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What's cooking?
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If God is in the details, the devil is in the kitchen where chefs slug it out
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Photo: Murali Kumar K.
MORE REALITY Watch chefs turn their aprons into combat fatigues
The clash of the titans swinging ladles and forks at each other, donning combat fatigues instead of aprons, and whipping up dishes in battle frenzy. There are as many dishes as there are emotions and it's all supposed to be as real as it can get in a star-studded kitchen.
Do you really have the appetite for the life of a bunch of American chefs battling it out for TV in one hell of a kitchen under the eye of Fearful Gordon Ramsay? To Bollywood buffs, Ramsay is a name synonymous with horror and terror that is rather hilarous, but this is no horror show. It's a reality show. (What other kind of show do you have anyway, these days?)
Kitchen voyeurism
I mean, all Sanjeev Kapoor fans would love to see him battle for fame with say, umm... Karen Anand or Upen Patel or even Tarla Dalal maybe? Everyone's talking Indian content, right? And Indian means going beyond making pav bhaji on Mumbai's beach or cooking meen molee on a houseboat in Kerala on "Indian" cookery shows. But if you're the kind that loves to see cameras prying into people's bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchen and so on, you might like Discovery Travel and Living's show. It's called Hell's Kitchen and is touted as America's "hottest and most wicked reality show".
Yes, wicked. If you are sadistic and love to see a group of professional chefs polish a 100 glasses, scream at each other, break down under pressure and cry in a bid to win a restaurant for themselves, this is the show for you.
Launched recently at the Olive Beach in Bangalore, the show really is right now a purely American phenomenon. There is no Indian version. As yet. And there is no Indian chef participating. So the launch was just a great excuse to indulge in some delicious Mediterranean food at Olive's, we presume.
Olive's chefs even competed in a sort of friendly reality show of their own at the launch. Three of them were given a basket of ingredients such as vegetables, chicken, peppers, lemon, herbs and mushrooms, to indulge in some "basket cooking" — using the limited ingredients, they cooked up something innovative.
Popular restaurateur A.D. Singh, who is Olive's MD, and Executive Sous Chef Anuj Kapoor did the tasting and judging. Singh expressed happiness that the largely forgotten faces of the industry, the chefs, are the focus of the show — a far cry from when they were branded mere bawarchis.
But Gordon Ramsay's gimlet eye was nowhere in evidence, no belligerent hands on hips, no F-words, no nervous breakdowns here. Only friendly banter while picking on some chicken stuffed with mushrooms and a happy cool winner at the end of it all.
But Chef Anuj swears that the kind of war-zone tension on show does prevail in restaurant kitchens where pans fly all over the place, and it's not easy keeping fellow chefs together and going.
A trailer of the show gives a peek into hell's kitchen as the heat is turned on and egos clash, cuss words rain, aggressiveness is a virtue and teamwork inane. The shock, the sorrow, the tears, backstabbing, bitching and cribbing — yes, they're all in place.
A look at some tasks on hand — in 15 minutes prepare a dish with 15 leftovers!! (That's something we can live without!) Set a table with over 90 pieces of crockery in five minutes — winning team gets to soak in a spa while the losers polish the glasses and silverware. While winning a round could get you live on national TV cooking on a breakfast show, losing it means watching your colleague on TV while slogging in a sweaty kitchen. Talk of reality!
Hell's Kitchen Week premieres on Discovery Travel and Living every day till May 19 at 9 p.m. The other episodes air every Monday from May 22 to June 19 at 10 p.m.
BHUMIKA K.
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