Celebrity Chef Michael Chiarello Will Slide Into Your DMs For $250

Michael-Chiarello
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Michael Chiarello is a celebrity chef with a restaurant in Napa Valley who always seems to show up on food shows. He’s been on Top Chef Masters, or you might remember him as the guy who got in a constantly-replayed shouting match with Dale on Top Chef season four. He seems to exude an air of self-satisfied dismissiveness, even when he’s being theoretically nice.

Who wouldn’t want to experience that firsthand through the magic of social media?! That was apparently an option. Buried in a (hilarious) San Francisco Magazine piece about the mafia-like influence of San Francisco Chronicle head restaurant critic Michael Bauer’s boyfriend, Michael Murphy — who runs the culinary branch of a “Make-a-wish for rich people” company called IfOnly (“a magical emporium for experiences,” according to the founder) — was a tidbit about Chiarello. Through IfOnly, customers could reportedly pay for a virtual encounter with the star chef.

Here’s the tidbit (emphasis ours):

Given the decadent tastes of most IfOnly customers, it comes as no surprise that the company has a robust arm devoted to culinary experiences. Scroll through the list of “luminaries,” as they’re called on the site, and you’ll see a who’s who of the Bay Area restaurant industry staring back at you. There’s Mourad Lahlou, offering a home cooking lesson and dinner at Aziza for $875 a head. Here’s Michael Mina, hawking a $70 autographed recipe card, and there are Nicole Krasinski and Stuart Brioza of State Bird Provisions, selling a “bespoke” $1,000-per-person dinner at your home. Not long ago, a modest outlay of $35 could buy you “the ultimate social media status symbol”: a Twitter follow from Michael Chiarello. For $250, you could upgrade to a direct message.

That’s right, for just 250 vongole, the Cal-Italian-style host of NapaStyle on the Fine Living Network will slide into your DMs. Or at least, he would for a time. It sounds like that offer’s no longer on the table. Of course, the thrust of the piece is that some of the chefs only agreed to work with IfOnly because they were worried about getting bad reviews from IfOnly’s culinary wrangler’s boyfriend (there is no part of that sentence that isn’t hilarious).

Still, how did they come up with Twitter follows and DMs as an “experience?” Was it Chiarello’s idea? And what do you think one of these DMs would say? If I’m paying $250 for an authentico Michael Chiarello encounter, I expect at least some pedantic advice about my poor gnocchi technique. “Um… you probably don’t want to overwork those potatoes, unless you like them really gummy, ha ha ha!  –deliciously yours, MC.”

(Via ModernLuxury)

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