You never know: Chef Academy rocks; Worst Cooks in America sucks -- as does this season's Last Restaurant Standing

It's a shame Bravo's Chef Academy, featuring chef Jean-Christophe Novelli, wasn't better-publicized. It was actually pretty good. (That's the divine Emmanuel, the former porn star, between chef Novelli and fellow student Tracie.)

by Ken

I always say I don't watch "reality" shows, but the truth is that there's one category I often do: the food-related ones. Partly it's because the subject interests me, and partly because the subject has some, well, reality.

I'm not saying it's strictly real, since after all we can't smell or taste what's prepared (my mother's big peeve with cooking shows was that at the end, when it's time for the cook to taste what he or she had produced, it's always wonderful, just okay or even "eh! not my best"; she had been cooking for a lot of years, and this didn't agree with her experience), and in any case shows like Top Chef and especially Hell's Kitchen really arent about the food. They're more about people who are involved in the preparation of food.

Still, the ingredients are real, and are either good or not so good, and likewise the skills of the people we're shown manipulating it, and in most of these shows, somebody eventually eats some of it. This already gives you a world of reality way beyond anything you'll get on, say, Survivor or American Idol or Dancing With the Stars.

Since viewers clearly love competition-style shows, we're getting more and more of them, even though it seems to me a really shoddy premise. Not much of life, after all, is organized according to the throw-one-person-off-the-island principle, and it really represents a degraded standard of quality. Nobody has to be good, just better, or wilier, than the competition. This certainly isn't how we learn.

I missed the first few episodes of Chef Academy, but then was impressed enough to catch the remaining five, and now I've gone back and caught up with the first via YouTube. The premise is that French chef Jean-Christophe Novelli, who apparently runs a successful cooking academy in England, wanted to establish a Novelli Academy in the U.S., and apparently had the smarts to help finance a trial balloon -- and of course publicize the venture -- by conducting an eight-week trial "course" in the form of the TV show.

Chef Jean-Christophe really does seem to know what he's doing in the kitchen, and clearly has a method for teaching cooks of various levels. He is also what we might call "a character." Whom did he want to meet in Hollywood? His hero, Columbo. Chef also has a fondness for playing practical jokes on students, with almost frighteningly deadpan seriousness. Though he appears to be straight as an arrow (his pregnant girlfriend is part of the establishment in L.A.), he showed a fine appreciation for the attributes of student Emmanuel, said to be a former porn star. It was apparently chef's idea to have Emmanuel serve dessert to Tracie, the winning student in one episode, in the manner of a Chippendale's-type waiter, and Emmanuel went along quite happily, and appeared naked except for an apron.

It was interesting, though, how little of his luscious self Emmanuel wound up revealing. Emmanuel was an interesting case. The young man is, in fact both quite bright and quite charming -- was it possible for a viewer of any gender not to fall madly in love with him? He's also quite serious about his cooking. Given his, er, attributes, on any other TV show you might see these days, reasons would have been found to have him at least half naked for significant screen time on every episode. Here, even in the "naked waiter" stunt, it's amazing how little of himself was revealed.

In general Chef Academy isn't like your standard reality show. For one thing, it really isn't a competition. There is no ritual elimination of one contestant in each episode. Instead, in each episode (each devoted to a food category, like bread or fish or meat) there was a test based on what the students were learning, though they weren't told when exactly the test would be, and each student was graded "pass" or "fail" -- though for reasons of TV drama they weren't told which at the time of their evaluations. The deal was, if you failed three times, you were eliminated -- in other words, maintaining some semblance of academic standards. Chef Jean-Christophe made it clear the whole time that he wanted everyone to succeed, but that they had to live up to his standards. I can't help feeling that some "pass" decisions were influenced by considerations of "good TV," keeping some of the more eccentric characters on the show. But in the main, I think chef J-C was in fact judging according to his own standards.

Interestingly, in the first episode we actually got to see Jean-Christophe screening the 15 preselected finalists for the program's nine slots, both interviewing and having them cook for him. There were intriguing insights into his thinking about cooking and people. He made it clear that what he was looking for was passion for cooking; with that, he was confident he could teach technique. And while what he taught was specific recipes, the recipes depended on kitchen skills that the students had to develop, or refine, in the case of the more experienced cooks -- and the food itself was highlighted in a way that it rarely is on, say, Top Chef. (I suspect that a lot of viewers have already made the amazingly easy-looking pea soup.)

It was clear that all of the Chef Academy students, even the really annoying ones, underwent significant personal as well as culinary transformations in the course of the eight weeks of the prototype U.S. Novelli Academy. What can I say except that the next time I hear chef Novelli is doing a TV series, I'll be watching?


WORST COOKS IN AMERICA:
WORST SHOW ON FOOD NETWORK?


Presumably Anne Burrell and Beau MacMillan are ashamed of their participation in Worst Cooks in America, but I'm guessing not nearly ashamed enough. For a few lousy bucks they disgraced themselves and their profession.

True, we've had only two episodes of Food Networks' Worst Cooks in America (new episodes air Sunday nights, with repeats throughout the week), and it's true that its intended as an entertainment program rather than any kind of record of culinary instruction. Teaching and learning, after all, are dull; what's fun to watch is eccentricity and conflict -- and of course those weekly eliminations. All of these Worst Cooks has in abundance. I guess by reality-show standards it's a success.

Here's how the show, which has been very heavily promoted, is described on the Food Network website:

Twelve of the most hopeless cooks in the country will compete in a high-stakes elimination series in Worst Cooks in America. At stake for the last two standing is the chance to cook for a panel of esteemed culinary critics and win the grand prize of $25,000. This six-episode series will put the "recruits" through a culinary boot camp led by two acclaimed chefs: Anne Burrell, host of Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, and Beau MacMillan, executive chef at elements in Phoenix.

There's no question about the participants' lack of culinary skills. In the opening episode the whole throng of contestants who had been selected to compete for slots on the show first had to cook a "signature dish" -- an excellent test for a cook of some skills, I think, but meaningless to people with none. And the results were pretty frightening. We saw that almost without exception these folks had no clue about ingredients or preparation techniques. The results were as horrifying as, under such circumstances, you would expect.

But we learned something else in that episode: Almost all of these people want, and I mean want desperately, to learn to cook. And what most enraged me about this crockpot of a show is the wholesale betrayal of those people's hopes -- as well as the hopes of viewers of similarly low skills who tune in, thinking there might be hope for them as well, and find that apparently it's all incomprehensible and hopeless.

It appears that each week, Anne and Beau will show their "teams," once through and out, how to prepare a dish of theirs and then expect them to "replicate" it. (Yes, the word "replicate" pops up a lot.) For all the talk of a culinary "boot camp," there is virtually no real instruction. At boot camp you have endless instruction and drill and correction and more drill and more repetition. Here a technique is demonstrated once, a recipe is prepared once, and it's assumed that people at this skill level, many of whom feel defeated before they even start, can instantly master it. Anytime one of these poor souls succeeds, it's almost entirely by luck. One of them said, beaming, when his version of the "replicated" dish proved surprisingly successful, that it gave him confidence. Well, if it meant confidence that he could learn to cook, of course he can -- though not from these frauds. Because if he meant that his accidental triumph gave him confidence that he was on the right path, he couldn't have been more wrong; he had no more clue what he had done right than he had a clue what he had done wrong in all his previous cooking efforts.

One of the chefs (mercifully, I don't remember which) gave a single demonstration of five different techniques of cutting with a knife, and then the contestants all fiddled with knives for a couple of minutes -- and knife skills were supposed to have been acquired? Or when chef Anne assigns her team the day's recipe to replicate, which literally fills a blackboard, and then erases the blackboard, telling the stunned contestants (who were already in a state of shock having to reproduce the dish even with the recipe in front of them) that they should have memorized the recipe. What??? In order to cook, you have to memorize incredibly detailed recipes?

In critiquing the dishes, both Anne and Beau use terms like "overseasoned" and "underseasoned" without considering that none of these people have any idea what proper seasoning would consist of. Nor is their almost total ignorance of even basic food ingredients ever taken into consideration. Often they're being asked to cook with ingredients they hate or afraid of. Like when people who have never eaten duck, and are in many cases grossed out by the very idea of it, were expected to cook the stuff.

Cooking isn't that mysterious. You need basic knowledge of ingredients and basic knowledge of preparation methods, including a basic understanding of how all the basic ingredients that can be cooked respond to heat, applied in the various ways it can be applied. (Incredibly, in the second show, people who are clueless about the whole matter of application of heat to food are asked to cook on a Benihana-style grilltop. Do I have to explain why that's a catastrophically terrible as well as pointless idea?) I'm sure that to the makers of a TV entertainment show, real teaching and real learning sound unbearably tedious. After all, they're programming for people who have forsworn ever learning anything more than they know, and are probably phobic about people who teach.

