I Design’s partnership with Great Chefs, LLC (formerly GCI, Inc.) goes back to 2006, when we launched their first website — built on the then-cutting-edge Joomla CMS. That early version brought the Great Chefs television legacy online, featuring thousands of downloadable recipe packages combining PDF recipes and professionally edited cooking videos from the Great Chefs TV series.
Over the years, the website evolved through multiple redesigns, including two WordPress versions — one by another developer and another created in-house in 2015. After a brief pause, our collaboration has come full circle: we recently revitalized GreatChefs.com from the ground up, optimizing every element of its 2,000+ pages for modern performance, usability, and search visibility.
Today, GreatChefs.com offers subscribers access to a rich digital archive of over 2,000 recipe videos and downloadable preparation PDFs, continuing the brand’s tradition of celebrating world-class culinary talent.
We’re proud to once again partner with Great Chefs — and now also with their sister sites, DUKES of Dixieland and Leisure Jazz — bringing their stories and legacies to life online.
Great Chefs [excerpt from Wikipedia]
The Great Chefs franchise of cooking shows began with thirteen half-hour programs produced for PBS nationally and later the Discovery Channel. The series is a franchise of 656 televised cooking shows and over 13 cookbooks, that began with "Great Chefs of New Orleans" by John Beyer and John Shoup in New Orleans. Later PBS series included "Great Chefs of San Francisco"; another New Orleans series; "Great Chefs of Chicago"; and "Great Chefs of the West". The Great Chefs programs were recorded entirely on location around the world, in professional restaurant kitchens, rather than in production studios, and shot in film format. The television series features over 1,008 chefs including Alain Passard in Paris, Bobby Flay, Daniel Boulud, Michael Lomonaco and Eric Ripert in New York City. Patrick O'Connell outside D.C., Emeril Lagasse and Susan Spicer in New Orleans, and Albert Roux in London in 51 countries.
DUKES of Dixieland [excerpt from Wikipedia]
In 1978, the reorganized DUKES of Dixieland, under John Shoup's direction, recorded the first direct-to-disk album, and then, in 1984, were the first jazz band to record on CD. In 1980, they recorded a television special at the old Civic Theater in New Orleans, with the New Orleans Pops Orchestra and later performed in a TV special with Woody Herman, Wood Choppers Ball. In 1986, they invited jazz musician Danny Barker to perform with them at Mahogany Hall to record a television special, Salute to Jelly Roll Morton. In 2001, their gospel CD Gloryland was nominated for a Grammy Award. In 2011, they recorded with The Oak Ridge Boys, in Nashville, Tennessee, titled Country Meets Dixie.
They have performed with symphony orchestras, including the Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, National, New York Pops (in Carnegie Hall), and 29 other orchestras around the world. In 2005, they traveled aboard the Steamboat Natchez up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Cincinnati, Ohio, raising money for the Bush-Clinton Katrina Relief Fund, while many of the band members' homes were still destroyed. In 2011, they performed with the Boston Pops.
Their latest CD, Here Comes the Girls, features music from R&B artists such as The Meters, Ernie K-Doe, and Allen Toussaint.[2]
Leisure Jazz
Most of the Leisure Jazz live shows were produced in the 1980s in Shoup’s “studio” nightclubs, Dukes’ Place and Mahogany Hall, located in the New Orleans French Quarter. Beyer passed away in 2002, but Leisure Jazz has continued producing and carrying on the jazz torch into the 2020s with such albums as “Live at the New Orleans Jazz Fest”, “Voodoo Woman”, and the television show “Celebrating Satchmo.”
The website utilizes bunny.net to deliver hundreds of music files and 19 videos for purchase.