Chef Tell: The Biography of America's Pioneer TV Showman Chef

"Tell started all this television madness about chefs." --Regis Philbin


Before The Food Network, there was Chef Tell-- the TV persona of Friedemann Paul Erhardt, America's first TV showman chef. Big on personality and flavor, Chef Tell was once described by Philadelphia magazine as the "affably roguish Bad Boy of the Philadelphia restaurant world." Chef Tell explores how a young German American chef became America's biggest TV celebrity chef of his time. Most of Chef Tell's forty million baby boomer viewers--a number comparable to Julia Child's--never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story.


Until now.


This winning biography puts us "behind the line" inside his kitchen and inside his, at times, turbulent personal life. Tell not only charmed, worked, entertained and taught audiences how to cook on live television shows, but, a quick-witted perfectionist, he also demanded only the freshest ingredients for his life of food, fame, fortune, and women.


Chef Tell's life--his colleagues would agree--was a managed, complicated and mercurial affair, which changed two industries and the taste buds of millions of home cooks.


An absorbing account of an extraordinary man, Chef Tell brings us through his personal and professional highs and lows, and his glorious successes, explaining why so many loved or hated him then, and miss him dearly now. The day Chef Tell passed on, messages of surprise and shock flooded the Internet and media airwaves. "Chef Tell has died? Stick a fork in him, he's done," one wrote.


Chef Tell would have loved that. Readers are beginning to find out why and they agree. 454 pages, 70 color photographs, and a seven-course dinner menu of recipes that Tell left behind for all of us!