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The Food Network is home to many celebrity chefs, from Ina Garten to Alex Guarnaschelli, who have built a solid following after appearing on the cable channel. The Food Network does not play when securing deals with some of the biggest names in the food industry, be it prominent restaurateurs, cookbook authors, or chefs. Interestingly, there’s one celebrity chef who struggled to secure a deal with the channel, and he hasn’t shied away from disclosing how his troubled past kept him from being a Food Network personality. It’s none other than Matty Matheson.
“Well, I know that I could never have been on Food Network. I’ve had enough meetings to know that I could never have been on it,” Matheson said on the “Obsessed: The Podcast.” According to him, his controversial past, which involved “drinking and drugging at a young age,” got in the way of the opportunity. He unapologetically admitted that during that phase of his life, he could take acid at 7:30 in the morning. He’s also previously shared that he got his first taste of coke when he was in 11th grade. He supposedly had a wake-up call when he suffered a heart attack at 29, but he quickly went back to his old ways, thinking that what didn’t kill him made him invincible.
How Matty Matheson turned his life around
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Now in his early 40s, Matty Matheson is already an accomplished celebrity chef. Aside from hosting his own cooking show on Netflix, “Just a Dash,” he stars as Neil Fak in the critically acclaimed FX series “The Bear.” Additionally, he runs a successful cooking channel on YouTube, where he has over 1.62 million followers. Looking at the trajectory of his career, one could say that Matheson managed to turn his life around. Even during the pandemic, he was proactive about his career. “I got really scared about not being able to provide for my family,” he told Highsnobiety. “I was like, ‘I need to fix that. I need to generate jobs. I need to generate opportunity.”
Matheson’s drive to change things led him from working at restaurants to owning his own establishments and then finding any means to put his cooking skills out there, making content for YouTube and Vice. He also dabbled in publishing his recipes, authoring three cookbooks thus far. In hindsight, Matheson admitted via the “Obsessed” podcast that he didn’t regret missing out on The Food Network opportunities.
It’s worth noting that he wouldn’t have been the most controversial figure on the channel, since many Food Network stars also faced high-profile scandals throughout their careers. One of the network’s celebrity chefs from the early 2000s was even sent to prison in relation to the murder of his wife.
Dining and Cooking