Allez, Cuisine

The basic premise of "Iron Chef" is simple enough: each week a challenger from a top restaurant in Japan is brought into Kitchen Stadium and given his choice of the three iron chefs. These are Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, I.C. Japanese Masaharu Morimoto, and I.C. Chinese Chen Kenichi (for a while there was an I.C. Italian, but no one ever seemed to pick him).

The ringleader of this affair -- and the only person on the show whose dialogue is subtitled and not dubbed -- is Chairman Kaga, a sort of baroque industrialist vampire who appears in the opening montage biting into a raw bell pepper and grinning mischievously. According to the show's premise, Kaga came up with the idea for the show himself, and immediately set about building his Kitchen Stadium. But now that there is an inferior American version of the show hosted by a man who claims to be Kaga's nephew, it seems increasingly likely that both of them are merely actors.

Now, once the challenger has chosen his adversary, Kaga unveils the theme ingredient for the battle. Both competitors then have one hour to prepare several dishes that "articulate" the theme ingredient. Most of the time each chef prepares between four and six dishes. At the conclusion of the hour, a panel of four "expert" judges taste each dish and offer comments. They then fill out a scorecard, and whoever comes out on top is the winner. Nine times out of ten, the Iron Chef is victorious.

The most entertaining part of the show, however, is the running commentary, dubbed into English for American audiences. When it is unclear what ingredients a chef is using or where he is headed with a particular dish, a correspondent on the kitchen floor finds out what he can and reports back to the booth, yelling the name of the play-by-play announcer each time by way of introducing his comments. Clearly, the American actors who sit down each week to recite their dubbed lines are masters of nuance. Every laugh, intonation and pun is rendered perfectly in goofy English, making the experience all the more enjoyable.

A typical exchange between the commentators might go something like this:

"Look at Iron Chef Sakai peeling that apple! I've never seen someone do it that fast."

"Well, you know if I tried that there would be blood all over the place."

"Heh, heh, heh -- No blood in my dessert, please, thank you very much. Okay, now let's check in on the challenger's side..."

(etc.)

As I mentioned last week, it is nearly impossible to learn anything about cooking from the Iron Chefs, given that the theme ingredient is as likely to be squid or truffles as it is to be pears or eggs. But it is worth paying special attention to the way the chefs present their dishes. Regardless of the regional "style" of the chef, the dishes are served in a variety of inventive and aesthetically pleasing ways -- in bowls made on the spot from horizontal bamboo stalks, tied to cedar planks, or wrapped in leaves and buried in hot gravel.

On this matter -- presentation -- it is worth mentioning also that the current "Iron Chef America" is by no means the first time the Food Network has attempted such a show. I recall several years ago a pilot episode for a show of the same name in which Todd English was among the Iron Chefs. The food he cooked didn't look especially elegant or unusual -- I seem to recall cornbread or something along those lines -- but when it came time to plate his dishes, he stuck sparklers in each one and lit them just as the clock expired. The crowd went absolutely wild, but the show didn't return until this year, and Todd English was gone.

Finally, the music for "Iron Chef," as I recently learned when scrutinizing the credits more carefully, is from the movie "Backdraft," starring Kurt Russell and William Baldwin. It provides just the extra dash of pomp and circumstance that the show requires. And while Chairman Kaga might not really be the visionary he plays on TV, he is welcome in my kitchen any day of the week. I am only disappointed that he seems not to be much of a baseball fan; on a recent episode, in which the manager of the Seibu Lions was among the celebrity judges, Kaga actually became visibly irritated when the judges were talking more baseball than food at the table.