SPOILER ALERT: DON’T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT LAST NIGHT’S “FOOD NETWORK STAR” OR WHAT HAPPENED TO LOCAL BOY JOSH LYONS!
OK, you’re still here. So I can tell you that Josh, of soon-to-be Clematis sushi palace Fuku, his own catering company, band Fell on Deaf Ears and some awesome vests, survived the cut again on the second episode. But I’m worried that if Team Giada had not been named the winner and thus immune from elimination, our goateed guy about town might have been cooking for his life again.
The challenge saw the teams research one specific aspect of a food-famous area of New York, either soul food-laden Harlem, Italian-flavored Arthur Avenue, or the Jewish and Kosher theme of the Lower East Side. They then have to lead a bus tour through that area, using their food as an edible landmark. Josh’s team got Little Italy, and he specifically was supposed to talk about a meat market. It’s not that his sausage and peppers crostini was awful. It’s that it was just OK. And when paired with a very, very long story about how Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro met on the phone when Pesci was working at a Little Italy restaurant that didn’t appear to have anything to do with the food he had cooked or the meat market he’d been inspired by, the scales were tipped for “Meh.” I’m worried. Come on, Josh. You’re gorgeous and funny and a rock star and we know you can cook. Make all that work for you. We want you around longer. We encourage gorgeous and talented. In fact, we prefer it.
Otherwise, I really dug last night’s episode, because it perfectly represented the two things that anyone with a cooking show should be able to master – cooking and showing. (This is not a difficult concept to understand.) It doesn’t matter how well you cook if you can’t engage an audience, because the folks on the other side of the camera can’t taste your food. They have to feel it. And it’s amazing how many of these contestants are eliminating themselves without realizing it because they can’t do both, or at least not out of their comfort zone of the food they usually cook.
“Well, won’t they be cooking their own food if they get a show, Leslie?”
Yes, technically, Person I Made Up! If they can win. But they’re on something we like to call a game show, and the way that these things work is that you are constantly thrown out of the comfort zone, and not just to judge how well you can roll with the punches and unpredictable world of live TV. It’s also because making people uncomfortable and shaking them up is good TV. And if this surprises you, you shouldn’t be on TV. That was punctuated by Team Bobby’s Kara, who completely blows not only her chicken and waffle challenge from Melba’s, but her presentation.
Kara tells us from the very beginning that she’s not comfortable with soul food, that she doesn’t know anything about it, that she doesn’t like fried chicken or waffles and basically that she’s not savvy enough to follow that with “…but I’m sure gonna find out all I can about them, because this is the challenge I landed on this here game show, and pretending it isn’t is like going on “The Price Is Right” and cussing Drew Carey out because you got Plinko instead of One Away.’” You rolled the dice, sister. Play through.
Kara’s discomfort is so palpable that when she starts her story, she not only gets flustered about describing Melba – she trips over “Black” and “African-American,” which doesn’t probably mean anything other than that she was so uncomfortable she flubbed those descriptors, which made her seem even more uncomfortable – the fact that she had to describe the woman’s race punctuates that even more. Ironically, those descriptors wouldn’t have sounded out of place if she’d actually told the story of the history of chicken and waffles – African-American musicians showed up hungry after a gig, and a resourceful cook rustled up what she had handy, thus creating a delicacy. (Convienience is how we arrived at a lot of ethnic delicacies, including chitterlings, hagis and any food involving gross meat baked inside another type of meat.)
Anyway, I am loving this team set-up, because it enages the mentors in a different way, and because it gives the contestants an added layer of advice. This doesn’t mean they have to take it, of course – you can lead a chef to the oven, but you can’t make him not screw it all up. Or something like that.
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ORLANDO — Canadian actress Holly Deveaux will play Casey Anthony in the upcoming Lifetime movie that will also star Rob Lowe as former prosecutor Jeff Ashton.
