TV cooking contest shows

[Blarg]

I've been really enjoying cooking contest shows for the last year or two. Examples are Hell's Kitchen, Next Food Network Star, and Top Chef. Sometimes the food is very interesting, as can be the challenges they put the chefs through.

They're all worth watching. Last night I saw another installment of Next Food Network Star, and it was fun. There has already been spotty outbreaks of discussion of these shows in OOT, sometimes impassioned, usually interesting. Let's do a Lounge take on all those shows!

To start, here's celebrity chef and author Tony Bourdain's take on that show as of 7/11/07.

Tony Bourdain is a familiar name to people who follow cooking shows. A confessedly moderately talented chef and small-time novel writer, he rose to notoriety and near adoration with Kitchen Confidential, a grungy, hilarious tell-all about the restaurant business and growing into adulthood as a chef and various types of louse. The success of the book spawned t.v. series and further books and articles, and it occasions some fun blog posts, including "guest blog" spots on other people's sites.

I hope you enjoy this one. Warning -- Tony can be crude.

Tony Bourdain on The Next Food Network Star

Note that Tony has been a guest judge on Top Chef, a similar show, just a few weeks ago.

Note also that on the same page, you can scroll down to find other entries from him.

[emon87]

Whenever one of these come on, I have a hard time following them. Too much action jumping back and forth.

[katyseagull]

I haven't read your link yet but I wanted to say that this sounds like a lot of fun, Blarg! I will check my TV listings and see if I get any of the channels that air these shows.

I used to watch one that came on really late at night. I think it was Top Chef. Anyway, currently I'm following Hells Kitchen. I think GR is a raving nutcase. I sort of wish that they would showcase the talents of the individual contestants just a little more, don't you? It's really hard for me to know who to root for.

[Ron Burgundy]

I haven't seen Next Food Network Star. I'm reluctant to watch because I assume it's not really about cooking, it's about who can be the next Rachel Ray or Sandra Lee (watch this semi-good looking woman make semi-edible food from recipes they stole from their parents or a Good Housekeeping book!)

I've watched every episode so far of Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen. Here's basically how I compare the two: Top Chef is a cooking competition. The entertainment value is centered around who can cook better in various competetive environments. The contestants are all somewhat accomplished chefs and know what they're doing.

Hell's Kitchen is a reality show that happens to be in a restaurant. The entertainment value is centered around watching an old English lunatic scream and insult people who are trying to cook standard restaurant food. None of the challenges involve the contestants being creative or showing off their talent. I'm getting more and more sick of this show every time I see it. The worst part is that the menu is basically the same as last season. Those wellingtons look just as nasty as they did a year ago. And the producers obviously chose contestants that were not good cooks. If they all knew how to make decent risottos in a reasonable amount of time, there wouldn't be a show.

I'm not sure if it's still on, but there used to be a show on BBC America called Gordon Ramsay's F Word. Each episode, a team of like 3 or 4 people would come to one of GR's restaurants and try to cook for dinner service. I only saw like 5 episodes, so I don't know if the point of it was to pick a winner at the end of the season or something. GR would yell at the people, but it was a lot more constructive criticism and less lay-up fat/ugly/dumb blonde jokes.

There's no doubt in my mind that the producers of HK have a lot to do with GR's antics on that show.

[Ron Burgundy]

Katy,

Top Chef is on Bravo. New episodes air Wednesdays at 10pm ET.

[Blarg]

Agreed on everything you said. Gordon Ramsay has to wheel out his abusive schtick regularly for program demands, and the cooks they chose were far from top of the line. I don't think they need to be for the purposes of the show. All the show needs to do is provide a cook, not show us top cooks.

Surprisingly, I've seen Ramsay be quite complimentary numerous times this season, which I saw virtually none of last season. He compliments Rock fairly constantly.

