table talk / By Joseph Byrd

The Next Iron Chef

Chefs cross swords over swordfish — the Byrds watch

(Nov. 22, 2007)  My wife Beni was in Cleveland recently, where she dined at Lola, a cutting-edge restaurant owned by Chef Michael Symon. Several years ago, we read a biographical sketch of the young Symon in Michael Ruhlman’s book The Soul of a Chef. When Beni returned, having had a spectacular meal, and having met Symon (she bore photographs and an autographed menu), I sat down with her and vicariously re-ate the meal. A day later, she was reading the paper and saw that a program called The Next Iron Chef was on that very evening, and that Symon was one of the finalists!

This was awkward — we almost never watch TV, save for an occasional sports event. And I’ve particularly avoided The Food Network, which trivializes things I take seriously and substitutes show-biz and “personality” for real content.

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The Iron Chef is one such program. The original was a typically eccentric Japanese TV series, which had kung-fu elements integrated into an actual cooking contest. Its campy charm, which came to attract American audiences, derived in part from the dubbing of the rather over-the-top Japanese dialog into English, reminiscent of the Godzilla and martial arts movies of the ‘70s. Elaborate production values helped the original show, with “conspicuous consumption” of expensive delicacies, such as caviar and truffles. One chef bragged about using 1,000 pounds of crab merely to flavor his asparagus dish.

The cult hit show was adapted into an American format in 2005, and has since had five series, each featuring a Food Network personality as “Iron Chef,” most recently Bobby Flay. In each episode, a new challenger chef “battles” one of the resident Iron Chefs in a one-hour cooking competition based on a theme ingredient. It is hard, frankly, to take this stuff seriously. The resident chef has a huge advantage over challengers (though less than the Japanese original), and the show conceals many elements that should be open — for example, the fact that each chef has two assistants of his/her choice. (Well! Give me Thomas Keller and Charlene Rollins, and I’ll go up against any chef in the country.) Much that is presented to the viewers as a “surprise” is known by the participants in advance. And there are other technical inequities I’ll forgo.

Nonetheless, the American show has become huge, a culinary game show, especially popular with the critical U.S. advertising demographic of 18-to-36 males. This may be because the showis promoted as more of a sporting event than a cooking show. And that’s why it has not been of keen interest to people seriously involved in food.

However, the Next Iron Chef series was to be something new — a true contest of actual working chefs, to select the new star.

We discovered that the entire series was running that Sunday, with back-to-back episodes from 4 in the afternoon to 9 at night, with The Next Iron Chef being crowned at the conclusion. The contest was presented as an elimination process (in place of “head-to-head” competition), with serious tests and a panel of expert judges. And so it came to pass that we, the “No TV” couple, spent six hours glued to the screen.

It immediately became clear that this show, while retaining much of the phoniness and commercialism I associate with The Iron Chef, was something more. For one thing, it matched established chefs, not personalities. For another, it was a progressive elimination process rather than the confrontational one-on-one format. There was also a serious production budget, not simply for showbiz values, but for cooking, including expensive new devices such as the “thermal immersion circulator” (a method called “sous-vide”) and the “Paco jet.”

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