There's No New White House Chef — And One Man Knew It

Cristeta Comerford: The White House chef (seen here in 2002) is staying put. Maybe it was the macaroni and cheese. Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

The New York Times has quashed the raging food-world rumors about the possibility of a new White House chef.

And now Walter Scheib can say it: I told you so.

Scheib is a former White House chef who cooked for Clinton and Bush the Younger. I called him two weeks after the election, as breathless readers were flooding my e-mail inbox with questions about who Obama would appoint for the role — as if chef were a cabinet position only slightly less important than Secretary of State.

Speculation had centered on celebrity chefs with Chicago ties. Predictably, circumstantial evidence had supplanted the need for real, actual evidence.

Rick Bayless? readers asked me. After all, the Obamas love his Chicago restaurant Topolobampo, and go there on special occasions.

Or what about Art Smith, a 2-time James Beard Award winner who opened a restaurant called Art and Soul on Capitol Hill just before the election? Mere coincidence? Or was this Smith's way of positioning himself for the gig?

I rang Scheib. He couldn't have been blunter.

What Scheib had to say, after the jump...

"The White House already has a chef," said Scheib, referring to Cristeta Comerford, who had worked for Scheib — and who succeeded him when Laura Bush gave him the boot, in 2005.

"Where are these rumors coming from?" he asked, with all the interrogatory ire of a prosecuting attorney. There was a long pause on the other end. He seemed to be implicating me.

"Well, it's very frustrating," he said, finally. "It's wrong. It's not right. People are advancing their agendas. That's all. She has done an exceptional job. Whoever is spreading these rumors — they're ill-served, if they don't know that."

With some lingering bitterness, he told me a story about how foodies like Alice Waters had to be won over to him when he started. Scheib had cooked at the Greenbrier Resort, a Mobil four-star property in West Virginia, where he had impressed Hillary Clinton, but he was an unknown to many, and his views on organics and sustainability were not widely known.

He did win Waters over, but seems to resent having had his sensibilities questioned. Yes, he said, the White House dinner can be a "bully pulpit, if you will, to promote American cuisine," but it was a mistake to confuse symbolism with substance.

"One thing you have to remember about being the chef at the White House is that, while its a wonderful and honorary position, you work directly for the first family. Your primary job is the care and feeding of the first family. Yes, there are state dinners and official functions. But most of the time it's simple dinners. ... The White House is a private home just like any other private home."

He snickered when I told him that journalists and bloggers were busily analyzing Barack Obama's speeches and books for clues as to the President-elects eating likes and dislikes — clues that might portend the direction of the new White House kitchen.

The one to look at, he suggested, was Michelle, not Barack.

"The safest way to keep everybody happy is to keep mama happy. If mama's happy, everybody's happy. I don't care if its macaroni-and-cheese ten days in a row, then your job is to make the best damn macaroni-and-cheese."

Todd Kliman is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic and the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine. The Wild Vine, his book about the Rosetta stone of American wine, is due in 2009.