Chef Rock Is on a Roll
With the Clock Ticking on His 'Hell's Kitchen' Fame, He Takes On Las Vegas

By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

HENDERSON, Nev. -- Rock Harper is psyched, he's hyped, he's restless, he's ready for his first official day as a celebrity chef.

He's also lost.

One block from his new home on the outskirts of Sin City, the cookie-cutter houses blend into a sea of desert pink, and Harper, veteran of 70-mile daily commutes to the District, can't find his way out of his own neighborhood.

"My 15 minutes are already running out," he frets.

If he's going to cash in on his fame, the winner of "Hell's Kitchen" knows, he needs to move fast. Chef Rock is already a brand name and a charitable foundation, in the rough draft of his dream. "I'm going to have a few cookbooks, hopefully. Definitely a product line. And my own culinary apparel: Food industry apparel will never be the same. There are definitely sauces and vinaigrettes I'd like to bottle. Knives, maybe. All chefs like their knives," he says.

Strategizing, not sauteing, is what ultimately won him the grand prize in last month's third-season finale of Fox's reality show. But even with a $250,000 contract as head chef at a new Italian restaurant inside the Green Valley Ranch Resort, Spa and Casino just outside Las Vegas, and even with bratty Bonnie and back-stabbing Brad and all the other "Hell's Kitchen" contestants vanquished, Harper can't stop now. A friend who's an agent back in Washington is putting out feelers for him, looking for opportunities. Hopes are raised, and just as quickly dashed, for getting on 50 Cent's guest list for the MTV Video Awards.

Harper arrives two hours before dinner service begins at the upscale Terra Verde. None of the dishes on the menu is a reprise from "Hell's Kitchen," and the 30-year-old winner will be too busy greeting fans to actually cook for them, at least initially. Eventually, he will be allowed to add some of his own specials to the set menu.

Introduced to the staff he will ultimately oversee, Harper tells them: "Do what you do. I won't get in your way. I'm not cooking tonight. In the next week or so, we'll get to the fun stuff and you'll really get to meet me." They politely applaud, and Harper later recounts this with glee while schmoozing with some diners, adding, "I don't think they'll be clapping for me in two weeks." The fans nod appreciatively, familiar with Rock's fiery side from Episode 6, when he threw a tantrum after losing a challenge and being ordered to bag mountains of the TV restaurant's smelly trash.

Resort managers say they got more than 100 calls the morning after the "Hell's Kitchen" finale, and reservations are booked solid for Harper's opening night: 200 tables, plus some open for walk-ins. A small placard announcing his arrival perches atop a penny slot machine. ( You could win again and again and again! the game promises.) Special menus with a small blurb welcoming him are printed up and left in strategic stacks around the restaurant for Harper to autograph. An eager cook holds up a plastic spoon containing sabayon for Harper to taste, and someone from corporate whispers something to the general manager about making sure Harper gets his state health card. A local TV crew shows up and asks him to pose in the kitchen "doing some chef stuff."

Diners begin flowing into the restaurant, nudging each other and waving when they spot Harper, whose mission tonight is to stop at every table. Beaming strangers wrap him in bear hugs, snap his picture and keep saying how proud of him they are. Lipstick soon smudges his new white chef's jacket. There are star-struck tourists, a tipsy gypsy in a floor-length black waistcoat, some motherly Canadians and a pair of purported music producers from London who send their waiter to fetch them Rock.

Harper's wife, Tamara, arrives with their two small children, his younger brother, both grandmothers and a family friend. Harper's 4-year-old daughter is tired and weepy and whining for shrimp; his 7-year-old son carries a tote full of the Power Rangers that his father ruefully admits are "his only friends" since the family was uprooted this summer. "It's been hard on them," Tamara acknowledges. They drove across the country in a Kia a week ago and had just moved out of the resort's VIP suite and into their new place that morning. They watch Harper make his rounds.

Harper lingers at each table, eager to connect, joking about favorite episodes and answering the same questions over and over again: No, the show's abusive star, British chef Gordon Ramsay, isn't really such a jerk; no, the diners in the TV restaurant don't pay; he and Brad are best buds now; Josh is clueless, Jen is a sweetheart, Bonnie deserved her spot in the finals with him.

He is touched when some butter executives who hired him for a promotional event in Orlando show up to claim the big VIP table. "I can't believe you came! Thank you!" he says. The butter big shots invite him to join them later at an exclusive private club on the Strip. The waiters who overhear this pull him aside and urge him to go. It's the place in Vegas right now.

Harper is tempted, but it's close to midnight by the time he's done, and he remembers his exhausted wife in an empty pink house with her mother, two kids and 86 Power Rangers and decides instead to go home. Wherever that is.

Business is more than double than on a typical Monday, resort managers say, and turnout is even higher the second night. Harper offers to help the hostess seat guests, "if you want, if it doesn't get in the way."

Before the rush begins, he parks himself at an empty table near the bar, where his words are punctuated by the electronic bloops and ding-dings of the slot machines in the smoky casino beyond the front entrance. "Spoons, bowls, plates, hats," he says, ticking off Chef Rock products-to-be. "Furniture."

