The New York City Wine and Food Festival is not the only venue filled to capacity with Food Network personalities—the new season of The Next Iron Chef has just as many.
About half the new cast, along with host Alton Brown and last season‘s winner, Marc Forgione, gathered together on Friday morning to promote “The Next Iron Chef Experience”—a Time Warner Cable-sponsored booth on 13th street in Manhattan where visitors could try out their best chairman impression any time during the festival.
Host Alton Brown described the season—entitled The Next Iron Chef: Super Chefs as having “some of the finest chefs on the planet.” Indeed some of the chefs in attendance are of a very high caliber. Top Chef Masters season two winner, Marcus Samuelsson is certainly an early favorite, for example.
During the event, Alton Brown was able to name all ten cheftestants from memory—a cast including Anne Burrell, Robert Irvine, Spike Mendelsohn, Elizeth Faulkner, Michael Chiarello, and several others.
The new season differs from previous seasons not only in the new pool of contestants (the previous three seasons had contestants less known for television work, and more established in the restaurant world), but also with a new format. Each episode will now include a “Chairman’s Challenge,” in which all the contestants participate. There is also what Brown called a “wicked, nasty, horrible sudden death showdown,” for the bottom two from the previous challenge. To make it even more painful, the other chefs watch during sudden death.
Cheftenstant Michael Chiarello of the restaurant Bottega in Napa Valley described some of the differences between Next Iron Chef and Top Chef Masters, in which he was a first season finalist. “Top Chef tests your ability as a chef,” he said, “Next Iron Chef tests your ability to throw things together on the run and have rules change.”
“I thought I put out some of the most amazing food on the show,” said fellow contestant and Restaurant: Impossible host, Robert Irvine.”I think it’ll be the highest rated season,” he added.
Most of the contestants noted the close friendship between them. “Some great camaraderie,” Irvine said. “We’re all great friends.” However, Irvine did mention a bit of ongoing animosity within the cast. “There’s an ongoing battle between Anne [Burrell] and I.” Irvine was referencing the earlier season of Worst Cooks in America, which Burrell is returning to host with Bobby Flay next season.
Regular Chopped judge Alex Guarnaschelli described how it’s different to be on the other side of the cutting board. “I’m making myself vulnerable to opinion,” she said. Elaborating on the different between Next Iron Chef and Chopped: All-Stars, Guarnaschelli said NIC is like Chopped “times 40.”
Many contestants participated in events throughout the festival. Guarnaschelli judged the Meatball Madness event, and former Top Chef contestant (and new Next Iron Chef contestant) Spike Mendelsohn competed in the Burger Bash (an event that he won at the South Beach festival in 2009).
Spike went on to visit the Eater lounge, as did Marcus Samuelsson, who was the best dressed chef of the weekend.
Speaking of being wonderfully dressed, on Friday, a bow tie-clad Alton Brown dictated the proper method of how to put on a bow tie. Brown explained that it is much more impressive to tie a bow tie than to wear a clip-on, and described how one should tie the bow tie while not around one’s neck, then slip it over one’s head and tighten the back—voila! Bow tie hacked!
Since Good Eats, Brown’s Peabody-award winning Food Network show ended this summer, the Iron Chef series of shows will now be Alton Brown’s last foothold on the Food Network. Good Eats will live on, however, in reruns on Food Network and Cooking Channel.
As The Next Iron Chef was usually known as the only show on Food Network with authentic restaurant chefs, its new range of contestants represents a Food Network-ification of itself. Certainly contestants like Beau MacMillan, Spike Mendelsohn, and Chuck Hughes (of Cooking Channel’s Chuck’s Day Off) will find it difficult to compete with world-class juggernauts like Marcus Samuelsson, Michael Chiarello, and Elizabeth Faulkner. Now only if they’ll get rid of that pesky chairman…
The Next Iron Chef premiers on Sunday, October 30 at 9:00 on the Food Network.
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