Chef Tell: The Biography of America's Pioneer TV Showman Chef

By Ronald Joseph Kule, Regis Philbin and Walter Staib

Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell—nickname of Friedemann Paul Erhardt, America’s first TV showman chef. Big on personality and flavor, Chef Tell was once called by Philadelphia magazine the “affably roguish Bad Boy of the Philadelphia restaurant world.” Chef Tell explores how a young German American chef became America’s biggest TV celebrity chef of his time. Most of Chef Tell’s forty million baby boomer viewers—a number comparable to Julia Child’s—never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story.

Until now.

This winning biography brings us “behind the line” into his kitchen and into his, at times, turbulent personal life. Tell was known as a charmer, as he worked the audience for live television shows, but also a quick-witted perfectionist, who demanded only the freshest ingredients for his life of food, fame, fortune, and women.

Chef Tell’s life—his colleagues would agree—was a managed, complicated, and mercurial affair, which changed two industries and millions of home cooks.

An absorbing account of an extraordinary man, Chef Tell takes us through his personal and professional highs and lows; and his glorious successes that explain why so many loved, or hated, him then and miss him now. The day Chef Tell died messages of surprise and shock flooded the media, including “Chef Tell has died? Stick a fork in him, he’s done.”

Chef Tell would have loved that. Readers will know why and agree.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781628734485

Ronald Joseph Kule

In his words, 'Internationally published author, biographer, novelist, and ghostwriter sounds fancy, but I'm simply a professional author with skills and a mission to write entertaining, uplifting stories for my readers' enjoyment. People tell me, 'You paint emotional pictures with your words.' Well, I write what I see in front of me, adding imagination where it improves the story. Growing up in a cramped household, competing for personal space among seven brothers and sisters, two parents, (most times) at least one good hunting dog, and a score of kids living on our block, I learned how to hold my ground, at times from a perch 30 feet up in my favorite tree in the woods behind our house. Born in Bogota, Colombia, of Polish-immigrant coal miner and blue-blooded Colombian-Chilean parentage, Kule came to appreciate ethnic values and cultural differences by observing the disparate social classes and living conditions of Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama, the 48 contiguous American states and Hawaii, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, England, Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Russia, mainland China, Barbados, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent directly. His heritage paint-brushed wanderlust onto his life canvas: he has performed speaking engagements in 17 countries. He laughs often and can experience a panorama of emotions just for fun, but he prefers making other people smile, laugh, and generally feel happier after having met him or read his books. If you curl up with one of Kule's books and find yourself breathless, provoked, inspired, changed, and feeling like you just undertook an important journey that left you more than satisfied, he will consider his work as the author a success. The author's home is in Clearwater, Florida, but his passport yearns for more national stamps, and his bags can be packed at a moment's notice! Because the author also enjoyed a successful sales, sales management, and sales-training career spanning 39 years, he wrote up his successful actions and a uniquely different approach to selling in his acclaimed sales book series, LISTEN MORE SELL MORE.