How Wealthy Are the Celebrity Chefs?

With everything I cover here eventually and naturally I got to thinking … Exactly how much money do these celebrity chefs actually make? Funny thing, searching the web, the news articles, the periodicals, the blogs, etc … I found two things. One, almost all of the information was old (aka, one or two and often three years old). And the information I found, even when dates were similiar — aka, two seperate articles in October 2007 or two different articles from February 2006 — never agreed on the amounts. Sometimes they were within the same ball park as the other, sometimes they were off by over $40 million in one case.

To say the least: I find this extremely annoying! What I ended up finding for the purposes of posting it here was from three months ago. Part of the information has zero attribution at all, that is, there is no confirmation of the source they got it from. And the second part, which was attributed to a magazine, I could not find the same information at the magazine! (Again, grrrr! Majorly annoying.) Plus there were one or two things I know for certain are inaccurate — and which I mention in color below as I find them. So until someone actually does a good job — someone with more resources than little ol’ me — we’ll have to go with this for now. From Celebs Chef Net from January 2008:

1. Gordon Ramsay, £ 67m ($126m)
2. Jamie Oliver, £ 38m ($71m)
3. Rick Stein, £ 36m ($67m)
4. Delia Smith, £ 25m ($47m)
5. Anthony Worrall Thompson, £ 21m ($39m)
6. Marco Pierre White, £ 10m ($18m). The only chef on the list who doesn’t have a TV show.
Note: This is 100% wrong. He’s been doing the UK Hell’s Kitchen for a while now.
7. Gary Rhodes, £ 8m ($15m)
8. Raymond Blanc, £ 7m ($13m)
9. Nigella Lawson, £ 3m ($5.6m). Interestingly, she is the only chef who doesn’t have a restaurant.
10. Heston Blumenthal, £ 2m ($3.7m)

The following is from the same site and said to have been taken from the Forbes annual list ranked American chefs, which may be true, yet a search of Forbes so I could link directly to the original source did not turn this up on their site. Again, my comments in color below.

1. Wolfgang Puck, $16m (No. 89)
2. Emeril Lagasse, $10m (No. 94)
Note: In March Martha Stewart bought up Emeril’s franchise for $50 million.
3. Rachael Ray, $6m (No. 81)
4. Mario Batali, $5m (No. 98)

Again, if anyone has better statastics, or writes a better article, either let me know, or hopefully I’ll find it first and bring it to you. Meanwhile, these thoughts …

Can European chefs and cooks really be making that much money over the American ones? I mean Puck at a measly $16M? I don’t believe it.

And what about folks like Todd English who has more restaurants than even Gordon Ramsay?

What about the French chefs? What about chefs outside of America and England? How about Canada, Australia, Germany, South America, Japan?

We need better stats because — as said, these are the most recent ones I’ve found — and while they may give us an idea … I just don’t believe they are accurate.

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