OT: Iron Chef USA on Food Network(!!#??>!)

three words - alt FOOD wine :-)

I should say the the Japanese show was wonderful and a lot of fun. I particularly liked the voices they used for voice overs. I just don't have the food channel anymore, so I don't know about the present controversy.

First of all, thanks Jason for using the OT prefix. While this is alt.FOOD.wine, the final designation in the hierarchy is what determines a newsgroup's focus (there are several here who also post to alt.food.sushi, but the fact that food is in the name does not make it appropriate to post re hamachi here nor Ch. Musar there). But I think everyone here is pretty lenient towards food related posts as long as they (a) come from someone who contributes wine discussion and (b) are not too frequent. But its important to list the OT so readers who aren't interested know there's not wine content.

I didn't see this. Is it the one with William Shatner as host? I think I recall Todd English being on that one (I only saw a few minutes). If so, it wasn't actually originally a Food Network feature, but on TNT or USA. A pilot for a possible show. The few minutes I saw convinced me that they totally misread the appeal of Iron Chef. To me the original was a great synthesis of some inventive cooking, some exotic ingredients (ah, hermaphroditic salmon!), camp (the host, "Chairman Kaga", was previously the lead in a lot of Japanese musical theater, including Les Mis), and cross-cultural exoticism. There was the one episode that featured the sommelier that was wine centric (though it had some gaffes, probably in translation).

Of course, from my view it's too bad that FoodTV doesn't show more of the shows that appeal to me (Sarah Moulton, Ming Tsai, Mario Batali,Alton Bown and most of all the great "Taste " show that David Rosengarten did) instead of the fluff like Date Plate, Rachel Ray, etc. Iron Chef was probably fluff, but it wasn't inane fluff!

Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply