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Marine chef cooked up details about his service

Would you like lies with that?

Former Marine Josh Adam Garcia has been cooking up some tall tales in the kitchen on his quest to win the title of “The Next Food Network Star.”

The popular reality television show, now in its third season, brings together 11 real-world cooks to compete for a six-episode series deal on the network. Last season’s champ, Guy Fieri, has quickly become a standout on the network, now working as host of the new shows “Guy’s Big Bite” and “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.”

After a June 1 interview with the former Marine cook, Military Times began digging deeper into Garcia’s past. It seems that much of the story, provided by both Food Network and by the man himself, doesn’t check out.

Touted as a graduate of the New York Restaurant School and a former Marine who served in Afghanistan, Garcia’s record is actually much less stellar. For starters, he never finished culinary school in New York.

“He attended, but did not graduate,” said Midge Elias, director of public relations at the school, now known as the Art Institute of New York City. Privacy rules prevent the school from releasing any further information, such as number of course hours completed or whether the former Marine used the GI Bill to help finance his training, as he claimed in multiple interviews.

Garcia, who turns 26 later this month, was a Marine, enlisting Aug. 15, 1999, for a four-year enlistment that should have ended in 2003. Instead, Garcia was discharged eight months early as a private for reasons that the Marine Corps declined to discuss due to laws protecting his personal information.

Enlisted for more than three years with no promotions? Not even the Marine Corps is that tough.

In a follow-up interview Monday, Garcia was asked to explain why he called himself a former corporal. He owned up to non-judicial punishments that cost him rank, but he blamed his military troubles on a hazing conspiracy at his former unit. Garcia also claimed that he fought his administrative separation and was ultimately exonerated, but none of that can be independently confirmed because of privacy rules.

The Marine Corps has no record of Garcia’s rank being upgraded from private by any review board.

Likewise, the service has no record of Garcia ever deploying to Afghanistan, and certainly not as a member of 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, the infantry unit Garcia said he accompanied to the war zone in 2002. In fact, Marine officials at the battalion’s home at Camp Lejeune, N.C., said the unit did not deploy to Afghanistan that year.

“When I was in the Marine Corps, I was a grunt for a year and a half, two years, and um, became a cook,” Garcia says in a video profile for Food Network, going on to tell his story of growing up in low-income housing in New York’s south Bronx, cooking for his family at age 7. Marine officials said Tuesday that the only military occupational specialty listed in Garcia’s file is food service, and there’s no record of him holding an infantry specialty.

Now living in Havelock, N.C., not far from the gates of his final duty station, Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, Garcia is the chef de cuisine at the French fusion restaurant Stacia’s Lieu Secret in nearby New Bern.

When confronted with the inconsistencies, Garcia said he never specifically told the Food Network he went to Afghanistan, but instead let producers there “believe what they wanted to believe.”

During the June 1 telephone interview, a conference call with the chef and a publicist for the network, Garcia was asked several times whether he was embellishing or omitting details from his military record. Rather than correct any inaccuracies then, the former Marine stuck to his story.

“I was just afraid of what they would say,” Garcia said in the follow-up interview Monday, which was not monitored by the publicist. “I’m not dishonorable, dude. The unit was trying to cover up hazing, a big hazing scandal.”

During a second phone interview later that day, Garcia asked that the truth behind his military record not be revealed. He told stories of fights that stemmed from being a victim of hazing, and of a command that wanted to ruin him forever.

“Everything I’ve worked so hard for will come crashing down,” he said. “Everybody there (in his military unit) told me I’d never amount to nothing. The worst thing I did was let the Food Network believe something that wasn’t true.”

It’s unclear what role his military past and culinary training played in his selection for “The Next Food Network Star.” There was no requirement for either in the audition process, and some other contestants have no culinary training or formal kitchen experience.

But, the former Marine admitted that it was during the final selections for the show that he let the “war hero” notion take hold.

“That’s my fault,” he said. “I let them believe it, that’s my fault.”

When contacted about the inconsistencies Tuesday afternoon, Food Network issued a brief written statement:

“Food Network conducted routine background checks on the competitors featured in the series,” according to the statement, attributed to Bob Tuschman, senior vice-president of programming and production for Food Network (and a recurring judge on the show). “It has come to our attention that some facts about Josh Garcia may have been misrepresented. We are currently investigating this situation and will have a resolution soon. His updated bio, pending further review, has been posted on the Web site.”

The online profile no longer included any references to Afghanistan as of 6 p.m. Tuesday, but still referred to Garcia as a graduate of the New York school after the statement was released. By 8 p.m. Tuesday night, Garcia’s profile had been updated to say that he only had attended the school. Garcia’s personal MySpace page also listed him as a graduate of the school, but as of Tuesday evening, his MySpace account had been made private, thus restricting access.

When contacted a final time for comment Tuesday afternoon, Garcia finally stopped talking.

“You’re going to have to talk to the Food Network,” he said. “I don’t have anything else to say.”

The bulk of “The Next Food Network Star” episodes have already been filmed. New episodes of air each Sunday night (repeats air throughout the week) through July 22, with a panel of guest judges voting on who stays or goes.

The voting is opened up to America when the field is down to the final two, and viewers will decide on the winner.