Sometimes the kitchen is too hot for more than one chef at a time, sparking feuds between Food Network mainstays.
Giada De Laurentiis claimed in July 2025 that fellow TV chef Mario Batali made an inappropriate comment about her body while writing a foreword for her 2005 cookbook, Everyday Italian.
“He’s really the main guy I had worked with. He’s a legend in the Italian space,” De Laurentiis said on the “On the Menu” YouTube show. “I felt like his stamp of approval would’ve been huge for me.”
She added, “When I read [his passage], I cried because I realized, ‘Ah, he’s basically saying that I’ve gotten to where I’ve gotten, and I’ve had this little bit of success that I had, because I have big boobs, and that if he had boobs, he would even be much further.’”
Giada De Laurentiis is opening up about her decision to depart from the Food Network. “It took a while for me to make this decision because I was very fearful of leaving Food Network,” De Laurentiis, 53, said on the Tuesday, April 23, episode of Rebecca Minkoff’s “Superwomen” podcast. “Because when you’re a big fish […]
De Laurentiis further noted that she interpreted Batali’s message as saying she was “a little bit of a joke” and decided to rewrite his chapter. Batali, for his part, did not respond to the accusations. Us Weekly reached out for comment at the time.
De Laurentiis and Batali’s alleged beef is far from the only time celebrity chefs have duked it out, whether in or out of the kitchen. Keep scrolling for more:
Rachael Ray and Anthony Bourdain
Bourdain, who died in 2018, was vocal about his disdain for Ray.
“A man who hated me more than anybody on the planet Earth was Tony Bourdain, and we ended up not friends but friendly,” Ray told Appetito Magazine in April 2024. “He was writing about me and about how much he disliked me, but I booked a band that he liked at the music festival we were producing at South by Southwest. And he said, ‘I don’t know whether to kick a puppy or send her a fruit basket, but she has good taste in music.’”
Ray decided to send Bourdain a large fruit basket with a note that read, “Just trying to save a puppy.”
“Afterward, Tony wrote an open letter to me and said that he’d never given me any reason to do anything but hate him. But he came home late one night with his very tired daughter in his arms, and there was no food in their house, but there was a basket of fruit with cheese and crackers and snacks,” she recalled. “He ended the post with ‘I guess I give up.’ The next time I saw him, he bent way down and gave me a kiss on my cheek. I burst into tears.”
Ina Garten and Martha Stewart
After first crossing paths in the 1990s, Stewart claimed in 2024 that Garten “stopped talking” to her when she went to prison in 2005.
The Barefoot Contessa, meanwhile, denied Stewart’s allegations and said during a December 2024 interview that the “story isn’t exactly accurate.”
“That was 25 years ago,” Garten said. “I think it’s time to let it go.”
Giada De Laurentiis and Mario Batali
The Giada at Home star claimed in July 2025 that Batali wrote in a foreword for one of her cookbooks that seemingly hinted she only had success because of her appearance.
“I called my editor, and I was in tears,” De Laurentiis recalled. “I’m like, clearly I can’t use this. So now what do I do? So we rewrote it, but I will never forget that. That’s basically what a lot of people figured: cute girl with big boobs, and so that’s why they’re watching her.”
In the final manuscript, the foreword said that De Laurentiis was not on the air “because she’s merely attractive; she’s a real Italian girl who can cook.”
Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay
The two British chefs have frequently gone toe-to-toe since 2009, trading barbs about one another’s culinary skills. Ramsay also repeatedly made jokes about Oliver’s weight.
“There was a lot going on at the time, and I don’t know where it all started,” Oliver recalled on an episode of the “Louis Theroux Podcast” in January 2025. “I was always a big admirer of his, and when I started writing for The Times, I staged in his kitchen and … we got on really well in the beginning.”
Once Oliver and Ramsay both started pursuing TV gigs, their bond became fractured.
“If you’re doing lots of interviews to promote things, and someone’s … trying to wind you up and say, ‘What about Jamie Oliver doing that?’ He got that every day, and I think he just bit,” Oliver said. “I was a target [for] probably 10 years. It was regular, and I generally used to bite once a year. I didn’t have anything against him, but it kind of generated the noise.”
The chef further stressed that they “never fell out,” but their respective wives, Jules Oliver and Tanya Ramsay, eventually “sorted it out because [we both have] growing kids.”
“It was like, ‘Come on, dads, grow up,’” he quipped. “I think that both of us got a telling off, and then we went to have a drink and put it all to rest and let bygones be bygones.”
Guy Fieri and Kevin Cooper
Cooper won Fieri’s Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime competition in 2022. Three years later, Copper sued Fieri’s Chicken Guy company for breach of contract for allegedly failing to live up to the prize promises of helping build a restaurant franchise. (Cooper’s restaurant closed in 2024, one year after it opened.)
Fieri was not personally named in the July 2025 filing obtained by NBC News and has not publicly addressed the accusations. Us reached out for comment.
