Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jonny Fine is used to the high-stakes game of advising America’s biggest companies on their multibillion-dollar financings. On Thursday, he swapped that role for a different type of heat.
(Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jonny Fine is used to the high-stakes game of advising America’s biggest companies on their multibillion-dollar financings. On Thursday, he swapped that role for a different type of heat.
Fine, who heads investment-grade debt syndicate at Goldman, starred in an episode of Food Network’s Outchef’d, a show on which home cooks unexpectedly find themselves duking it out with world-class chefs to deliver the best dish.
Going head-to-head with Fine was celebrity chef and restaurateur Tiffani Faison, and they each had 45 minutes to win over a panel of judges with their duck-based creations.
The 49-year-old Fine is an aspiring Instagram meat influencer, whose frequent social-media postings on cooking and weightlifting have garnered him a mini fan base at Goldman and beyond — far from the staid world of investment-grade bond deals. His growing online persona has also been the subject of bemused texts swapped among bosses.
Fine is also a well-known markets commentator whose team at Goldman helped orchestrate some of this year’s biggest corporate-bond sales. On Outchef’d, he made seared duck breast with kecap manis — an Indonesian sweet soy sauce — and green beans.
Faison, a four-time finalist for the James Beard award for best chef in the US Northeast, put together roasted duck breast with spicy duck fat and a ginger sweet potato puree.
“I’ve never cooked under this kind of pressure before,” Fine said on the show. “This is insane. If I win, that would be something I wouldn’t stop talking about for the rest of my life.”
Fine isn’t the first Goldman employee — or even the second — to appear on a cooking show. In 2021, Crystelle Pereira, then a London-based analyst, made it to the final of the wildly popular Great British Bake Off. Three years earlier, Antony Amourdoux, then a vice president in the markets division, appeared on the same show.
Read More: Goldman Analyst Turned ‘Bake Off’ Star Finds Finance Fame
If just one of the four judges had preferred Fine’s creation to Faison’s, Fine would’ve walked away with $5,000. But the judges — a teacher, a bodybuilder, a personal trainer and a product developer all recruited off the street — unanimously declared Faison’s dish superior, sending Fine away without the prize.
Luckily, he brings home plenty of bacon from his day job. And he says he left the cook-off with an idea for his own show: “Burgers and Bonds.”
–With assistance from Sridhar Natarajan.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.