Review: Netflix’s ‘Iron Chef’ Reboot Feels Food-Network Familiar

Talk to everyone who enjoys Tv set cooking competitions what show’s their most loved, and they’ll possible have a distinctive response: It could be the stalwarts, Chopped and Best Chef new college streaming exhibits like Is It Cake? and Baker’s Dozen or, of course, twee sensation The Terrific British Bake Off. But the mother of all cooking shows is, and will often be, Iron Chef. Launched in 1993 in Japan, the initial edition, hosted by the regal Chairman Kaga, was deadly really serious in its exuberant quest for culinary excellence, an mindset flipped on its head with the campy, hilarious dubbing that adopted when the Foodstuff Network commenced airing it in the U.S. in 1999.

Iron Chef, in all its splendor, threw each its esteemed Iron Cooks and formidable challengers into a grand arena — “Kitchen Stadium” — a spectacle contrary to any other on television. The exhibit was the progenitor of cooking as sport, complicated two chefs to prepare dinner the better food using a shared theme ingredient, and it enthroned cooks as heroes. In turning cooking into storylines akin to professional wrestling drama, the unique Iron Chef reinforced the notion of cooks as auteurs, or chefs as icons worthy of veneration. The opening monologue dubbed the Iron Chefs “the invincible adult men of culinary techniques,” enjoying up the strategy that if “ever a challenger wins over the Iron Chef, he or she will get the people’s ovation and fame for good.”

But as reckonings inside of the restaurant industry have peeled back again some of the prolonged-standing reverence for cooks, the rebooted Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend, which premiered on Netflix, raises the question of why we must even now care about elevating chefs into this degree of admiration. (Food stuff Network’s long-managing variation, Iron Chef America, which ran from 2004 to 2018, now would seem like a relic of a prior period, with the now-disgraced Mario Batali a person of its early Iron Cooks.) Quest for an Iron Legend addresses the “why care?” query much like the first does: by advertising us on who these competitors are, and why their stories should really matter to us. The show’s remarkable audio, speedy zoom-ins, and sluggish-motion victory poses truly feel ham-fisted in comparison to the additional stoic Japanese eyesight, but total, the components carries on to perform.

Netflix’s reboot delivers back again the original Foodstuff Network duo Alton Brown as host with actor Mark Dacascos as Chairman Kaga’s “nephew.” But with an totally new established of judges, challengers, and Iron Cooks, the demonstrate doesn’t have time to create the names of its in-dwelling heroes, so they in its place arrive with decades or even a long time of prior culinary achievement and recognition: consider Curtis Stone, Marcus Samuelsson, Ming Tsai, Dominique Crenn, and Gabriela Cámara. There’s also a diverse cast of opponents: Mason Hereford of New Orleans’s Turkey and the Wolf, Esther Choi of New York City’s Mokbar, Curtis Duffy of Chicago’s Ever, Claudette Zepeda of San Diego’s Vaga, Yia Vang of Minneapolis’s Union Hmong Kitchen area, Mei Lin of LA’s Daybird, and Gregory Gourdet of Portland’s Kann. There’s no absence of culinary potential here, and these cooks come with as a lot acclaim as the Iron Cooks, nevertheless with less several years of practical experience, undoubtedly.

(There are spoilers from this position on)

Patrick Wymore/Netflix

The unique Japanese Iron Chef was an overly stylized, extraordinary duel of culinary wits, pitting proven older male cooks towards the usually stoic Iron Chefs of Chairman Kaya’s steady (Masaharu Morimoto, a person of the Japanese Iron Cooks and a longtime Iron Chef in the American version, makes a critical judging look in the Netflix reboot). Iron Chef The usa showcased a very similar dynamic of intense levels of competition, but with hosts that furnished levity. The Netflix variation carries most of the tone and tactic of Iron Chef The united states. In the new Kitchen area Stadium, human audiences have been replaced by CGI graphics and piped in applause, introducing an edge of tacky, “don’t acquire this way too seriously” mind-set. Best Chef alum Kristen Kish is now the sideline reporter along with Brown, who proceeds his streak of factoids although Kish provides her individual intensive cooking expertise to the commentary.

