Bored beyond his wildest nightmares, cramped behind tiny writing desks in sterile high school classrooms, Bobby Flay spent a great deal of his time staring out the windows at the magic flow of New York's humanity the streets below. By his senior year, Flay would sometimes neglect to attend school at all - there were too many things that he wanted to observe up close and learn through hands-on experience. He was rewarded with threats of expulsion (probably along with damnation and excommunication) by the school authorities.
Not able to contain his lack of enthusiasm, Flay was tossed out of high school for the third and final time at the advanced age of 17. His father, a no-nonsense businessman who happened to own a slice of a new, slick Manhattan restaurant at the time, Joe Allen's, thought he had found a cure for his son's malaise by procuring a job or him as a busboy for a couple of weeks.
Flay fell in love with the backbreaking restaurant business overnight and happily dumped a high school diploma and a university degree for an uncertain future in a heartbeat. Today, with nothing to fall back on, he owns and operates five restaurants stretching from New York city to Las Vegas and the Bahamas, hosts about a half-dozen TV series simultaneously on the Food Network, has eight best-selling cookbooks on the shelves and hawks his own line of pots and pans.
Among the flame-haired, 43-year-old culinary maestro's Food Network current crop of shows - new and old - is the barely unwrapped "Grill It! With Bobby Flay." It basically takes the place of his old series, "Boy Meets Grill," according to Flay.
"It's a very casual, outdoors, hanging-out-with-family-and-friends-type show. Grilling is the way I love to cook when I'm not cooking in my restaurants."
Somehow, "Grill It!" is even more laid-back than "Throw Down! With Bobby Flay" - the show that made him a demigod among professional foodies.
"Sure, 'Throw Down!' is competitive, but it always remains lighthearted. It's really about the cooks I challenge. ... We follow them around for a few days and have people say nice things about them. But 'Iron Chef America' is a 60-minute culinary athletic event pitting wonderful chefs against each other. The show is very hard to do because it's one hour of pure adrenaline pumping through your system."
Besides the handful of culinary specials the 43-year-old Flay is whipping up for the Food Network this year, he joins "The Next Food Network Star" show in its fourth season as a Permanent Celebrity Judge. Every other Thursday, the smooth-talking kitchen artiste continues as a food correspondent for CBS' "The Early Show" - designed to inform a national audience of seasonal ingredients and regional dishes.
And it all started when the teenage Flay made a quick assessment of his eatery working environment fresh out of high school: Being a busboy meant getting dirty for super-low pay; chefs made tons more money and carried big knives. Properly motivated, he learned lots about Mexican sauces and cooking racks of lamb before picking up his sheepskin at New York's French Culinary Institute in 1984. From there, it was simply a matter of working his butt off as for a decade.
He became enthralled with Southwestern cuisine as a chef for Manhattan restaurateur Jonathan Waxman, followed by an executive chef job at Jerome Kretchmer's Miracle Grill in the East Village and executive chef/partner at Mesa Grill in 1991.
Flay made his Food Network debut in 1996 by "basically by being in the right place at the right time," he explained. "It was I was hanging around their studio as a guest on several cooking shows when the network brass said on day, 'Do you want to try you own show?' I said, 'Sure,' and that was it."
The time-challenged Flay also managed to get married in the center ring of his flying circus. Three times. The first was a plunge with fellow talented chef Debra Ponzak; the second was with Kate Connelly, who birthed a daughter, Sophie, now 12, before the divorce a year or so later. A blind date with beautiful Stephanie March ("Law & Order: SVU") proved three to be a lucky number. Flay makes it sound easy, but his working day (which is most days) usually begins at 6 in the morning and ceases at 10 p.m. When at home, he reports at Mesa Grill or Bar Americain to prep for the lunch crowd.
He is back for the night shifts, whether he works at the Mesa Grills in Las Vegas and the Bahamas or Bobby Flay Steak in Atlantic City. Taping the TV shows "take huge chunks" out of his weekends and the work can be hell on a marriage, "but luckily I'm married to an actress who has her own hectic schedule."
"The greatest amount of stress I have is making 450 employees very happy," Flay sighed. "They're people, trying to cope with everyday living and I feel responsible for them all. By the way, I only hire people who are nice and ambitious. I don't care about anything else, including experience. A perfect day is when I can sit down for a few minutes and enjoy my favorite food - vanilla-based ice cream.
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