"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! "Chef Tell made cooking on TV the new frontier. He did it with humor, a thick German accent and was rather bossy. He showed, we learned, we laughed. I am honored to be a part of the book!" --Jan Yanehiro, First Co-Host, Evening Magazine , San Francisco. "Tell never forgot that he was the guest... never took over his segments from the host, and that added to his genuineness.This book gives you so much: a taste of Tell, the person, and his taste for delicious food." --Art Moore, Executive in Charge of Production for LIVE! with Kelly & Michael "Chef Tell was a man of great humor and incredible skills in the kitchen. He brought wonderful food to the table as well as love and laughter. The author, Ronald Joseph Kule, did an impeccable job bringing to life Chef's humor and passion for food." -- Iron Chef Cat Cora "Author Ronald Joseph Kule's excellence can be felt in the pulse that beats from within the pages. His work about the late Chef Tell is going to stir more than just a few kitchen pots. Ron took a complex, infuriating, yet ultimately appealing character, and produced one superbly crafted work of literature." -- J. David Miller, Award-winning Author/Sports Journalist/head coach, AAA Semi-pro champion SoCal Coyotes "WOW! A wonderful account of one man's voyage... engaging, and takes you through all the emotions of life, leaving you to decide what is next for you, and how you will make the most of your today... a testament of the human spirit." --Tracy Repchuk, #1 Amazon.com Best Selling Author and Top Woman Speaker in the World Online Business Strategy. I had come to the conclusion that no one else was going to write about the life of Chef Tell Erhardt and that I better do something about that. Not sure that it was a worthy endeavor -- family and friends I'd met were in opposite camps about the man: some loved him, and others hated him, I wanted to research the facts and decide for myself. The easiest pretext was to work under the guise of writing his biography.In December of 2011, my sister, Bunny Erhardt, now a widow since Chef had passed away in 2007, acceded to my request for access to her friends and acquaintances, and permission to write Tell's biography.Embarking on my quest to discover whether this man was worthy of my time as an author or not, I developed a three-part outline loosely fitted to the early, middle and later years of his lifetime -- a beginning, middle and end to the story, if you will.  As data gathered on my desk and on my sheets of papers surrounding my work area, I fit these into the corresponding sections of that outline. Eventually, a timeline list of major events took shape, which would become my main guide to my work.As people's names popped up within the information about Tell's life story, I jotted these down and notched a mark each time the same name appeared. The list soon directed me to certain individuals who would become subjects of interviews I hoped to conduct for personal anecdotes and to qualify some of the data which, in some instances, added up to conflicting accounts.In other words, fact and fiction overlapped more than a few times -- not that the proverbial "truth is stranger than fiction" was happening, but either the subject of my