'Chefs vs. City,'
bland to the taste
Competition in which two chefs take on locals
By Tom Conroy
Aug 6, 2009
Putting its participants through a series of typical reality TV competitions for ridiculously low stakes, “Chefs vs. City” fails to provide much entertainment.
Unlike most of the other programs on the Food Network, it fails to teach us much of anything either.
In the series, which premieres tomorrow at 10 p.m., two chefs, Aarón Sánchez and Chris Cosentino, travel to various American cities to compete against two local chefs in food-related contests.
The premiere takes place in New York, where the regulars are matched up against two other Food Network chefs: Kelsey Nixon, a contestant on season four of “The Next Food Network Star,” and Claire Robinson, host of “5 Ingredient Fix.”
The teams are provided with yellow taxis to take them around Manhattan and backpacks full of items to help them complete five tasks.
The teams also get pieces of paper that hint in rhyme (à la “Survivor”) where the next contest will be held. For example: “The next task will be a bit dicey/Head to the place where the food is spicy.” But since they’re also given the addresses of the locations, these rhymes are superfluous; they should at least be clever. (The addresses, meanwhile, are the excuse for repeated product placements of a certain well-known online search engine.)
In the tasks, the chefs have to sniff out various flavors in a candy store, slice salmon so thin that they can read through it, and eat a bowl of painfully hot Indian food.
Since the show is only an hour long (though it seems longer), it doesn’t provide us with much information about the various shops and restaurants or much insight into the various cuisines. (But if the establishments are paying a product-placement fee, it’s probably money well spent.)
The final task initially seems likely to teach us something about cooking. At a high-end food cart called the Dessert Truck, the teams have to assemble and sell 10 desserts. But the ingredients are already basically finished: Viewers could probably figure out on their own that if you put ice cream and caramel on top of a brownie, it will taste pretty good.
This isn’t to say that these tasks are less ingenious than the average roadblock on “The Amazing Race” (this show’s most obvious inspiration) or the average immunity challenge on “Survivor,” two series that have proven that millions of Americans will sit and watch video of their fellow citizens participating in the equivalent of scavenger hunts, three-legged races and pie-eating contests.
The difference on those shows is that the contestants are trying to win a million dollars. On “Chefs vs. City,” the teams are competing for bragging rights. But whereas on, say, “Iron Chef,” the competitors are actually demonstrating their cooking skills, it’s hard to believe that these four contestants are going to brag later to their friends about how fast they ate that bowl of phaal.
To their credit, the competitors try to raise the stakes by talking up how much they want to win: “This is for all the girls at the Food Network!” says Robinson to Nixon. “I don’t want those two little Food Network cutie pies to beat the big boys,” says Cosentino.
Since Sánchez is from New York, the home-team-vs.-visitors factor is lacking in the premiere. Maybe when the guys go to Chicago or New Orleans, local pride will add some interest to the proceedings.
A more serious problem is that neither Sánchez nor Cosentino is particularly charismatic. What’s more, they lack chemistry as a team. Again, this could change over time. As we all know, sometimes the soufflé rises, and sometimes it doesn’t. This episode doesn’t inspire you to take another peek in the oven.
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