ALLEZ CUISINE!

I’ve spent a fair number of my waking hours over the last twenty years working on a show called Iron Chef America, based on the classic Japanese series in which chefs from all over the world enter a culinary colosseum called Kitchen Stadium in order to challenge one of the Chairman’s Iron Chefs. To anyone late to this particular picnic, clarification may be required. If you’re familiar with the show, feel free to jump down a couple of paragraphs.

In the original series, Chairman Kaga is some kind of aristocrat guy, played eponymously by Takeshi Kaga, who has a bunch of money and a whacked-out wardrobe, often sporting palomino pony bolero jackets, lace doily ascot things, and Lagerfeld-like gloves. Kaga is food-crazy, so he decides to open a culinary academy. (Supposedly the army of tall white toques seen at the top of each episode sat upon the heads of students of Hattori’s Nutrition College.) The top dogs of the academy are the Iron Chefs, literally Ryōri no Tetsujin, or “Ironmen of Cooking,” and each specializes in a cuisine: Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and French. Challengers come forward and choose which Iron Chef they wish to tangle with. The Chairman then snatches a big red cloth off an altar and up rises (attended by lots of smoke and dramatic music) the “secret ingredient,” the culinary theme of that battle: octopuses, or cabbages, or wild boar, or nuts and berries, or live sturgeon, or chickens, or mushrooms, or chocolate, or any number of cheeses, or… you get the point. After everyone looks over whatever it is, the Chairman announces, with considerable theatricality: “Allez Cuisine!” The chefs then have an hour to cook a number of dishes, usually five, which are then presented to a table of judges, who decide on a winner. The judges’ table will typically be stocked with a senior government/diplomat type and his wife, a dashing actor, and a starlet who only speaks with a hand over her mouth, saying things like “Usually I do not like shrimp, but this is very good.” The first time I saw Iron Chef, I was in a hotel room in San Francisco, innocently scanning the tube, when suddenly I was witnessing an ornately costumed chef nailing a live eel’s head to a board and then flaying it… and I don’t mean Bobby. There was no dubbing, no subtitles, I had no idea what the show even was, and though shocked, I was also transfixed.

Fuji Television pulled the plug on Iron Chef in 1999, and the American network UPN got hold of the rights. The resulting Iron Chef USA, starring the amazing William Shatner as the Chairman, only managed to squeeze out two episodes late in 2001 before it was canceled. Personally, I thought Shatner was deliciously over the top, but I’m not sure any of the producers knew much about food.

I got a call in the fall of 2003, while shooting the fifth season of Good Eats, from the head of Food Network programming telling me that they had acquired the rights and were launching an Iron Chef reboot, and if I was interested, I could have the Chairman job or the commentator job, which had been filled by the inimitable Yukio Hattori in the original series. I immediately jumped at the commentator gig, not because I thought I could do it, or even because I wanted to do it, but because I so badly wanted to be able to do it.

Though Good Eats was doing well at the time, I was already starting to worry that I was a one-trick pony, or worse, an impostor who, instead of toiling in restaurant kitchens for decades, thus accumulating bona fide credibility, had merely popped off to culinary school and worked in a few kitchens, rarely for more than six to eight months at a time, before making a culinary show. What kind of asshole thinks he can get away with that? Granted, I never claimed to be a chef, nor did I want to be one. I wanted to tell stories about food and had the production background to make that happen. I was, at best, an enthusiastic culinary adventurer, not to mention an amateur. This new ICA gig would require actual expertise, and although I might have possessed a wee bit more knowledge than the average line cook, my data bank of international ingredients, dishes, and cooking methodologies was seriously wanting. After all, on Good Eats we made meatloaf, roast turkey, biscuits, and the like.

It would prove to be a very bumpy ride.

Before going to full series, we auditioned the reboot scenario with a four-episode miniseries called Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters, which shot in Los Angeles in January 2004. Thematically, this would serve as a “handing off of the baton” from Kaga and (some) of the original Japanese Iron Chefs (Hiroyuki Sakai and Masaharu Morimoto) to the new Chairman (Kaga’s supposed nephew) and his American Iron Chefs: Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Wolfgang Puck. (Puck wouldn’t end up on the regular roster going forward, but Morimoto would, transferring directly to the new pantheon, and thus providing connective DNA to the original.) This production also served as an audition to discover if those of us who hadn’t done this sort of thing before actually could do this sort of thing. Keep in mind this was 2004, culinary competition basically didn’t exist yet, and Food Network wanted to get it right.

I can say with absolute certainty, I did not get it right. From my standpoint, the experience was a disaster. I was up there staring at monitors that showed me anywhere from four to eight cameras at a time, but I couldn’t keep up with which was which; a culinary producer was constantly talking to me through an extremely distortion-prone earpiece, a floor reporter (thank you, Kevin Brauch) fed me nonstop insight from the battle that I didn’t know how to use, and so I just stood there going, “Uhhhhhhhgrblegrble.”

And then it got worse.