I thought, though, that at least on the Food Network it might have been thought necessary and worth the effort to find people who can do real teaching and make it entertaining. (And they know people. Alton Brown's Good Eats, on the network, is both more entertaining than, oh, 98 percent of what's on TV today and as good a source of food and cooking information as I know. It's true that Alton brought the show to them more or less fully conceived, but they had the sense to put it on the air.

Worst Cooks's Beau is new to me, but Anne we've known as Mario Batali's right-hand sous chef on Iron Chef America and, as noted in the show description, from her own show, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef. She has one of those outsize personalities beloved of TV executives, but there's no question that she can cook. Which doesn't necessarily mean she can teach. I see from her bio that she has taught quite a lot at the Institute of Culinary Education, and I assume this means she's taught people with zero skills. I can't imagine she does it anything like this way. If either she or Beau ever thinks back to how they first learned to cook, I'm sure they realize that it had nothing to do with the perfunctory one-time-and-out demos they do here. (I do allow that more instruction and practice actually took place than we're shown, but then, why is there no reference to it? The implication is that we're being shown how to teach people with no skills how to cook.)

Oh, I expect Anne and Beau were told constantly, throughout the preparation for the series and then during production, that this isn't a "cooking show," it's just entertainment. Well, they got suckered. Because to a lot of people, both participants and viewers, this is as close as they're going to get to a cooking show, and they're being lied to. There's a fair amount of ridicule and scorn heaped on the many failures produced in the judging of inept dishes produced.

Thanks to the five seasons of Food Network's Next Food Network Star series, we viewers have gotten to know two of the network's chief programmers, Bob Tischman and Susie Fogelson, pretty well. Or at least I thought we had. Did they really green-light Worst Cooks? If so, they should be ashamed. Everybody involved in it should be ashamed.

LEARNING-TO-COOK FOOTNOTE

I was thrilled to learn that Jacques Pépin's ancient PBS "Technique"shows had been packaged onto DVD.I learned an immense amount from those shows when they were first aired, and then repeated endlessly during pledge drives. I haven't seen the DVD package myself, but from the online comments I gather that it's been done in strangely inept fashion, but the content apparently is still there, and I can identify with the commenter, J. Lin of Seattle, who wrote:

This DVD is far and away the best thing that has happened to my cooking skills in the last ten years. Humans learn by imitation and it's much easier to learn when watching someone actually doing and walking you through the technique than trying to read it out of a book. All the TV shows and specials gloss over the fundamental techniques you need in order to get anywhere. As in all arts, without a good grasp of the basic moves, you'll get hopelessly lost very quickly when you attempt anything beyond the remedial.

I can't recommend this DVD set highly enough if you, like me, have always wanted some kind of cooking "training" but can't make the time to go to a class or take lessons.

I'm embarrassed to admit that' I'll keep watching Worst Cooks in America, at least for a while.


MEANWHILE, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED
TO LAST RESTAURANT STANDING?

Raymond Blanc (center) with his intrepid restaurant examiners -- and now restaurant partners -- Sarah Willingham and David Moore

You may recall that I've been a big fan of the first two seasons of Last Restaurant Standing, the series BBC America has imported from the U.K. (where it's just The Restaurant), in which couples with dreams of opening a restaurant are given the opportunity by chef-entrepreneur Raymond Blanc to open and operate, on a limited basis, the restaurant of that dream, competing to open a real restaurant in partnership with Raymond. (The partners can be anything from spouses to parent-child to just friends. There just have to be two of them, one to cook and one to be front-of-house manager.)

We're only two episodes into the new season, and the whole thing is a shambles from which it's hard to foresee any recovery. (New episodes air Tuesday nights on BBC America, and then are repeated often.) Oh, there are a couple of couples who might yet show us something, but mostly the competitors seem hopeless. They seem to have hardly any clue why they want to be in the business, and certainly no idea of what kind of restaurant theirs would be (beyond a few mindless clichés like "local produce"), and even if they did, they seem to have virtually no skills, culinary or managerial, with which to back up that vision. For example, the women who wanted to open a Nigerian restaurant and popularize Nigerian cuisine might have had a workable idea, but the cook couldn't produce even a single dish. She and her partner literally couldn't open a can, and were handling knives so dangerously that chef Raymond wisely sent them packing while they were still, er, cooking.

The show claims to have received thousands of applications. Didn't anyone screen them?

