Former Food Network Stars You Rarely Hear About Anymore

Food Network came along and saw the entertainment value in watching others cook and eat. After a tentative launch in the early 1990s as a purveyor of instructional cooking programs, the service has evolved and expanded to include a wide variety of shows that cover nearly every aspect of eating and food possible. This aggressive push to establish brand identity resulted in a growing collective of people to anchor those shows. Food Network has made stars out of home cooks, chefs, and restaurant industry personnel, while elevating the profile and adding credibility for other experts in the field.

Because the channel has altered its image so much and continues to do so, it's perpetually examining who no longer clicks with viewers, while the on-air personalities themselves also seem to know when they've had enough of the number one name in culinary television and they leave Food Network behind. After they leave the network that beams their image into millions of homes on a daily basis for years on end, sometimes owing to controversies they'd rather fans forgot, Food Network stars tend to virtually drop out of sight, their public profile dimmed somewhat. Here are some of the biggest stars in Food Network history who later left the broadcaster and went on to do other things — interesting, compelling, and worthwhile things, just in front of smaller audiences.

In 1996, the very young Food Network enlisted Sara Moulton, a moderately well known food editor at "Good Morning America" and collaborator with Julia Child, to host its daytime studio demo show "Cooking Live." It ran for six years and was so valuable in helping viewers cook recipes they saw on TV that it spawned an evening spinoff, "Cooking Live Primetime," and then led to Moulton's more relaxed 2002 to 2005 preparation series "Sara's Secrets." After that, Food Network fired one of its longest-lasting employees for precisely that reason. "They dumped me. I'll say it," she told Eater. "I was part of the old guard and every time a new president comes in they make changes."

Following her unwelcome exit, Moulton ventured into other avenues of food television, albeit slightly less visible ones. She's hosted 13 seasons of the cooking and travelogue series "Sara's Weeknight Meals" for American Public Television, and it's syndicated to nonprofit broadcast channels throughout the United States. She's also continued to appear regularly on "Good Morning America" cooking segments and often guested on the food-featuring talk show "Rachael Ray." The four extensive and exhaustively instructional cookbooks she's authored remain in print, while Moulton also wrote columns for the Washington Post and the Associated Press. And up until publisher Condé Nast shut down "Gourmet," Moulton was the acclaimed magazine's staff executive chef.

What was then called the Television Food Network launched in 1993, and at first, its low-key lineup included multiple shows hosted by David Rosengarten. The personality driving programs like "In Food Today," "Food News and Views," and "Taste" was at the time best known for his writing about wine and stint as a college theater professor. The series won Rosengarten a James Beard Award for Best National TV Cooking Show, but it was still eventually canceled.

The last time that the first Food Network anchor appeared on the network he helped established: 2012, in an episode of "Iron Chef America." Rosengarten has since authored multiple cookbooks, served as a contributing editor of the now defunct "Gourmet" magazine, and a food writer for a blog associated with the public radio show "The Splendid Table." 

In the mid-2000s, his reputation in the food writing community nearly got him back onto Food Network. A producer from "Food Network Star," then known as "The Next Food Network Star," who was unfamiliar with Rosengarten's history, recruited him to appear on the reality contest. "I'm not sure you're aware of this, but I have some history being on Food Network, and you might want to just look into this before we go ahead and schedule an audition," Rosengarten told the producer, according to "From Scratch: Inside the Food Network."

Easily one of Food Network's most recognizable and beloved talents in the 2000s and 2010s, Paula Deen brought warmth and Southern comfort food to the network with "Paula's Home Cooking" and various other shows where she (and sometimes her adult sons) made decadent meals and treats while proudly throwing in all the butter, cream, and oil possible. That all came to a sudden end for the Georgia-based cook, caterer, and celebrity in 2013. During a deposition regarding a lawsuit alleging that one of her restaurants operated under a cloud of cruelty and racially charged behavior, Deen admitted to using racist slurs and similar language in the past. Food Network basically fired Deen, announcing that it wouldn't renew its star's contract, despite a tearful plea on NBC's "Today" about how she wasn't really a racist.

The Deen comeback began in 2015, far away from Food Network. After a brief stint on "Dancing with the Stars," The Paul Deen Channel hit Roku, in advance of the food celebrity opening Paula Deen's Family Kitchen, a restaurant in Sevier County, Tennessee. Other locations followed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Panama City Beach, Florida, as did two in Texas, but those quickly closed. 

Deen's still making television, but for harder-to-find outlets. Since 2016, "Positively Paula" has aired on the rural and country-oriented cable channel RFD-TV, while the cook regularly sells her Paula Deen Jewelry line on the JTV home-shopping network.

