When all you've ever eaten is filet mignon, it's hard to adjust to a lesser cut. Such is the case with cooking reality shows. I've only ever watched Top Chef and its spinoff. I attempted watching an episode of Hell's Kitchen once for kicks and turned it off about five minutes in. I've always been a fan of the Iron Chef series but that's an entirely different animal, built around colorful dishes and gimmickery. With The Next Iron Chef, the Food Network is trying to take a page from Bravo's playbook.
At first, I was surprised that another chef was needed - wasn't five enough? But Batali hasn't cooked once all season (too bad, I like him) and Morimoto cooks sparingly (ditto). And somebody needs to pick up Cat Cora's slack - she wins less than 60% of the time. Meanwhile, first season winner Michael Symon is doing pretty well for himself.
Is it unfair to compare The Next Iron Chef exclusively to Top Chef? Yes. But one of these shows is the gold standard, and the other is the upstart.
Next Iron Chef borrows the preliminary challenge/elimination round format from Top Chef but throws in a nifty wrinkle by having the chefs evaluate each other's dishes in the beginning challenge. There's no secret ballot, which strikes me as unfair - perhaps that's edited out to ramp up the drama.
In place of Padma as host, there's Alton Brown. I'd say that's a pretty solid tradeoff; Brown does a great job as host of Iron Chef America and his culinary credentials trump Ms. Lakshmi's. But he's behind a booth on Iron Chef America and Next Iron Chef forces him to intermingle. It's in this role that he struggles. Padma and Tom Colicchio have this act down pat, but Alton Brown tends to stand uncomfortably close to the contestants and interject awkward statements. With his pocket notebook in hand, he comes off sort of like an overbearing college professor.
Next Iron Chef also takes more of an educational stance. Its parent show has often focused on interesting tidbits about different foods and cooking techniques and the spinoff follows suit, including pop-up text balloons that explain the origins of certain dishes and describing culinary terms to the layperson. I wish Top Chef did this too; I only recently found out that creme fraiche was more akin to sour cream than fresh cream.
The challenges have been fairly vanilla so far, and so have the challengers. Just like in Top Chef Masters, these competitors are professionals in their field and pettiness is not encouraged. There is a vague attempt to make Nate Appleman a villain, but it's pretty weak.
Will I keep watching? Perhaps. Mad Men already occupies a piece of my Sunday nights so another show isn't going to hurt. But I could easily miss a few episodes and not lose any sleep.
As for early handicaps, I like Jehangir Mehta. But like in any reality cooking show, it's too early to tell.
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