Next Food Network Star is a bit of a puzzle. The cooks are obviously not top level, and don't seem ready to be televised authorities. When getting quizzed on a basic ingredient like canned tomatoes, one contestant is completely flustered and starts babbling. Then again, their job is not just to cook, but be photogenic, clear, and personable on screen. So cooking is a demonstrably smaller part of their job. On screen, it may finally be nonexistent, as there are plenty of shows in which the host doesn't cook at all. So the show moves in multiple directions at once, which multiple ways to succeed or fail, and those all have to be measured at once with some sort of balance.

Bourdain's entries on the show, on the link, have a lot of good things to say about the show.

Top Chef this season seems interesting, and the contestants are notably good this year. It's the cooking contest show I like the most because it is the most serious and has the sexiest hostess(so much for serious, on my part!).

I'd love to see those old Gordon Ramsay BBC shows. I'm going to check to see if they have any of them at Netflix.

[katyseagull]

Ever since you made this post it seems I've been watching the Food Network channel more. Today I watched them make some great sandwiches and cheesecakes. The other day it was authentic ravioli. Yum! It's making me really hungry. I am going to try to catch Next Food Network Star tonight for the first time.

About Hell's Kitchen, I was sort of wondering why we keep seeing those same Wellingtons. I guess I'm finding the show rather boring. I want to watch people cook, not sweat onto customer's plates. Gordon Ramsay makes me very stressed out.

Question for all you chefs out there, is a busy restaurant kitchen really this stressful? I'm sort of surprised they have so much trouble timing things right. I mean how come they keep overcooking their meats?

[Blarg]

Katie, if you have not read Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential, you really should give it a try. It's absolutely hilarious in many places, and gives a really intriguing look at how the business really runs and what it's really like at all levels. If you have any interest in cooking shows or just like a pretty hilarious, sometimes rude romp through what is for most of us a different world, you'll get a bang out of that book. I've read a couple others of his, and he's just a pretty fun guy and a really good writer. He's got a real gift for skewering pretentious stuff yet really grooving on people trying to do high level things, including some that he knows he'll never be able to do himself. Reading him raving about Thomas Keller, often called the best chef in American and maybe the world, is a wonderful take on the kind of high artistic levels a chef can reach that I wouldn't have been able to understand without his help. Reading him rip a new arsehole into people who crow about being vegetarians but then have the nerve to cook vegetables in really crappy, indifferent ways is a hoot I can relate to, as well.

Food Network Star is on tonight, Katie, and I think it's the final episode for the season. I'm sure Bourdain will also have a very interesting blog post on that, too.

[katyseagull]

[ QUOTE ]
Katie, if you have not read Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential, you really should give it a try. It's absolutely hilarious in many places, and gives a really intriguing look at how the business really runs and what it's really like at all levels.

[/ QUOTE ]


Thanks for the recommendation, Blarg. Definitely sounds like something I would enjoy. I will look for it this week. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]


Ok so I watched two episodes of Next Food Network Star. This show was a lot of fun. Way better than Hell's Kitchen. I won't give away any spoilers just wanted to say I really liked the format. I got to see the differences in style between the contestants and learn their strength and weaknesses which is a lot more than we learn from HK. This is the kind of show I want to watch.

With regard to last week's show, I found it interesting that Jag didn't make one entry that the judges liked. And what was with his chicken wontons dipped in vinegar? Who does that? Yuck.

Amy's chicken with goat cheese and mushrooms looked really good, as did her comfy looking stew. She seems like a very strong contestant. Clue me in on why she wanted to go home the other week.

[Blarg]

I've been watching so many of these shows I'm forgetting some particulars, that among them. I do know that she was whining on and on about being away from her daughter, as if it was going to kill the both of them. It looked like craven attention-wh*ring/sympathy mongering to try to get around her screw-ups. I think it was just doing badly in one of the competitions and not knowing how to take it without cracking up.

Both she and Jag seem to be really easily able to segue into near breakdowns. I wonder about these guys' stability and resourcefulness under pressure. Really, all of the last four have blanked out or screwed up under pressure pretty notably. As in, not just not cook well, but really spaz out on a personal level.