Food Network entered the daytime talk show space in 2014 with "The Kitchen." Hosted by a group of chefs from different areas of expertise, the show originally featured five personalities, one of whom was Marcela Valladolid. She brought her perspective as a classically trained chef and author of Mexican cuisine cookbooks to "The Kitchen," a show she'd walk away from in 2017. 

Also the host of "Mexican Made Easy" and a contributor to "Iron Chef America," "Beat Bobby Flay," and "The Best Thing I Ever Ate," Valladolid disappeared from Food Network around 2020. Valladolid departed in part because she found it difficult to advocate for her Mexican heritage and culture at the programmer. "When you're with executives from the most powerful network on culinary TV, you don't think you can fight back on anything," she told Parents Latina (via NBC's "Today"). "I have nothing but gratitude for that relationship, but there are life cycles to jobs. I wanted freedom to do things my way. So one day I said, 'Thank you so much, but no thank you,' and that was it."

Valladolid remains a cooking instructor, but independently teaching classes online with her sister. The chef remains a frequent guest on food shows and programs that feature food, which don't air on the Food Network. In recent years, she's graced "Fame to Table: With Matthew Hoffman," "Home and Family," and "Selena + Chef."

A master and advocate for the rich culinary traditions of New Orleans, John Besh was a stalwart of the ever-growing realm of food television in the 2000s and 2010s. The host of "Chef John Besh's New Orleans" and a frequent contributor to "Top Chef," Besh was a go-to guy for all sorts of Food Network programming, including "The "Kitchen," "Iron Chef America," "The Next Iron Chef," and The Best Thing I Ever Ate." Through the Besh Restaurant Group, he had a strong hand in the operations of 12 restaurants.

Besh disappeared from both areas where he loomed large, the New Orleans restaurant scene and Food Network, from 2017. The major New Orleans newspaper The Times-Picayune published its investigation into Besh's businesses and found 25 people who alleged that they'd been subjected to sexual harassment, unwelcome touching, and improper behavior, all of which was reportedly encouraged by management, including the celebrity chef. Besh reportedly left his restaurant group, while Food Network edited Besh out of an already filmed episode of "Iron Chef Showdown" in which he'd been a judge.

Seven years later, news emerged that Besh hadn't left his restaurant group at all. He'd continued to benefit financially — quietly and secretly — from his 12 eateries, so much so that in 2024 he was able to publicly declare himself a partner in a brand new New Orleans restaurant, Delacroix.

For more than two decades, Mario Batali was one of the most omnipresent and prolific figures in the space where food meets pop culture. An acclaimed chef and restaurateur in the crowded and high quality New York City restaurant world of the 1990s, he started hosting the Italian cooking program "Molto Mario" on Food Network until its cancelation in 2007. He remained a fixture on the channel, regularly showing up on "Iron Chef America," among other series, and hosting food shows and appearing in food segments all over the dial, including a long-term gig as a co-host of the ABC daytime food panel show "The Chew." 

In November 2017, Food Network announced a "Molto Mario" revival, just before the publication of a Batali-focused exposé by Eater New York. Four ex-employees of Batali's restaurants alleged numerous acts of inappropriate conduct and unwelcome intimate physical contact from their boss. ABC pulled Batali off "The Chew," Food Network called off the new "Molto Mario," and Batali apologized to his fans via his email newsletter.

Over the next few years, Batali divested himself of his ownership stakes in all of his restaurants and faced two sexual assault lawsuits, which he settled. After disappearing from the public sphere for so long, Batali returned to televisual cooking with "Molto A Casa," a livestreamed Italian food demonstration in December 2023. The chef broadcast his lessons from his home in Northport, Michigan (population: under 600), where he moved after facing so many scandals.

For about its first decade of life, the Food Network's face was Emeril Lagasse. The original host of the basic cooking series "How to Boil Water" was soon in charge of "Essence of Emeril" and then "Emeril Live." From 1997 on, the nightly primetime show placed Lagasse in a studio, preparing the dishes he'd perfected over a luminous culinary career, in front of a chef and a studio audience who would be absolutely delighted when he shouted his catchphrases "let's kick it up a notch!" or "Bam!" 

While very popular for a very long time, Lagasse's act began to wear thin by 2004, when, according to Food Network Research, viewers demanded reality, competition, and documentary shows over cooking instructional shows. Food Network changed up the format and set of "Emeril Live," but it didn't work.

