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By J.M. HIRSCH
MIAMI (AP) — Rachael Ray isn’t sick. Her marriage is healthy, too. And yes, she’s still on TV.
Rumors have swirled around the woman who gave us 30-minute meals since she stepped away from her daily show. But that hasn’t diminished her thrill at rolling through her mid-50s still cooking on television and still pulling crowds for beachside burger parties.
Welcome to Ray’s third act, the recipe for which is equal parts serendipity and returning to her hands-in-pans roots.
Three years ago, the woman who turned culinary effervescence, EVOO and garbage bowls into a media empire stepped away from the Food Network and her syndicated daytime talk show. Today, she acknowledges, “It can be hard to find me.”
Ray sat down with the AP recently during a break from events at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival to talk about what’s next, what keeps her going and why she doesn’t care about her legacy.
“I’ll be dead, so who cares?” She said that a lot, actually. About her critics. About the gossip. About whether people today get her and her decisions.
Except, clearly she does care. Particularly about the thread common to it all — giving people kitchen confidence. She once described her cooking as the food equivalent of a pop song. Which sounds flip. But when your entire career is built around breaking barriers to food, the easy digestibility of pop is an apt analogy.
“That was the message I wanted to bring to people. Don’t be scared of this,” she said. “If it doesn’t come out all right, who cares? It’s just dinner.”
The story of Ray’s rise is well-trod. Young woman from upstate New York gets noticed while doing food demos at an upscale grocery store, lands a gig on the Food Network demystifying cooking with a focus on fast and affordable, parlays that into a daytime show backed by Oprah Winfrey, and in short order she and her rat-a-tat Yum-o!-punctuated vernacular — not to mention her knives, books, pans, magazine, pet food and all manner of other products — were ubiquitous.
Then, in 2023 — after 17 seasons on daytime TV — she jarred fans by walking away from much of it, a decision she’d been quietly considering for years. Network television brought with it armies of executives and lawyers.
“I just didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t want to live by committee,” she said. “I wanted to focus more on food the way I want to teach it, talking to people I want to talk to, and being just me.”
To many, she seemed to slow down or even disappear. After fire destroyed her home in upstate New York and flooding ruined her city apartment, she moved much of her life to Italy. A podcast was started, then quietly shuttered. All amid rumors of failing health and marriage.
Moved under the radar might be more accurate than slowed down. But let’s start with the gossip.
“We’re very volatile people. We’re loud, and then we’re lovey dovey, and I think we confuse a lot of folks because of that,” she said of her marriage to musician and lawyer John Cusimano. “I have a great marriage. My health is fine. I lift weights every morning, 4 o’clock, you know. I’m doing just fine.”
As for slowing down?
After ending her daytime show — the only thing she misses is the energy of the live audience — she created her own production company, Free Food Studios, an effort to control her content (sans layers of lawyers) and launch new talent. A&E soon acquired a 50% stake in it and ordered hundreds of episodes, including several new series starring Ray.
“People tell me on the plane or at the airport or at the grocery store, ‘Oh, I miss your show so much!’ And I’m like, I have many! You know, look on YouTube or look at A&E or look at Disney or Hulu,” she said. “It rotates through all these different platforms now, so it’s harder for people to find.”
In fact, her “Meals in Minutes” recently was renewed for more than 100 new episodes, and she’s producing two additional shows with other stars. Meanwhile, she’s planning an eighth humanitarian trip to Ukraine — she’s been collaborating on them with José Andrés since early in the war — recently launched her own gin, and still sells plenty of pots and pans and pet foods, the latter of which helps fund The Rachael Ray Foundation, which has donated $140 million to animal welfare and nutritional advocacy groups.
Today, culinary pedigrees among food celebrities are few and far between, making the early critiques of Ray — She’s not a serious cook! She’s not a chef! — seem quaint, sexist, maybe both. She’s thankful social media has lowered the bar for entry to her world, saying fresh faces no longer need money, connections, a culinary degree or blind luck to get noticed.
What hasn’t changed is the way aging women are judged, particularly when they have the audacity to do so as a public figure. Her appearance has been a hot topic in recent years, but Ray said she refuses to join the beauty bandwagon. “I tried Botox here (pointing at her eyebrows) years ago,” she said. “And I just looked sort of shocked or something. And I thought, this isn’t you.”
At this year’s South Beach festival’s Burger Bash, which Ray has hosted for two decades — consuming some 568 burgers over the years, but who’s counting? — crowds swarmed her with stories of growing up on her recipes and shows. At a private dinner the next night, 20-plus people paid $500 each to clamor as she served pasta alle vongole and told family stories while Cusimano mixed cocktails.
“Honey! I’m talking too much! This got hot!” Ray said, handing him a Martinez cocktail to refresh. “I don’t drink a hot cocktail. I almost never drink the second half of my cocktail.” The crowd of mostly middle-aged women nodded enthusiastically, clearly adopting a new Ray-endorsed rule to foist on their own spouses.
“I love the fact that it’s still relevant that I come here,” Ray said. “I’m a woman in her mid-50s that’s still employed, still making programming, and still can book an event and have thousands of people come out. That means a lot to me.”
What comes next?
“I like not knowing,” she said. “I like watching things evolve and discovering what’s next for myself. So there’s no plan. There’s no road map.”
