The private life of chef Jamie Oliver: anti-obesity activist with a large family
Five children, 16 Michelin stars, tourist flights, an abortion ... This is the life of chef Gordon Ramsay
Karlos Arguiñano: "I went on TV to cook because of Joan Manuel Serrat"
When a chef becomes a star, it happens as in all professions that have an important media projection, that fame and fortune are stratified at different levels, such as in football, haute couture or pop music. Above all are the international superstars -Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver-, those who have built real empires by placing their restaurants even at the airports, who put their name on recipe book covers and who invoice what is not written for being on television .
Then, at an intermediate level there are those who live well thanks to the mass media and their culinary talent, but who would not be able to buy a large-length yacht yet - Jordi Cruz or Alberto Chicote, for example -, and finally prestigious chefs, with thriving hospitality businesses but who, as Albert Adrià says, also consume a lot of expense and time and are not like to retire to the Bahamas for life. Of course, below all is the strata of the currant , which cut the chives and heat the broth.
Karlos Arguiñano has gone through almost all those levels. In the 80s he was a hard-working chef with a vision of the future but an inconstant fortune that bordered the ruin and that would have broken in his attempt to consolidate his restaurant-hotel in Zarautz, Hotel KA, if it were not because he appeared an angel in the form of Television Spanish, who offered to make a daily cooking program that became immediately popular thanks to its salty verb, as well as its potions, and its bad jokes - which today would make it subject to the odd lynching in networks, such as that of differences between the clams of the sea and the clams of licking-, and that it relaunched its business to the point that it has never stopped filling since then.
Towards stardom
As the restaurant's own corporate website explains, he founded KA in 1979, and it was relaunched as a hotel, bar and chocolate shop in 1990, a project that Arguiñano had caressed since the mid-80s and with which he borrowed to such an extent that the project almost Drag him to misfortune. Providers and banks demanded money , to the point of accumulating debts for more than 250 million pesetas.
Once a popular face of television became as of 1991, Arguiñano no longer suffered from pressure. He has barely missed his daily appointment, either on TVE or Antena 3, always with splendid audience figures, and the income derived from that activity - managed through the company Irusta Gain SL, with which he channels his income for questions of Image and editorials of its more than 60 recipe books published so far, including the latest Kitchen every day. 1095 recipes 365 menus for the four seasons - they are added to those of another company , Karlos Arguiñano Promociones SL, which has control of its restaurant and other interests in hospitality.
They are not the only areas in which Arguiñano has invested money, also in the sport of Basque ball and in betting houses, although they are neither by far their main activity nor the most profitable, and recently declared a personal assets of more than three million euros. The gross income derived from its activity amounts to five million annually, although the net benefit does not exceed 50,000 euros due to the high cost of personnel and supplier expenses, but it is enough to have supported a large family of six children with his longtime wife and partner at Hotel KA, María Luisa Ameztoy, familiarly known as Luisi.
good manager
If we wanted to harmonize the chef's economic hierarchy with his culinary lexicon, Arguiñano would belong to the club of the rich, rich, logically, a reference as basic and logical as his cathodic chascarrillos. And rich, rich not precisely for having abused parsley -which, you know, they give it to you in the market by hand-, but for having taken advantage of and managing with you a unique opportunity, when the idea of the media chef in Spain or it smelled, and the most we had on television was Elena Santonja, from the Vainica Doble group, in the program With Hands in the Mass , whom Arguiñano replaced after Santonja resigned from continuing with the program because he was denied the possibility of participate in the income generated by the growing publicity that TVE was inserting in it. An unexpected resignation that led to an urgent solution in a Basque man with a beard. Undoubtedly, that day the wheel of fortune took a sudden turn and Arguiñano was able to grab, in extremis, the lock of the goddess's hair.
According to the criteria of
Know more
Comments
This news has no comments yet
Be the first in give your opinion
0 comments