A Goliath of gourmet gadgets
Williams-Sonoma founder encouraged home chefs to soup up their kitchens
If you’re happy, maybe even thrilled, to spend more for a lemon zester from Williams-Sonoma than from Canadian Tire, well, Chuck Williams is smiling right now.
Never mind the gadgets. Hernia-causing cast-iron Le Creuset enamel cookware competes for your attention with gleaming chef’s knives from Germany and high-end copperbottomed sauté pans. Pleated soufflé moulds? Over in bakeware.
Drool-inducing balsamic vinegars, savoury sauces, olive oils, sea salt, exotic peppercorns. Italian pasta. Lavender from France.
If this was your mother’s kitchen, lucky you.
The founder of the Williams-Sonoma kitchen empire, who died in his sleep on Dec. 5 at age100, introduced North Americans to upscale tools and gourmet goodies, and played a delicious role in how we regard and prepare food.
“Not only how we prepare food but all the equipment we needed for the preparing,” pointed out Alison Fryer, an instructor at George Brown College’s chef school and former manager of the Cookbook Store in Yorkville.
We may roll our eyes at a $20 bottle of Madagascar vanilla extract, but the stores bridged European cuisine and the meat-and-potatoes approach of North America, Fryer noted.
In 2001, Williams-Sonoma opened its first Canadian outlet, on Bloor St. W.
“That was huge,” Fryer recalled. “Everybody was talking about it.” At last, here was a kitchen store that “introduced us to a whole new way of how we look at entertaining and how we cook. They raised the bar. We were complacent to that point.”
What about the brand’s hard-to-hide snob appeal?
“Oh, absolutely!” Fryer allowed with a hearty laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, the gadgets at Canadian Tire are just as effective. But there’s an allure to the Williams-Sonoma brand that you can’t deny.”
Maybe, but former food and restaurant critic Joanne Kates doesn’t think Williams influenced our gastronomy. “His stores aren’t really accessible because they’re too expensive for most people,” she said.
Williams acquainted North American cooks with “the tastes and tools of new cultures, inspired curiosity around exotic flavours and preparations, and enriched home and family life by bringing people together around food,” said a company statement.
He did help cooks get serious about equipment, explained cookbook author and food guru Rose Reisman.
“You could buy the most fabulous cut of beef tenderloin, but if you didn’t sear it or bake it properly or didn’t know how to take a temperature, you could ruin it,” Reisman said.
“So I think he allowed the basic cook to become a better chef.”
The company today operates 27 stores in Canada: nine Williams-Sonoma outlets, seven Pottery Barns, six Pottery Barn Kids and five West Elm stores.
Florida-born Williams’ earliest memories were of helping his grandmother bake fudge and pies. He was inspired by a1953 vacation to France, where he encountered heavy pots and pans, white porcelain ovenware, country earthenware, fish poachers, high-quality tools and professional knives. At home, “there were thin pans in not a lot of sizes, and tools were on the cheap side. In those days, people bought kitchenware in hardware and department stores,” Williams told the Washington Post in 2005.
He opened his first store in Sonoma, Calif., in 1956. Today, the company is a retail home furnishings and mail-order giant, with more than 600 stores under its corporate umbrella and $4.7 billion (U.S.) in net revenue.
He sold the company in 1978 but remained its public face, and wrote or edited some 200 cookbooks.
Remembered as a soft-spoken, unassuming man with no immediate family, he conceded in a 1993 newspaper profile that years of hard work had taken a personal toll.
“I lived the shop, spent all my time with the shop,” he said. “Years later, I look back and say it ruined my life for anything else, including family and socializing.”
“He allowed the basic cook to become a better chef.” ROSE REISMAN COOKBOOK AUTHOR