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Food--Celebware picks, pans[2008-08-06]
Food--Celebware picks, pans
The Wall Street Journal
advertisementIn a kitchen at Manhattan's International Culinary Center, chef Andre Soltner and two cookware junkies seem bent on destroying a collection of brand-new pots and pans.
"This is very thin," says John Doherty, executive chef of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, as he taps the side of a stainless-steel frying pan. He holds the pan against his stomach, and then pushes in the sides like an accordion. "Oh my God," he says, "I just bent it."
"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah," says Soltner, 75, the former owner of Manhattan's Lutece restaurant, giving it a try himself.
At The Wall Street Journal's request, the two were testing products in a growing niche of the roughly $2 billion U.S. cookware market: celebrity-chef-branded pots and pans.
Celebrity lines now make up an estimated 10 percent of the market, compared with as little as 3 percent a decade ago, according to the Cookware Manufacturers Association.
Flip on the Food Network and Rachael Ray's orange-handled cookware fills the screen. Wolfgang Puck appears regularly on home-shopping network HSN to pitch his wares.
Marcus Samuelsson, known in Manhattan for his Aquavit and Merkato 55 restaurants, debuted his own line in March. And this fall, the Food Network's Paula Deen is set to introduce five retro-styled cookware lines, including one made of cast iron.
The makers and retailers say such things as their sets will be "the last cookware you have to buy" and that they offer "exceptional" value.
To test the claims the Journal assembled three pros: Soltner, Doherty and Ran Lerner, a professor of industrial design at the Manhattan design school Parsons, who has created housewares sold at places including Crate & Barrel.
What they found was that a star endorsement doesn't necessarily mean stellar cookware.
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