On the last day, Iron Chef Sakai, possibly the most venerated of the original Iron Chefs, made a dish containing some kind of oyster broth. At the time, I was suffering from an intolerance to oysters. Intolerances are funny things… they’re not like allergies, they’re just like strong gastric disagreements, which can mysteriously come and go as the decades pass. I’d consumed raw oysters rapaciously for most of my life, then suddenly, when I was thirty-two, I started throwing up whenever I ate them. After landing in the ER twice, the doctors told me I’d better lay off them for a decade or so, as the issue would probably pass, which it did, around 2013. Alas, in 2004 my oyster intolerance was raging hard, and I tasted that dish, not knowing about the oyster content, because I hadn’t been paying close enough attention. I started barfing right there on set. Some kind soul brought me a trash can to stash under my desk for more stealthy retching, and on the show went. Sometime midafternoon, the producers called in the studio doctor, who told me I was so dehydrated that my heart had gone into arrhythmia and that I could, quite possibly, drop dead at any moment. Oh, bother.

I’m willing to stay, I told them… and nobly proclaimed I’d rather die on set than in some ER somewhere. But the producers insisted, so I relented, riding off with a trash can, and my tail, between my legs.

I spent the night in a cardiac ward, where I was given all kinds of meds to snap my heart back into rhythm. The doctors told me if it was still out of whack come morning, they’d have to use the paddles on me… you know, the shocky things… one, two, three, clear, pop! Around nine the next morning I felt fine. I got dressed and headed back to work, as I didn’t want the producers to think I was a weaker link than I already had been, nor was I a quitter. I wanted them to know I’d do whatever I could to fix the mess I’d made.

The producers were indeed merciful and allowed me to record pages of extra dialogue, which they then used to glue my performance together, like a postproduction Frankenstein’s monster. And, by and large, the shows worked, because the chefs killed it, as did Kevin Brauch, who saved all our bacons, along with Jill Novatt, the culinary producer, who has forever earned my love and respect.

When the Network decided to pick up Iron Chef America as a full-blown series, they did indeed keep me on as commentator. The way they figured it, I was already under contract, and with no one on deck to take over the position, there probably wasn’t another valid choice at the time. No matter how the break came, I was thrilled for the reprieve and vowed to earn it, and my place on the show. I had but three goals going into the first season:

1. Be surprised by nothing and have facts to share about literally everything.
2. Never, ever stop talking.
3. Make everything feel like a discovery.

The first required, above all: research, lots and lots of research, and not just on the secret ingredient (S.I. for short). Honestly, the S.I. was the easy part. For one thing, I knew its identity well in advance and therefore had plenty of time for research. Since it was revealed right at the top of the battle, I could usually say a fair amount about it before any other significant ingredients could come into play. Also, since it was typically right there in front of me (or more importantly, the cameras) throughout the battle, the only way to be surprised by the S.I. was if I lost track of it during fabrication. For instance, once grated, Parmigiano Reggiano looks an awful lot like Pecorino Romano, and don’t even get me started on chocolate. Is that 68 percent or 72 percent? Look away at your own peril.

The most challenging thing about goal number one concerned all the random ingredients the chefs, Iron and otherwise, were allowed to bring in with them. Not only did I need to be able to identify every morsel the moment it came into play, I needed to know enough to create the impression that me and those huacatay leaves (aka Peruvian black mint), or that duqqa (an Arabic spice-nut mixture), or that sodium alginate (a spherifier) were bosom buddies. That would be the only thing that granted me the authority I so dearly sought, at least until I learned enough to keep up. Typically, the chefs would supply the culinary producers with a fairly concise list of those incoming items, but that list often evolved right up to battle time, and occasionally certain chefs, and no I’m not naming names, would attempt to sneak ingredients in that either weren’t allowed (for instance, you couldn’t bring your own chicken stock in, as it was already provided in the Chairman’s pantry) or were over the allotted budget allowed by stashing shallow trays of ingredients over deeper trays of other ingredients. It was a jolly-good game, and Morimoto was a master, who I think extracted real joy from messing with my mind, a kind of culinary schadenfreude.

Here’s how any Morimoto battle could go: one day he’d be cooking and, all of a sudden, little crabs would be walking all around the counter… Yes, live ones, dozens of them, teeming in every direction. Meanwhile, I’d be tearing through all my paperwork, whispering to the culinary producer…

“What the hell are those?”

“What camera?”

“Camera four?”

“Stand by… They’re crabs.”

“Yes, indeed they are, but what kind, where did they come from, and why didn’t we know about them?”

“Stand by…”

I would look up across the room and Morimoto would be grinning this little grin, totally just, like, peeling a daikon, while decapods skittered to and fro.

“They say they’re called sawagani.”

I’d then start furiously googling. There they were: marsh crabs. I’d then go back to constant talking. “Apparently Iron Chef Morimoto thinks it’s ‘Bring your pets to work day,’ as Japanese marsh crabs run riot on his station.”

The guy was a genius, but jeepers, give me a break.

