Iron Chef

Whose cuisine will reign supreme?

Iron Chef runs on the Food Network 10 p.m. Eastern on Fridays and Saturdays.

I don't usually watch the Food Network. I'm not really into food. I tend to rate restaurants based on service and how much food I get for my money, rather than the worrying about whether the food is haute cuisine. And I don't cook. If it can't be prepared in the magic food box (known to some as the microwave) I'm not interested. So why am I so obsessed with a show on the Food Network?

That show is Iron Chef, and it is no mere cooking show. It's an import from Japan, shown in the States in a somewhat edited form. If you haven't seen it, here's the setup, recapped at the beginning of every episode. Five years ago Chairman Kaga envisioned and built a cooking arena, the Kitchen Stadium, where he could test the cooking skills of the best chefs in the world against each other. Kaga hand-chose a group of four great culinary artists in various styles (Japanese, Italian, French, and Chinese) to be his Iron Chefs, and every week one of them engages in a one-on-one cooking contest with a high powered chef from a famous restaurant.

At the outset of each battle, Chairman Kaga unveils an ingredient, which rises out of the floor amid a cloud of dry ice vapor, and the two chefs have to use that ingredient in all the dishes they cook. Then the two have an hour to complete a full-course meal, and a panel of (Japanese) celebrities tastes those meals. The panel then gives each chef points, and the chef who wins gets... nothing. There are no prizes or anything; this is a no-holds-barred culinary fight for bragging rights.

Iron Chef is probably not the first competitive cooking show ever to air, but it has to be the most fun. It starts with Chairman Kaga. First of all, precisely what he is chairman of is never explained, and the man (actually an actor) wears outfits that often get him compared to Liberace, though we suspect he's trying to dress as his favorite anime villains. Or he may be auditioning for the role of the next Doctor Who. Every week Kaga introduces the challenger with a long monologue that begins "If memory serves me right," and often rambles incoherently through numerous topics before actually getting to the point.

The Iron Chefs themselves wear costumes that wouldn't look out out of place on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We get to see them every week, and pretty soon I found myself developing deeply personal opinions about them. ("Iron Chef Japanese Morimoto could kick Emeril's ass!")

The show is couched in terms of conflict that aren't often appropriate. For instance, each episode is known as a "battle." So the episode with tofu as the featured ingredient is "Tofu Battle" and so forth.

Excitement is generated during the cooking by the color commentators. They, even when dubbed in English, make the goings-on in Kitchen Stadium sound much more important than the Asian economic crisis. The best commentator is Ota, the floor guy. He's always interrupting the main commentator by yelling "Fukui-san!" only he says it so fast that it always sounds like "Squee-san!" Ota constantly updates us on how the chefs are feeling, and what they're putting in their rice cookers. (Most often, rice.)

I suspect that the reason Iron Chef is such a compelling show is that we mere mortals can never anticipate what the chefs are making. You can't stop watching because you want to see how all the cooking the chefs are doing will become the beautifully rendered dishes.

There's also a certain element of decadence to the proceedings. In the Asparagus Battle episode, the challenger made an asparagus dish that costs about $1000 a serving. Essentially, the chef took whole asparagus stalks and baked them on top of a bed of six lobsters, and below another layer of six lobsters. Then, after it had finished cooking, he threw out the lobsters and served the asparagus by itself. There have also been episodes that have featured abalone (shellfish worth hundreds of dollars each) and Mishima beef ($12,000 a head).

Occasionally, the show takes on a surreal edge. In one episode I saw recently, Peach Battle, Iron Chef French Sakai was challenged by a chef named Masanobu Watabe who did not work with assistants (normally, each chef has two assistants). After the commentators hammered on the fact that the challenger wasn't using assistants for eight minutes, Sakai told his assistants to take the day off. In this same episode Watabe had recently separated from his wife, and the commentators actually read a letter from the poor guy's wife on the air.

American sensibilities won't necessarily find the food cooked on the show appetizing. It really depends on what the featured ingredient is. So the Mishima Beef Battle and Pork Belly Battle yielded some yummy looking stuff, but there was an episode called Giant Eel Battle where one of the featured dishes was gelatin made by boiling eel bones, garnished with fried okra and liver. Mmmm mmmm, sounds vomit-inducing.

Iron Chef, despite being a very Japanese show, seems to be catching on in the US. According to Entertainment Weekly, a special episode was filmed earlier this year in New York City, with Morimoto challenged by another Food Network star, Bobby Flay. Hopefully Morimoto will make sushi out of him.

Scott Hamilton is one half of Stomp Tokyo and would probably never eat anything made on Iron Chef, but he finds it fascinating to watch.

Date:April 7, 2000