Next Iron Chef is a show similar to Top Chef where a number of skilled chefs compete in cooking competitions with one or two chefs being eliminated every episode until there's a final winner. The difference lies in the nature of the challenges and the stakes. The challenges are almost universally individual ones, with the team challenges that are Top Chef's bread and butter being once a season affairs on Next Iron Chef, if that. Also, rather than a bunch of cooking products and a stack of cash, what's at stake on Next Iron Chef is a place on Iron Chef: America's cast as a new Iron Chef.
The odd thing is that I prefer the competition to become an Iron Chef, more than I do Iron Chef: America itself. I suspect that's because there is so many fewer variables in Iron Chef: America than there are on Next Iron Chef. On the regular Iron Chef, each contestant, usually one Iron Chef versus an outside challenger, is told in advance that the secret ingredient is one of four possibilities. That allows each chef to have a pre-planned menu designed, making all about the final execution. Iron Chef contestants also get a pair of sous chefs to help them with the cooking. While that does allow for much more complex and artistic dishes, it also removes a lot of the spontaneity from the proceedings.
By comparison, Next Iron Chef is pretty diverse. You get wacky ingredients, or strange locations, or odd restrictions, or sometimes more than one of the above. I mean, really, who doesn't love watching persnickety Chopped judge Geoffrey Zakarian running for his life through a ballpark desperately trying to find some kind of ingredients to use before having to cook them on a grill set up in the bleachers? No one. It was hilarious.
What's more, the fourth season of Next Iron Chef added a new wrinkle, the Secret Ingredient Showdown. In the first three seasons of the show, matters proceeded similarly to Top Chef, where you'd have a preliminary challenge, the winner of whom gets an advantage in the second challenge. In the second challenge, the chef who did the worst is eliminated from the show. Starting with season four, however, the first challenge determines who the two worst chefs are, and those two get a single, often wacky, ingredient to play with. Best chef sticks around, worst goes home. Also, the winner of the first challenge gets some kind of edge in the first challenge of the next episode.
The fourth season also added a subtitle: Next Iron Chef: Super Chefs. In previous seasons, they'd usually included a reasonably well known chef, at least in TV Cooking circles. Season two had Amanda Freitag, who also serves as a judge on Chopped. Season three had Ming Tsai of Simply Ming fame. Season four, however, went nuts with the idea. Every single contestant either had their own cooking show either on Food Network, the Cooking Channel, or elsewhere, or else had at least appeared as a challenger on Iron Chef America. TheFood Network raided their own pantry pretty heavily for this season, with Zakarian, Guarnascelli, and Samuelson from Chopped, Burrell, MacMillan, and Irvine from Worst Cooks in America among other shows, making it six out of ten contestants being regulars on their own network! Still, like the Chopped All Stars competition before it, that ended up being a net positive as I for one found it fun to see people who are normally positioned as judges being on the other end of the judgments.
Thus, Next Iron Chef. It's only on for a few weeks every year, so it becomes a rare televised pleasure. If you happen to be watching Food Network in the autumn, you could do much worse than Next Iron Chef.
This concludes my Competitive TV series. But wait, what about the frequently mentioned Chopped? As it turns out, I wrote something about that show a few months ago and nothing's really changed. Go read that installment, and I'll move on to other topics. Thanks for reading.
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