Chef Tell, Who Turned Kitchen Skill Into TV Fame, Dies at 63 (Published 2007)

The Philadelphia culinary legend known as Chef Tell, who gained nationwide fame as an early television chef in the 1970s and ’80s, died Oct. 26 at his home in Upper Black Eddy, Pa. He was 63.

The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Bunny.

Before there were celebrity chefs, Chef Tell, who was born Friedman Paul Erhardt in Germany, came out of the kitchen to become one of the first chefs to appear on television. He earned his nickname after he played the role of William Tell as a boy.

From the nationally syndicated television show “Evening Magazine,” he branched out with appearances on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and “Regis and Kathie Lee.” He eventually had his own PBS program, “In the Kitchen With Chef Tell.”

His oversize personality and a German accent that some found unintelligible made him the subject of skits on “Saturday Night Live,” and his wife said he had been the inspiration for the Swedish chef on “The Muppet Show.”

He took full advantage of his celebrity, writing cookbooks, opening restaurants, promoting cookware and food product lines and creating a line of his own cookware and knives.

For the last two and a half years he had been teaching at the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia

Chef Tell’s route to American citizenship involved Richard M. Nixon, who after he had resigned his presidency often visited his daughter Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, in Pennsylvania. On occasion they visited Chef Tell’s eponymous restaurant in Wayne.

Bunny, the chef’s wife of 19 years, said that on one visit in 1986, Nixon asked the chef if he voted. Chef Tell said he could not, as he had been unable to become a citizen. Nixon joked that lack of citizenship was no barrier in Chicago, where noncitizens always voted. The next day someone called to say that the former president had sponsored him for citizenship, and a month later Nixon spoke at the ceremony at which he took the oath of citizenship.

Just before Chef Tell died he completed a cookbook for diabetics, based on his own experience.

He is also survived by a son, Torsten, and a grandson.