Actually, the first show got off to a promising start, with chef Raymond pointing out what a dreadful time this is for restaurants. Rightly or wrongly, I really do place considerable stock in both his kitchen skills and his thorough knowledge of the restaurant business. It's clear when he talks about or actually handles food that he knows what he's doing, and not only does what he has to say about the business consistently make sense, but he's got his large chain of successful restaurants, of quite varied sorts, to testify to his business acumen. So when he explained that his restaurants are nevertheless succeeding because of the strength of his creative vision for them, I take it seriously.

There's also an interesting wrinkle this season in that chef Raymond's trusty sidekicks, restaurant executive Sarah Willingham (she of the exasperated grimaces that say, "What do these people think they're doing?") and restaurateur David Moore (who accomplishes pretty much the same thing with a look of astonished incomprehension at what he's observing), who in the past have done all the field inspecting of the restaurants, have now been promoted to the rank of partners. They are to invest in the winning couple's restaurant along with Raymond. Our Sarah in particular, never exactly a "soft touch" in her evaluations, seems to have turned into a veritable tigress, as if at every step the competitors are trying to filch money out of her wallet. And in line with their new more or less equal status, Raymond himself ventures out into the field more.

All well and good. But then we're exposed to contestants who seem as if they would be unequal to the challenge of eating in a restaurant, let alone working in one -- and forget running one.

If possible more alarming, after all of chef Raymond's down-to-earth, down-to-business words, the producers seem to have run out of ideas for challenging the contestants, or perhaps run short of budget with which to do so. To begin with, contrary to BBC America's publicity, which insists that "nine couples" -- the starting number -- will be given the chance to open restaurants, it appears that the actual number of restaurants will be six. (I suppose you could say that the other three couples had "a chance" to have a restaurant, but that's pretty fine parsing.)

Then, what are we to make of the first formal "challenge"? It began plausibly enough, with chef Raymond explaining, in that dead-serious tone he uses to impart the real lowdown on this business, that no restaurants know more about their customers, thanks to thorough research, than chains. This is entirely plausible. But in what way were the contestants either to have their aptitude tested or their skills enhanced by being divided into three groups and taking over the running of a chain express sushi place or pizza place or an Asian place for a day?

What the heck does this have to do with the restaurants these people plan to run? Yes, there is a certain challenge in seeing whether, with maybe 10 minutes' "training" from the restaurants' regular staff, they can manage to serve a day's worth of customers, but because the job of keeping those establishments functioning is so specific to each (most obviously, you don't learn how to make sushi or pizza or the Asian dishes in a few minutes, and the ability to do so really doesn't matter if you don't plan to serve sushi or pizza or the Asian menu), the task really has next to nothing to do with the talents or skills these people would need to run their own place. And what does any of this have to do with the research and marketing expertise of chain restaurants? What it looked like was a way to do a show on a minimal budget. (Presumably the restaurants donated their premises in exchange for the publicity, saving the producers the cost of running the "real" restaurants for a week.)

As Sarah approaches the pizza restaurant, we're told that she's looking for the "sleek service" that enables it to serve so many people. Once inside, we learn that what she's really looking for is "product knowledge." Sure enough, she traps her contestant-waiter into telling her, after long study of the menu, that two pizzas she asks about are safe with her nut allergy, only to inform him that they both contain nuts! Huh??? For three years now we've been told how much expertise Sarah has in restaurant management, and in particular with chains, and she thinks one of those restaurants could be successfully run by people who have more or less just walked in the door? Of course the front-of-house contestant-waitress who comes to her table first and asks if she can get her "a drink or something," before she's even been given a menu, deservedly gets demerits, but really now! I don't think we need our Sarah's vaunted industry credentials to sniff out rank incompetence, which is mostly what seems to be featured in this season of Last Restaurant Standing.

David doesn't do much better at the sushi restaurant. His first "gotcha" test is whether the temporary staff has succeeded in keeping the conveyor belt that carries most of the sushi offerings filled. To his surprise they're doing a pretty good job of it, and he even acknowledges that the quality is pretty good. (I guess we don't need to be reminded how many years of training is required in Japan to qualify as a sushi chef. Not to worry, though, at the much busier dinner service the conveyor built is thinned out till it's empty.) But then he traps a contestant-waitress who doesn't like fish -- and as the narrator reminds us refuses to eat raw fish -- asking her if she could describe for him the differences between tuna and salmon! Huh??? Do we have anyone out there who'd like to take this one on: describing the differences between tuna and salmon?

All that said, though, I'm embarrassed again to admit that, hopeless as this season is looking, I'll keep watching Last Restaurant Standing too, at least for a while.

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