What These Celebrity Chefs Looked Like Before The Fame

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They might be living lives of glitz and glamour, but at the end of the day celebrity chefs are people just like everyone else. While these celebrity chefs tend to be meticulously groomed and spiffily dressed for their television appearances, there was a time when they — like most people in the world — had to get ready without the assistance of makeup artists and hairdressers.

How much has fame changed our beloved celebrity chefs? Some of them seem to have been blessed with an impeccable sense of style from an early age, while others have clearly switched up their look quite a bit since hitting the big time. If you have ever wondered if your favorite celebrity chef had bad hair days or exhibited questionable fashion choices in their pre-fame days, keep reading. You won't believe just how different some of Food Network's biggest stars looked before they became famous.

Bobby Flay may have grown up, but his boyish grin has remained with him even into adulthood. The New York City native didn't know he would grow up to become a household name, but he did grow up knowing that he wanted to have a career in the food industry. Flay began cooking when he was a little boy and enjoyed being in the kitchen so much that, as a child, he asked for an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas.

Dropping out of high school at the age of 17, Flay got his first job in the business as a busboy. From there, he worked his way up the ranks, and eventually received his GED and then graduated from Manhattan's French Culinary Institute. After opening his first restaurant, Mesa, in 1991, Flay began to attract attention from the culinary world. In 1994, he made his first appearance on Food Network, and the rest is history. 

Before Paula Deen was the matriarch of good, old-fashioned Southern cooking, she was the belle of the ball. The Georgia native was a high school cheerleader and got married to her first husband shortly after graduation. Her business grew gradually. She started with a home-based catering company called The Bag Lady in 1989 which became so big that she started her first restaurant, The Lady and Sons, in 1996. Deen was in her mid-50s in 2001 when she first shot her first pilot for Food Network, and became a mainstay on the channel for the next decade.

In 2013, a lawsuit and accusations of racism threatened to derail her career after Deen admitted to having used the "N word." While Deen apologized, she was dropped from Food Network and other companies she had been working with. Deen laid low for a while, but has since staged a comeback and returned to cable TV in 2018.

The Barefoot Contessa star charms her fans with her sweet, grandmotherly ways, but half a century ago Ina Garten was a young bride. Her relationship with her husband, Jeffrey Garten, is an inspiring story of true love and lasting devotion. The pair met when Garten was just 16 years old, on a visit to see her brother who was studying at Dartmouth.The Gartens have been going strong ever since, and her husband, the Dean of Yale Business School, is her biggest fan.

The two have chosen to live their lives focusing on their careers and on each other, opting not to have any kids or even any pets. Even decades after their wedding, they still seem to be inseparable. "The secret is just that you care about each other and admire each other and support each other — and you get that back," Garten told Katie Couric (via Today).

Has there ever been a time when Nigella Lawson wasn't fabulous? After graduating with a degree in medieval and modern languages from Oxford University, Lawson began a career in publishing as an editor, and later became a restaurant critic and the food editor of British Vogue. Her first book, How to Eat, was released in 1998, when she was nearly 40 years old. She later told The Guardian that she had her sister, Thomasina, and her mother in mind when she was writing it. Both of them had died young, and Lawson wanted a way to memorialize them and the food they loved. "But I suppose I was also writing for myself, as cooking and enjoying food is a way of accepting and celebrating being alive, which can be hard when those you love have died," she said.

How to Eat was followed by Lawson's first television program, Nigella Bites, in 2000. Since then, she has become a household name in both the UK and the US, writing several more books and making many television appearances over the decades, all while looking effortlessly put-together.

These days, Gordon Ramsay is typically sporting bleached blonde locks that are carefully spiked to create a messy-but-stylish look. The chef's hairstyle has become an iconic part of his style, but he didn't always wear his hair this way. Back in the '90s, Ramsay was a young chef still learning the ropes of the restaurant business. One of his earliest jobs was as at London's Harveys, where he worked under Chef Marco Pierre White.

The two chefs would eventually clash and become embroiled in a bitter feud, with Ramsay claiming that White made him cry in the time that they worked together. For a while, though, Ramsay was a devoted protege. In this video clip, filmed when Ramsay worked for White, we can see that he is sporting locks that are a bit darker and not as perfectly coiffed as they are now that he is a globally recognized celebrity.