After the final episodes of the ill-fated relaunched "Emeril Live" aired in late 2007, Lagasse jumped to the obscure Ion Television broadcast service in 2010. "The Emeril Lagasse Show" was structured like a late night talk show, and lasted five episodes. Later that year, "Fresh Food Fast with Emeril Lagasse" made it just 20 episodes on The Cooking Channel, and the subsequent traveling with chefs show "The Originals with Emeril" made it 13 episodes. In the late 2010s and 2020s, if Lagasse is on television, it's in a judging or advisory capacity on entries in the "Top Chef" franchise or in an infomercial, pitching inexpensive life-saving kitchen gadgets.

In 2009, former finance professional Melissa D'Arabian became famous virtually overnight. That year she won Season 5 of "Food Network Star," and with it the job of starring in a Food Network series of her own creation, "Ten Dollar Dinners." In addition to taping 84 episodes of her signature show (and publishing a tie-in cookbook), D'Arbian could be found on plenty of other Food Network programs, like "Chopped," "Rachael vs. Guy," "Cutthroat Kitchen," and "The Kitchen." By the end of the 2010s, D'Arabian's in-house work started to slow down, and she hasn't been seen on Food Network since an episode of "Guy's Grocery Games," hosted by Guy Fieri, the highest-paid chef in cable, in 2021.

D'Arabian switched gears to pursue a different side of culture performance. In 2023, she enrolled at Columbia University's School of the Arts and is pursuing a degree in theater management and producing. Inside of her first year, D'Arabian staged "White Rose" at an off-Broadway theater.

Not long after graduating from the French Culinary Institute, Claire Robinson took her top-shelf chef skills to the Food Network. After popping up to help her cable colleagues cook on shows like "Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello" and "Grill It! with Bobby Flay," Robinson headlined her own instructional series, the populist and economical "5 Ingredient Fix." Making cooking on TV somehow seem glamorous and entrenched as a Food Network personality during the 2009 to 2011 run of that program, Robinson subsequently competed on "Chopped" and "Cutthroat Kitchen," waxed nostalgic on more than 20 episodes of "The Best Thing I Ever Ate," and hosted multiple seasons of "Food Network Challenge."

Appearing on TV only sporadically since 2012, Robinson has been missing from the Food Network airwaves entirely since a 2021 spot on "Beat Bobby Flay." She still prepares dishes in a performative and public manner, although not in front of TV cameras. Robinson is a regular on the speaking engagement circuit. The former television chef also runs live demos and in-person cooking shows at food festivals across the country.

At the forefront of a couple of Food Network's many travel-oriented documentary programs with a culinary focus: chef Joey Altman. In 2001, he co-hosted "Appetite for Adventure," which found the on-air personality galavanting around and tasting the local cuisine in Mexico, California, Hawaii, and Utah. After that single-season show ran its course, Altman returned to Food Network in 2003 with "Tasting Napa," wherein he explored the many independently-owned world class wineries and restaurants in that fertile region of northern California.

Altman's relatively brief period on the national Food Network followed and ran concurrently with his long-running, regional cooking series, "Bay Café." After that show's eventual cancellation, Altman utilized his degree in restaurant management, classical French training, and executive chef experience in numerous disciplines to start his own business. Since 2006, he's operated a consulting firm that helps restaurants and food adjacent-business open up and expand. He's provided his services for the likes of Torani Italian Syrups, Saag's Meats, Tommy Bahama, and Williams Sonoma.

Food Network's late 2000s hit cooking show "Down Home with the Neelys" charmed viewers with its romantic comedy and happily-ever-after sensibility. Married cooks Pat and Gina Neely, of Neely's Bar-B-Que restaurants, demonstrated the proper ways to grill and sauce meat and prepare Southern cuisine, and in their real Tennessee kitchen. The only time they didn't keep the conversation and instruction going was during their numerous breaks to hug, kiss, or talk about how much they loved each other. 

It was something of a shock to viewers in 2014 when two years after the final "Down Home with the Neelys" episodes aired, the couple announced that their 20-year marriage was over. "Moving forward our focus will be on our individual brands and we are optimistic about our respective futures," the estranged pair said in a joint statement to People. Evidently, the image of happiness they projected on Food Network was inaccurate. "I tried to leave five times and I just didn't have the strength but the fifth time I held on to that," Gina Neely later told People.

In 2018, Gina Neely returned to TV, but not to Food Network. She was a cast member on the Bravo reality dating series "To Rome with Love." A few months later, Pat Neely announced that he'd remarried in 2017, to a nurse, with whom he was already raising two children.