Cosmetic modifications apart, the demonstrate argues that the in general purpose for the chefs continues to be the identical: the risk for glory, or winning for the sake of straightforward satisfaction in one’s get the job done. In the new Iron Legend, there is a throughline purpose which is intended to motivate competition: the optimum-scoring competitor who clears their initially battle competes in a finale against all five Iron Cooks. If the challenger wins, they are given the title of Iron Legend, obtain a plasticky golden chef’s knife as a trophy, and, of program, some ineffable recognition as a next-stage master. With pride and glory as the principal motivators, the show wills us to think that chefs covet the knife-formed trophy. It feels convincing mainly because of the verisimilitude of the frenetic, significant stakes exhibition on Television to the normally intense tension cooker environments of expert kitchens. In all Iron Chef formats, the level of cooking on screen — minus the inclusion of two previous sick-equipped NFL gamers in the recent series — always appeared to be more rigorous than in other competitions.

Of study course, the audience will by no means get the chance to test any of this food items. But the present translates flavor and taste in the backstory and point of view of every single chef, which in transform offers viewers a sense of what the judges are eating without having a more on-the-nose, submit-recording interview standard of other truth demonstrates. For the most element, this is effective simply because competitors normally lean on their heritage and id for assembling flavors.

As an case in point, Choi states her grandmother justifies all the credit rating for her adore of foodstuff, but she crafts a menu that weaves in traditional residence cooking like a king crab bibimbap to some thing more polished, like a kimchi butter lobster ramen she may provide at her Brooklyn cafe. Combating tears, Choi tells the judges, “every dish we put out there has to do with our society and who I am.” Banking on heritage is absolutely not a new a person in Iron Chef, but with the earliest seasons fundamentally expressions of classical European or East Asian cuisines, and afterwards Iron Chef The usa menus spanning a a lot more intercontinental technique, it’s refreshing to see younger cooks not just unafraid of boasting their cultures, but amplifying them without pandering to the perceived requirements of French, Italian, Japanese, or Chinese cuisines. And the display screen time to place previously lesser known cuisines into the limelight, these types of as Gourdet’s Haitian, Vang’s Hmong, or Zepeda’s border Baja California flavors, feels like a sensible go in 2022.

Cooking competitions are excellent tv, but also absurd. Rooting for the opponents or Iron Cooks on Iron Legend feels very similar to rooting for superheroes in our age of Marvel and D.C: There is a perception of futility. On-display, it is tricky to sense a palpable conflict in between opponents, and there’s adequate higher-fiving and prolonged-hugging to make you surprise if the chefs came on to the display emotion like there was a great deal at stake.

But I saved coming back to individual tales that resonate in the meals and cooking. Black and white or gradual-movement recollection have been a regular section of the Japanese Iron Chef, possibly the Chairman’s individual or the competing chef’s nostalgia. It was these moments on Iron Legend that I felt most fascinated in who was competing and why, these kinds of as when Choi recalled her Korean grandmother or when Vang talked about the Hmong flavors he figured out just after immigrating to the U.S.

Choi, who was one of just two competitors who conquer an Iron Chef, earns the optimum rating and thus the likelihood to cook dinner for the Iron Legend in a major period finale that pits her and her courageous two sous chefs Ilji Cheung and Jin Jang versus all 5 Iron Chefs. Choi potential customers the judges by way of her overall culinary profession, undergirded by her Korean heritage. In the close, her staff falls brief by a mere position, a consequence that seems suspect to assist propel the present into a different year. But observing Choi, with whom I have recorded a video at a restaurant named right after her grandmother, and someone I see as a future luminary in the modern day Korean foodstuff scene, felt like somebody worthy of rooting for.

Possibly which is why references to the authentic culinary influences — moms, fathers, grandmothers — certain me that acknowledging chefs for their cooking abilities is a deserving endeavor that it’s possible the quest for an Iron Legend is less about the motivation for glory, but comprehension that household and cultural roots, nostalgia, and memory are much more strong flavors than method or prowess and ultimately, that the battlefield by itself is meaningless without knowing why the foods issues on the plate. At the starting of just about every episode, the primary Iron Chef exhibited Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s adage, “Tell me what you try to eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Possibly the new Netflix version really should say, “Show me how you cook, and you have explained to me who you are.”