The premise of Iron Chef: an eccentric millionaire, in search of new taste sensations, uses some of his considerable fortune to build Kitchen Stadium. He then finds four "Iron Chefs", each with their own specialties (Japanese, Chinese, French, and Italian cuisines), and invites other chefs to do culinary battle with them. The battle consists of a theme ingredient and one hour, and each chef must create as many good dishes as possible (usually 4-5) highlighting the theme ingredient as possible. After the cooking is done, a guest panel tastes each chef's creations and rates them - after which a winner is declared.
Chairman Kaga, the eccentric millionaire, is the only character played by an actor (Kaga Takeshi, who has appeared in the Japanese productions of Les Miserable and West Side Story). Everyone else plays themselves - the chefs, the commentators, the food critics, and the panel.
The show is partially subtitled, partially dubbed on FoodTV. Chairman Kaga is always subtitled, but the rest are mostly dubbed.
What makes this show fun is that it's basically Julia Child meets WWF. The pace is fast, and watching the chefs do battle not only with each other but often with the still live ingredients is very entertaining. I like the commentary, I like guessing what they're going to do with each ingredient, and most of all, I like when the theme ingredient is traditionally Japanese, because half the time I have no idea what they're going to do with it
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For loads more information, I'd recommend the Unofficial Iron Chef site:
http://www.ironchef.com
This site has loads of background information on the actors, chefs, regulars on the tasting panels, and summaries/results of almost all the shows. Note: that means there are spoilers, but they do warn you when you're venturing into that territory. I really love this site, because knowing more about the folks on the show gave me some new appreciations as to where they were coming from.
I didn't get to see the Morimoto/Bobby Flay rematch - I was out of town, and even though I carefully set up the VCR, we had a power outage while we were away, and something in the recording set up got frotzed. I'll just have to wait until FoodTV shows it again. (But thanks to
www.ironchef.com above, I did look up who won. I couldn't have standed not knowing.)
Linear Mode