He smiles at the irony of that last bit: His own household is still in storage back in Spotsylvania, Va., and the Harpers are camping on air mattresses in the modest rambler he leased on a hilltop about 20 minutes from the Strip. Already, they're not so sure they want to stay when Harper's year-long contract is up; the bleak desert landscape will take some getting used to, they tell each other. They yearn for trees. And grass. The patch in the rental's back yard is fake. "At least there's no mowing," Harper observes.

Virginia has an emotional claim on the other part of the Chef Rock franchise, too, the part he calls "paying it forward," where his own success might inspire and motivate kids lured by the street life and where his training in culinary arts might translate into franchises that teach low-income single mothers how to shop for and prepare healthful meals.

"I'm not going to be able to try to save everyone," he realizes, "but I'm going to target the children I was around, and the child I was."

That child lost his father at 2 and grew up in poverty with three siblings and a mother who worked long hours as a social worker. Rahman "Rock" Harper discovered cooking in a home ec course in junior high, but in high school, at Alexandria's T.C. Williams, the streets were a powerful lure.

"There were a lot of drugs in my neighborhood in south Alexandria. It was tough. Everybody wants to be cool, and the cool kids were the hustlers. They were good guys who made bad choices." Harper didn't like school much and had a habit of leaving campus for lunch and not coming back. He was about to flunk out when his mother dragged him to her church, Union Temple Baptist in Anacostia.

"I saw rappers, actors and athletes on TV," Harper recalls, "but for the first time there, I started seeing powerful, professional black people: doctors, lawyers." A deacon accompanied Rock to his principal's office to devise a plan that would let him graduate. Culinary school at Johnson & Wales University was the next stop. He married, started a family and worked his way up to the executive chef's job at B. Smith's in Union Station.

After nine years, though, he was restless. "I just wanted to change," he says. He auditioned twice for "Hell's Kitchen" before making it onto the show where a dozen cooks compete for the approval of the foul-mouthed Ramsay, who ultimately chooses the winner. The only prize is the year's contract at Green Valley, which pays his inflated salary out of the marketing budget.

"They have purchased a one-year ad," Harper acknowledges. Green Valley's general manager, Bob Finch, says much the same thing, but he also clearly hopes that "the heart and passion and drive" he admires in Harper can find a good long-term career fit in the parent Station Casinos corporation. Harper is more eager to show that fervor to poor kids "back home," to inspire them "to do something great and really believe in yourself, that the only way to do it is just do it."

He hopes to open doors that he is surprised are still closed even in 2007. "My profession is one of the most racist professions in this country," he says. "Minorities dominate the food service industry at the lower levels. Why doesn't that resonate at the higher levels?"

The bartender, servers and floor manager hurry past Harper with quick hellos, intent on last-minute details before their own nightly show begins. Harper will be their boss, second-in-command to executive chef Massimiliano Campanari, a 31-year-old Italian who has pictures on his computer proving that the pope once ate his pesto back home in Genoa.

Going from executive chef at B. Smith's to head chef here technically is a step down for Harper, but at triple his former salary and a share in profits, he's quick to point out, it's a great demotion.

His eyes narrow as he stares into the middle distance.

"That wineglass is cloudy," he says, nodding toward the tower of glassware ready for setup. "Things like that I don't tolerate."

Earning respect rather than recognition is a task he might be underestimating. Campanari urges him to come back into the kitchen and work the line, to get to know the cooks and learn their strengths and weaknesses, "become part of the family" he put together when he opened the restaurant in August. Campanari is as tender as Ramsay was abusive, dedicating ravioli to his dead grandmother and waiting each week for the care packages his father sends from Italy. The cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves is due any day now. He has been in Vegas for eight years, long enough to swear off Russian girlfriends but not yet fully acclimated.

He wanders out of the kitchen, watches Harper work the room and wonders, with a bemused smile, whether he should start keeping "maybe a container of oxygen" back in the kitchen for his new head chef.

When Harper began dicing shallots for the TV crew on opening night, a worried cook had scurried out to tell the boss: Rock is in the kitchen using a knife! Should we get the metal glove? The cook reportedly was surprised to learn that Harper was, in fact, a classically trained chef who would not be needing the protective gear reserved for beginners. Harper has picked up on the wary vibe, making mental note of a waitress's rude demeanor, a sommelier's cool greeting. ("Sommeliers are almost always snooty," he rationalizes.)

He spends his second night tirelessly working the crowd again, bonding with the strangers who eat the $42 veal chops instead of the ones who prepare them. The fans become his confidants.

"I know some of the cooks are looking at me like I'm a fraud," he tells two men from Salt Lake City who give him man-hugs and knuckle-knocks. "I'll show you I'm a bad-ass dude in the kitchen. I'm not short on confidence. I tell the staff, 'A TV show's a TV show, but some parts of it are real.' " The Salt Lake men snicker and hoot.

Anyone who saw Episode 7 knows you don't challenge Rock Harper. When Brad hinted at his shortcomings in front of Ramsay, who could forget Harper's steely voice interrupting him mid-complaint?

Say my name! Harper demanded. Just say my name!