The Food Network’s Original Chefs: Where Are They Now?

Bobby Flay

Bobby Flay joined the Food Network right at the start in 1994 — when its name was still TV Food Network!

“That place has been my family for a long time,” Flay, whose first show Grillin’ & Chillin’ premiered in 1996, told PEOPLE in early 2023. “I love having my Food Network family because it’s my shorthand of life. They’ve let me basically bring to life my culinary dreams on TV.”

In the more than 30 years since his time on the network began, he’s had his hand in many shows including Iron Chef America, Brunch @ Bobby’s and Beat Bobby Flay, won four Emmy awards, penned several cookbooks and opened multiple restaurants around the country.

In 2021, he ventured into the pet food business when he launched a brand of cat food named Made by Nacho after his own cat, Nacho.

Flay shares his one daughter, Sophie, 28, with ex-wife Kate Connelly. 

Guy Fieri

Guy Fieri’s career on the Food Network began in 2006 after winning The Next Food Network Star.

Following his win, his show Guy’s Big Bite debuted in 2006 and he now hosts series including Guy’s Grocery Games, Tournament of Champions and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (which is currently airing its 51st season). In 2021 he signed an $80 million deal with the network.

And even longer than his relationship to the network is his marriage to his wife Lori, whom he wed in 1995. The two welcomed sons Hunter, 28, and Ryder, 19 as well as helped to raise their nephew Jules, 22, following the death of Guy’s sister Morgan in 2011.

Ree Drummond

Ree Drummond began hosting The Pioneer Woman on the Food Network in 2011. This year, the show is celebrating its 38th season.

The Pioneer Woman brand has expanded exponentially since the show (inspired by her blog of the same name) launched, and now includes everything from a line of clothing to kitchenware to furniture. She and her husband of more than 25 years, Ladd, also own many businesses in their hometown of Pawhuska, Oklahoma including a bakery, restaurant, hotel and retail store called The Pioneer Woman Mercantile.

In her personal life, Drummond and Ladd share five children together and in 2024 became grandparents for the first time when their eldest daughter, Alex, welcomed her first daughter.

Anne Burrell

Anne Burrell’s first Food Network show came in 2008 with the premiere of Secrets of a Restaurant Chef which ran for 9 seasons. In 2012, she launched the show Chef Wanted and since 2010 has been a host and mentor on Worst Cooks in America since 2010.

Recently fans had some questions when the latest season of Worst Cooks in America Celebrity Addition: Heroes vs. Villains premiered in early January and Burrell was nowhere to be seen.

“Chef-how come you are not doing Worst Cooks this season. That is your show,” one fan asked below a Jan. 10 post to which Burrell responded: “Uuuuughhh…I know. And I don’t know. 🫤🤷🏼‍♀️❤️” In wake of the confusion, neither Burrell or Food Network had an official comment to share with PEOPLE.

Burrell married Stuart Claxton in 2021, after meeting on the dating app Bumble in 2018,

Rachael Ray

Rachael Ray first stepped on to the Food Network scene in 2001 with her show 30 Minute Meals, and later with $40 a Day and Week in a Day. Outside of the Food Network, Ray hosted her daytime talk show, The Rachael Ray Show, from 2006- 2023.

These days, Ray is as busy as ever, telling PEOPLE she’s “not really good with downtime. Projects include her series Rachael Ray in Tuscany and podcast I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. In addition to her shows, she also lines of all sorts of cookware, a pet food brand, Nutrish, and of course, cookbooks.

In 2005 Ray married John Cusimano in Italy after meeting at a mutual friend’s party four years prior. 15 years later, the couple built a house in Tuscany, their favorite location.

Giada De Laurentiis

Giada De Laurentiis has secured her spot as one of the network’s longest-running chefs after being discovered in 2002 by an executive who read about her and her family in Food & Wine, per the Food Network’s site.

Her show Everyday Italian then premiered in 2005, and she later launched Giada’s Weekend Getaways, Giada at Home and jumped into Food Network Star as a judge. Around the same time as her television career was taking off she also began authoring cookbooks, her first aptly titled Everyday Italian, and in the years since had added several more to the collection. In March, her newest title, Super Italian, will hit shelves. Her name is currently on three different restaurants — two in Las Vegas and one in Scottsdale, Arizona — and her lifestyle website, Giadzy, offers her lines of pastas, spices and more.

Outside of food, De Laurentiis is mom to daughter Jade whom she shares with ex Todd Thompson. The mom-of-one has been dating boyfriend Shane Farley since 2015.

David Rosengarten

David Rosengarten starred on one of the network’s debut shows, Taste (left) back in the late 1990s. After writing the James-Beard winning newsletter The Rosengarten Report for several years in the 2000s, The New York Post reported in 2014 that he was bringing it back as a both a print and digital product that published four times a year (though it seems as though it is no longer being produced).

He was formerly a contributor to Forbes, last writing a piece for the publication in 2019.

Alton Brown

Alton Brown first launched Good Eats on the network in 1999 — a gig he kept until 2012. He later hosted Cutthroat Kitchen, Iron Chef America and even brought back a reboot of Good Eats  in 2019. Though in 2022 he left the Food Network to lead Netflix’s new Iron Chef series.

“I don’t really think of myself as having left a place as much as I simply crossed the street to join one of my first loves,” he told EW of his departure at the time. “I had 20 pretty spectacular years at Food Network. I built a brand there. I became part of Iron Chef America there. But to be honest, if Netflix had taken a shot at Iron Chef without me, that would have broken my heart.”