J.M. Hirsch is a food and travel journalist, and the former food editor for The Associated Press.
By J.M. HIRSCH, Associated Press
MIAMI (AP) — For nearly 10 years running, Lesley VanNess never missed the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, a beachfront bacchanal of celebrities, booze and bites that tens of thousands of attendees pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to join.
It was about access, the chance to nosh and gab with the likes of Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay, people she otherwise could experience only via the hands-in-pans purview of the Food Network.
“I’d get the Food Network Magazine and there would be advertisements for it. I’m like, ‘0h my god! You could go to that? Go to these great events and meet these celebrity chefs?’,” said VanNess, a 44-year-old former restaurant owner from Iowa. “I’m in!”
That was during the food festival heyday, a decade-long stretch starting around 2010 when copycat events popped up everywhere, creating a circuit-like scene for A-list chefs (and ample wannabes).
Then came social media, a force that melted barriers between fans and food celebs. People like VanNess realized that instead of crowding into football field-size tents to chance a chat with Flay, they could just DM him.
Or better yet, they could tune in to online #instafood chatter to perhaps discover the next Ray or Flay, a whole new level of social cred unlocked.
VanNess hasn’t been back to South Beach since at least 2020. “I’d rather see them on social media or go to their restaurant,” she said.
Last weekend, the South Beach Wine & Food Festival turned 25, cementing it as one of the elders of the festival scene, along with its sister event, the New York City Wine & Food Festival, and the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. By all accounts, all three are going strong. But many smaller festivals have disappeared, victims of the pandemic, slumping ticket sales, soaring food and labor costs, and chef disinterest.
So, are food festivals still relevant?
“South Beach and New York, they fill a niche and I can see them going on forever. But food events and food festivals are going in a whole other direction,” said Mike Thelin, one of the founders of the now shuttered Oregon festival Feast Portland.
Festivals’ success long hinged on the need of chefs, wineries, mixologists, food producers, and what only now are known as food influencers to reach a wider audience. In 2026, that’s an antiquated notion.
“In 2010, they wanted to get on the map,” Thelin said. “They don’t need that anymore.”
That doesn’t mean festivals are dead. There’s a recalibration happening, he explained. What many call “white tent affairs,” a not-so-subtle nod to South Beach’s events that stretch along the sands of the Atlantic, are fading.
“If I’m going to a certain region, I want to know what makes that region special,” Thelin said. “I don’t want to go into a giant white tent that’s devoid of geography and drink a bunch of wines from California if I’m in Washington or Tennessee.”
Taking their place? A host of small, hyper-focused events grounded in people and place. Events like AAPI Food & Wine, a 3-year-old Oregon and New York City-based festival that highlights the work of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
“The foodie scene has changed so much,” said Lois Cho, one of the founders of that event, which draws about 1,000 attendees a year. “People didn’t realize wine and black bean noodles and izakaya and all these different Thai dishes — they had no idea they paired. Creating a different narrative and community where you can connect with people, those are the types of events we’ll see now.”
Social media, she said, unlocked so many overlooked voices.
“And a lot of people haven’t caught on because it’s been a lot of cookie-cutter events for the last 20 years,” she said.
It’s been a similar story for the Southbound Food Festival, which celebrates the culinary scene of Birmingham, Alabama. Started in 2022 and stretching over a week every fall, the event pulls support not just from chefs, but also the region’s art and music scenes.
“There’s less appeal today with these TV chefs. Great chefs are everywhere,” said Nancy Hopkins, one of the event’s founders. “People come to celebrate and uplift Birmingham.”
Still, as Thelin said, the South Beach Wine & Food Festival and it’s New York sibling aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, white tents, Food Network faces and all. Tickets to nearly all of South Beach’s 110 events, which featured 500-plus chefs and food personalities, sold out this year. In its quarter century, the festival has raised more than $45 million for the Florida International University Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.
Lee Schrager, the force behind the two festivals, said the South Beach blueprint remains relevant today.
“There’s something very different about DM’ing Bobby Flay than going to an intimate dinner at a table of 10 that he’s doing that’s sold out in three days,” Schrager said. “Social media has made everyone available, but can you touch and feel it?”
The first South Beach event, attended by only 10 chefs, was little more than a wine tasting. This year, more than 30,000 people attended. Martha Stewart hosted a luncheon at Joe’s Stone Crab, Italian celebrity butcher Dario Cecchini tossed slabs of beef into an eager dinner crowd, and Ray reprised her Burger Bash, where everything from Kool-Aid pickles to foie gras adorned smashed wagyu patties on potato buns.
Schrager acknowledged that most smaller festivals can’t operate the way his do, including hosting events he knows will sell tickets even if they ultimately lose money. He said he sold $7 million in tickets this year and brought in $6 million in sponsorships — and netted just a little over $1 million.
“It’s a good number in the festival world, but it’s not a great return if you’re running a profit business,” he said.
Ray, who has participated in nearly every South Beach and New York festival, continues to show up. It’s about loyalty to Schrager, who took her seriously when much of the food world didn’t. But it’s also about in-person access to fans.
“I love talking to people, being with people, having people climb all over you, hang on you, give you a compliment,” she said. “I love being in the real-life experience.”
J.M. Hirsch is a food and travel journalist, and the former food editor for The Associated Press.
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