hungry”) has been a household name for many years, and he owes much of that fame to his TV presence. Bobby Flay’s love of creative variety shines through as much on camera as it does in the kitchen: having made around 2,000 appearances in 17 different reality TV formats, most recently Bobby’s Triple Threat on Food Network in 2022, he’s a consistent ratings draw.
In 2000, he was the first American chef on the US version of the hit Japanese show The Iron Chef, and thus established the “cooking duel” genre on Western television. Today, Bobby Flay recalls squaring off against Japanese Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto as “a brutal hour of cooking. The stand mixer almost cut my thumb off; I got several electric shocks from water leaking onto the wires in the studio, and one of them made me fall into the stove, so I nearly got burned to a crisp. But the ratings were so good that the previously obscure TV channel Food Network became part of American pop culture overnight…”
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King of the Grill meets Mr. President
“Beat Bobby Flay”, a live-audience show where he and a guest chef compete for the favor of a (blind-tasting) jury, has enjoyed remarkably long-lasting success. As of November 2024, it had aired 469 episodes over 35 seasons. So far, Bobby Flay has won 290 of those duels, or 61.8 percent. “But something totally different is way more important to me there. I love cooking, and I love hanging out with friends. This lets me combine both of those perfectly.”
Popularity with audiences soon led to numerous awards: Besides taking home the James Beard Foundation’s prestigious “Rising Star of the Year” award in 1993, Bobby Flay has been nominated for six Emmys and won four. Other successful shows like Boy Meets Grill, Grill It!, and Bobby Flay’s Barbecue Addiction have earned him the nickname “King of the Grill.” In 2015, Bobby Flay received another extra-special honor when he became the first chef to receive a star on the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame.
And, of course, fame opens up all kinds of opportunities – for example, to become a character on South Park. In 2009, Bobby Flay was invited to the White House, where he taught Barack Obama a few things about barbecue. The King of the Grill didn’t even take offense when the then-President outed himself apologetically as a “medium-well guy.” “We don’t want you to change that,” he assured Obama.
In return, he let the world’s then-most powerful man in on one of his kitchen secrets: “I don’t use tongs – I carefully place the meat on the grill with my hand. But more importantly, you don’t constantly flip the steak back and forth on the grill. You only turn it once! When exactly? You can tell by the slightly charred edges on the steak…”
Image: Caesar Entertainment
Horse breeder and cat man
Bobby Flay is now one of the richest chefs in the world; his wealth was most recently estimated at 60 million dollars, or about 57.7 million euros. This financial cushion is more than enough not just for setting up new restaurants, but for financing a few chic hobbies as well. Horse breeding, for example. Bobby Flay is a true horse lover who owns a sizeable number of racehorses, and in 2016 he celebrated the triumph of one of his “progeny” at the prestigious Belmont Stakes.
Bobby Flay also celebrates his love of cats in profitable fashion: In 2021, he founded the luxury cat food brand Made by Nacho, named after one of his Maine Coon cats (now-deceased). “I was an only child,” he remarks. “We always had cats at home – they were like siblings for me. I remember Pumpkin especially fondly. His coat was as orange as a pumpkin, very similar to my own hair color. There was nothing cooler for a five-year-old boy!”
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No memoirs
Bobby Flay was awarded a Michelin star only once, in 2008 for Mesa Grill in Las Vegas. For a long time, he struggled with the image of “just” being a TV chef: “Apparently it’s really easy to criticize people and treat them with contempt just because they cook on camera. I don’t know why that would be the reason people would question my culinary skills, though. But such comments stopped bothering me a long time ago anyway.”
In order to make all his ideas happen, Bobby Flay has to work extremely efficiently, as he once revealed while on the popular YouTube talk show Hot Ones: “We can record two shows of Beat Bobby Flay each day and go home at 5 p.m. That way, we can turn out 50 episodes at once, in a 25-day block.” So it’s no wonder that this milestone birthday doesn’t inspire him to look back on his career – his eyes are always on the future: “That’s why I don’t see my new book, Chapter One, as my memoir. I am still very curious about what all will happen next.”