Shenanigans aside, the only way for me to have obtained reliable intel, and reference photos, was to arrive in the prep kitchen at the ass crack of dawn during load-in, a practice that was critical through about the fifth season, by which time I’d amassed enough reference data to confidently rely, at least part of the time, on my PowerPoints.

Despite never being a fan of that ponderous piece of programming, PowerPoint saved me. During season one, I started building slideshows for each Iron Chef (by then Flay, Batali, Morimoto, and Cat Cora), and during every battle, I did my best to keep a running list of the ingredients they used. After the battle, I’d add slides to each, accompanied by bullet points for quick reference. After a couple of seasons, I’d memorized many of them, but always had to check back on the Mexican and Central American chiles that Chef Flay is so fond of because, with the exception of chile de arbol, they all have different names for their fresh and dry versions, and I always confuse them. And then there was Morimoto… again, whose PowerPoint rapidly swelled to over two hundred slides. Alas, I still often misidentified mitsuba as yomogi. Nobody’s perfect.

Now to number two: never stop talking. This was critical because I was the white-noise machine of Kitchen Stadium. If I talked, so did everyone else: the judges on the other side of the room, the chefs, and the audience (usually forty to fifty guests of the chefs). If I stopped talking, so did everyone else, and the room became a death chamber. Every spoon hitting a pot rim rang out like gunfire, and that could make the chefs (at least the visitors) self-conscious, sometimes in the extreme. So, blabber I did, thanks to my one superpower, as described in “The Secret of My Success” (page 181). Having learned to funnel words directly from ear to mouth, bypassing the brain, I could also channel the words of the culinary producer talking in my other ear. The good ones learned that if they fed me complete sentences, I could essentially become their megaphones. The hardest thing for them to learn was to not stop talking once I started, which they typically did because it’s rude to interrupt and good manners are hard to break. Meanwhile, I’d be making notes or looking up research, totally unaware of what robot-me was saying. It was a cool trick and made me sound authentically authoritative. And I really needed that because I continued to honestly have not one clue as to what I was actually doing. Even worse, since I was basically cramming for two final exams a day, I remembered almost nothing once the day was done. It got so bad that, occasionally, when talking on the phone with my wife at the end of the day, I could not for the life of me remember what the morning battle had been. I got concerned enough to consult a professional, who assured me that my inability to make long-term memories during those shoot days was because my brain was essentially locked in short-term-memory mode; so much was outbound, nothing stuck for long. Eventually fans asked me so often what my favorite battles were, I had to look up a “Best Iron Chef America Battles” list online and write a bunch down on an index card that I think may still be in my wallet.

Number three: make everything seem like a discovery. My biggest job on Iron Chef America was to make it seem like everything was happening spontaneously in real time, and I found that the best way to create the illusion of discovery was to make purposeful mistakes. Even early on in season one, I felt things were stilted because my commentary always led smoothly to the conclusion I knew would be reached, at least as far as the dishes were concerned. Now, I must state, in the strongest terms, that I have no idea whether or not the chefs actually knew ahead of time what the secret ingredients were going to be. Only the show producers would be privy to that kind of information, and I was a mere hired hand with zero inside intel. What I do know is that before almost every battle, I was supplied with the proposed menus from both chefs. How those menus came to be, I cannot say. But in defense of the process, I have been told by sources, whom I trust, that a week before each battle, the chefs were provided a list of between three and five possible secret ingredients, and that they would then have to design menus for each possibility. If that was the case, the producers would, of course, have only supplied me with the menus they knew would come to fruition.

So, it’s completely possible that when that big dome lifted on its cables, revealing through the smoke whatever the secret ingredient was, the chefs were truly surprised, or at least as surprised as one can be in that situation, which is to say… not terribly much. Still, have you ever tried to cook five incredibly complex and delicious dishes with only two helpers, from scratch, in an hour? Try it sometime. I couldn’t do it… that’s for damn sure, whether I knew the identity of the secret ingredient or not. In fact, when you’re competing against another chef, I’m not sure that knowing, or not knowing, even really makes a difference. What I am sure of is that, on television, the element of surprise makes for good drama.

And so, I learned the art of misdirection. My strategy was not only to make it sound like I didn’t know what dishes were being made but to actively make guesses and predictions that turned out to be flat-out wrong. Sure, I looked stupid a good bit of the time, but that enhanced the overall verisimilitude of the situation, thus reinforcing the illusion of discovery. Truth is, 95 percent of the time I knew exactly what each chef was making because they knew exactly what they were making. Does such subterfuge downgrade the product?

Heck no. Iron Chef America was a great show. The producers cared about the chefs, their food, their stories, and certainly the integrity of the judging. Of that, I’m sure. I also know that ICA was great because it stood on the shoulders of the original Iron Chef, itself a masterpiece. As for every other celebrity chef show since? I’ll simply share what an Iron Chef America winner from season five said to me a couple of years ago: “Iron Chef America was the only one that really mattered.”

I may not have ever really earned a place at that desk. But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.