Looking ahead into 2025, Brown is hitting the road in February for the Alton Brown Live: Last Bite tour — a tour he says will be his last. Also in February, Brown is releasing his tenth book Food for Thought though says after the tour wraps in May, he’ll probably step away from the spotlight for a bit: “After the tour, I’ll take a break maybe and disappear for a little while and see if the world misses me. If it doesn’t, oh, well, I had a good run,” he told PEOPLE.

Brown shares an adult daughter, Zoey, with his ex wife, DeAnna Brown and currently lives in Atlanta with his wife, interior designer Elizabeth Ingram, and their three dogs.

Emeril Lagasse

Emeril Lagasse was one of the first ones to venture into celebrity chef territory, gaining enormous popularity through his shows The Essence of Emeril  and Emeril Live and his use of “Bam!” while cooking. Since then he’s appeared on several other shows including Emeril Green, Emeril’s Florida and as a guest judge on Top Chef. More recently, he has appeared on two Roku original shows Emeril Cooks and Emeril Tailgates — both premiering in 2022.

Over the years he has opened more than 20 restaurants around the United States, a culinary journey that began with him landing a job as the executive chef at the famous Commander’s Palace in New Orleans in 1982.

Lagasse shares two daughters Jessica and Jillian with his first wife, Elizabeth Kief. He later welcomed two more children, E.J. and Meril, with his third wife Alden Lovelace, whom he married in 2000. Three of his four children have followed in dad’s footsteps with E.J. working as the chef patron at Lagasse’s flagship restaurant, Emeril’s, and Jillian and Jessica writing two cookbooks together.

Paula Deen

Paula Deen was a part of the Food Network for 11 years before she was fired in 2013, as a result of her admission to using a racial slur. The admission was included in a sworn deposition as part of a lawsuit filed by Lisa Jackson, a former manager of one of Deen’s restaurants, Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House.

Not long after, a federal judge in Georgia dismissed the lawsuit after a settlement was reached. She lost a slew of partnerships in the wake of the initial news, though later appeared as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars and returned to the world of cooking television.

Deen is mom to two sons, Jamie and Bobby, with first husband Jimmy Deen. She has been married to Michael Groover since 2004.

Mario Batali

Mario Batali’s Molto Mario first aired in 1997, per Variety, and continued on through the early 2000s. He was also a longtime co-host ofThe Chew on ABC before stepping away from the show in 2017 following accusations of sexual assault and harassment from multiple women.

Eater reported in 2017 that he had groped four different women and engaged in inappropriate touching over the course of two decades. Another accuser later claimed on an episode of 60 Minutes that Batali drugged and assaulted her while she was unconscious in 2005.

While Batali denied the woman’s allegations in a statement, he apologized for being “deeply inappropriate” in the past.

In 2019, NYPD officials closed three sexual assault investigations involving Batali, as “the charges in two of the case were beyond the New York State statute of limitations, which was lifted in 2006, but not made retroactive,” the department told The New York Times. The third, the outlet explained, was dropped because of a lack of criminal evidence.

According to court documents from July 2021, though, following a four-year investigation by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, Batali and fellow chef Joe Bastianich were ordered to pay $600,000 to 20 people who were sexually harassed while working at the pair’s restaurants after finding that their management company B&B Hospitality Group violated state and city human rights laws.

And in 2022, Batali was found not guilty in a Boston court for the assault trial surrounding claims from the accuser, Natali Tene, who said the chef was “grabbing me in a way that I was never touched before” while posing for a selfie.

After divesting from the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group and selling his minority stake in Eataly in 2019, Batali has kept a low profile. In 2023, he briefly launched an at-home cooking demo video series from his home in Northport, Michigan (saying he was done with the “a——-” in New York), but recently has mostly posed travel and food photos to his Instagram.

Duff Goldman

Duff Goldman stepped on to the scene as baking master in 2006 with the premiere of his show Ace of Cakes out of his shop Charm City Cakes. The show aired for 10 seasons and has since appeared on shows like Holiday Baking Championship, Spring Baking Championship and Kids Baking Championship.

In 2022, Goldman showed off his talents outside of the kitchen when he competed as McTerrier on The Masked Singer.

Goldman married his wife, Johnna, in 2019 after meeting online in 2016. They welcomed their daughter, Josephine, in 2021.

Buddy Velastro

Buddy Velastro’s iconic Cake Boss television series debuted on TLC in 2009 after he appeared on Food Network Challenge in 2007. He has since launched several more shows including Next Great Baker , Food Network’s Bake You Rich and more recently, Legends of the Fork and Buddy Valastro’s Cake Dynasty on A&E.

His family’s bakery, Carlo’s Bakery, has grown from its original shop in Hoboken — which is still in business — and now has locations in New York City, Las Vegas, San Antonio and in the Mall of America.

In 2023, Velastro ventured outside of his comfort zone and made his acting debut in Yes, Chef.

Velastro married his wife Lisa in 2001 and the two now share four kids: Sofia, Buddy Jr., Marco and Carlo.

Alex Guarnaschelli

Like Velastro, Alex Guarnaschelli first landed on the Food Network on 2006 when she competed in Food Network Challenge. She has since appeared on dozens of episodes of Chopped, secured the title of Iron Chef in 2012 and recently hosted Alex vs. America.

Guarnaschelli shares one daughter, Ava, with her ex-husband Brandon Clark and in 2023 the mother-daughter duo released a cookbook together titled Cook It Up.