Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell—nickname of Friedemann Paul Erhardt, America’s first TV showman chef. Big on personality and flavor, Chef Tell was once called by Philadelphia magazine 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 brings us “behind the line” into his kitchen and into his, at times, turbulent personal life. Tell was known as a charmer, as he worked the audience for live television shows, but also a quick-witted perfectionist, who 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 millions of home cooks.

Ronald Joseph Kule, born in Bogota, Colombia, attended Oakland University and later worked independently in sales for fourty-eight years. His sales-training Manual, Sell Better, sell Easier, Sell Anything Artfully, is sold internationally. A published poet and short-story author, he has also authored several additional books. He lives in Clearwater, Florida.

Chef Walter Staib is a German American chef and restauranteur. He has authored several cookbooks and made numerous appearances on the Food Network’s Best Think I Ever Ate and Iron Chef. He currently hosts the PBS show A Taste of History.