Celebrity chef Robert Irvine can name many things he loves about his job. But one of his favorites may be when a military member opens with this line: “Hey, do you remember that meal you made me and my squadron years ago?”
Irvine, a former petty officer in the UK’s Royal Navy, often does. It could have been the simplest of fares — perhaps chicken or hamburgers — but the level of culinary difficulty seems unimportant. What the service member typically recalls, Irvine said, is the care that went into the meal.
“Food is at the heart of everything I do, which means it goes with you,” said Irvine, host of Food Network’s hit show “Restaurant: Impossible.” “It’s not like a music performance where you listen to a band, and they leave after signing a picture. I’ve actually given you a piece of myself.”
Giving back to America’s military is paramount to Irvine, who joined the Royal Navy at age 15 to work in culinary service aboard Her Majesty’s Royal Yacht Britannia. He often cooks for troops at bases around the world, including at least 17 sometimes-dicey USO trips to Afghanistan and Iraq (his aircraft has been fired upon). The 59-year-old became a U.S. citizen 20 years ago and has made it his mission to keep the nation’s military at the forefront of society’s attention.
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“Every chance I get, every show I do, every interview is about making sure the American people don’t forget the sons and daughters, moms and dads who put on the uniform and stand and watch every day,” Irvine said. “So when I spend 354 days on the road, 150 of them just with military members, it’s a big deal. Not because of me, but because of what I believe we are doing — making memories, changing cultures, listening and bringing back to senior leadership exactly what these men and women are thinking when they’re out there on ships and patrols.”
Talking with high-up military officials, in fact, is a big part of what Irvine, owner of Robert Irvine’s Public House at the Tropicana in Las Vegas, Fresh Kitchen by Robert Irvine at the Pentagon, Robert Irvine Foods at grocery stores, and FitCrunch protein bars, powders and snacks, does. And to no one’s surprise, it’s almost always about food.
“You can’t expect someone to perform unless we give them the tools to do their job,” Irvine said. “We talk about physical fitness and all these things in the military, but we’re not giving the nutrition we want them to have in our dining halls, in the field and elsewhere, and that’s unfair. It’s like me giving you a gun without the bullet and saying, ‘Go fight the enemy.’”
To that end, Irvine created Victory Fresh, an initiative bringing nutritious and healthy grab-and-go food on military installations like Fort Jackson in South Carolina. He also debuted Fresh Kitchen, a healthy food court restaurant, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland in August. It’s all to completely change the way the military looks at feeding its members, including the sort of calories they are delivering.
“I’m not trying to make military food gourmet; I’m trying to make military food nutritious, healthy and fun,” said Irvine, who has been named the Honorary Chief Petty Officer of the Navy and the Medal of Honor Society’s Bob Hope Award recipient, among numerous military-related honors. “That will never change for me.”
Thankfully, Irvine said a sea change is at hand.
“I finally feel that we have the senior leadership of all the branches at the right place and time for something magnificent to happen in this space of military feeding, and it’s already happening,” Irvine said. “I’m so passionate about this and have given up most of my career to make sure we can take care of these men and women, because food is something that binds us all.”
