Generally speaking, I don't like reality shows. Inane premises, hateful contestants and embarrassing social interaction add up to torturous, hour-long episodes chronicling the worst that TV has to offer. Every week millions of Americans gawk at these cultural train wrecks, like the old ladies who sat knitting at the foot of the guillotine during the French Revolution. Wouldn't want to miss any of the action, now would we?
Still, like most people who claim to abhor the reality TV plague, I'm addicted to a couple of shows, especially Project Runway on Bravo. After the disappointing finale — what were you thinking, Santino? — I started feeling a little twitchy. Hey, I may hate the drug, but I still crave my fix. I'm not sure I can wait nine months for more bitchy fashion fights.
Conveniently enough, the fine producers of Project Runway have offered a substitute for anyone entering withdrawal, with a new show focused on chefs. Each night, participants cook to avoid elimination, with $100,000 awarded to the last chef standing. Will Top Chef be the TV heroin I'm looking for, or just unsatisfactory reality methadone?
Like gateway drugs, cooking and restaurant shows are what first lured me into reality TV. A couple years ago, BBC America aired the meager few episodes of bad-boy super-chef Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. It was more a redecorating show than a competition, as the London-based, Michelin three-star chef headed to failing restaurants to try and turn them around in a single week. Then (unlike, say, a restaurant critic) he actually rolled up his sleeves to help improve the place. Go figure.
In 2005, Ramsay found the time to do a Fox show called Hell's Kitchen. Calling him a "bad boy" doesn't really cover it. His show may have contained more bleeped-out f-bombs than anything in Fox's history. Hell's Kitchen had the same amount of contrived "challenges" and forced interaction as most reality shows, but the core premise was sound: Every episode, contestants had to work stations in a restaurant kitchen, from prep to service, until Ramsay became too disgusted with the product on the plate to continue, or the contestants finished a dinner rush. That's as real as a restaurant competition can get — on TV.
Then there was Cooking Under Fire, PBS's soft-core version of Hell's Kitchen, that also aired last year. With mild celebrity chef Ming Tsai and a monotone Todd English at the helm, contestants displayed their chefly talents in controlled kitchen challenges designed to push the envelope of their skills. Yawn. It lacked both the silly and down-and-dirty moments of Hell's Kitchen, but there was a lot of attention paid to the cooking and a lot of explication by the judges. Hell's Kitchen is due to have a second season. Cooking Under Fire isn't. That seems about right.
Bravo's Top Chef has a better pedigree for success. Magical Elves — the production company behind Project Greenlight, Project Runway and Last Comic Standing — is the creative force behind the show. Almost everything this company has touched in the past turned to basic-cable gold.
The concept is straightforward: contestants compete in an immunity challenge — like creating an innovative fruit tray in 30 minutes — and an elimination challenge: cooking a signature dish, for instance.
There's a problem, though, the same problem that plagues all food reality shows: How does the average Joe, blitzing through with TiVo remote in hand, get involved? How does the viewing public judge two-dimensional, digitized food?
Hell's Kitchen circumvented the problem by making the show more about performance and efficiency in a working kitchen than about the food. Every time a plate came to Chef Ramsay, it was abundantly clear if the product was acceptable or not, usually when the food went flying onto the apron of the offending contestant. Cooking Under Fire showed every step of the cooking and spent inordinate amounts of time on the extensive comments of the bland judges. Hence, no second season.
After hearing the first two celebrity judges on Top Chef — both renowned San Francisco chefs — complain about how disappointed they are in the food prepared by contestants, it's hard to care about the cooking. In response, the show almost immediately resorts to gonzo settings for the unexciting dishes pumped out by the contestants, trading flavor for sensationalism. By episode two, the chefs are catering in a bondage shop. I'm sorry, but do I want to see a lubed-up gimp sucking mousse from a shot glass? Well, maybe, but not on a cooking show.
A powerful cast could help, but instead of Ramsay, the foul-mouthed perfectionist, or the comfortably confident fashion designer Michael Kors, or even Ben Fucking Affleck, Magical Elves gives us New York chef Tom Colicchio, Food & Wine Magazine writer Gail Simmons, and Mrs. Billy Joel.
Colicchio is wooden and uncomfortable on TV; Simmons is a plant by the sponsors to get the name of Food & Wine into the show a few more times, and host Katie Lee Joel moves and speaks like a woman paralyzed by Botox, mood stabilizers and marriage to a paunchy, balding former pop star. They're not going to save the show.
Neither are the contestants. The pool of competitors is a bland cross-section of America — a pudgy Latino, a middle-aged gay man, two African-Americans, a model turned "chef" and a half-dozen other forgettable folks. It's the same crew we've seen on almost every reality show since the first season of Survivor, but with their own knives. The only one who actually bitched and yelled like a real chef was eliminated on the first night.
After calling around to a dozen eateries, I've come to the conclusion that people who work 80-hour weeks in the inferno of a restaurant kitchen have little time for the primped and whiny silliness of TV pretend. They're already living the life. A few admitted to watching The Apprentice or American Idol, but most echoed wine guy Freddie Matson of Vineyard Brands: "My next reality show will be my first."
I'm already addicted, though, so I'll stick with the bland fix that Top Chef provides for a while, albeit with my finger hovering over the fast-forward button. I just have to make it to June, when Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen returns with more reality crack.
Brian Ries is a former restaurant general manager with an advanced diploma from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He can be reached at brian.ries@weeklyplanet.com. Planet food critics dine anonymously, and the paper pays for the meals. Restaurants chosen for review are not related to advertising.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2006.