3 Competitive Cooking Shows I Like Because of Their Cohesive Brands
Kelly and I LOVE Food Network competitive cooking shows, especially when the Celtics are enjoying their offseason.
It’s a great way to learn how to cook better and generate new, creative meal and ingredient ideas, plus the consistently repeatable formats function kind of like a sports game and are very easy to jump right into.
One aspect of the shows that I love analyzing is how the rules so clearly work in parallel with the vibe that the show is trying to create. I think it presents an interesting way to understand how strategy informs a brand as much or even more than the visuals like logo and colors that we usually associate with marketing and branding. This concept is why all of our Kind & Funny projects start with an in-depth Soul Search interview and strategy session.
Here are a few shows I like right now, and a look at how the rules dovetail with the overall brand:
1. Outchef’d: Empowering home cooks
First off, competing with food is kinda weird because it's highly subjective, and you can judge food on so many different criteria—taste, technique, creativity, authenticity, sustainability, cost-effectiveness, whether you made it gluten-free and taste good, etc.
This is personal to me because we recently competed with a group in a regional backyard barbeque competition, and I was confused by how much emphasis they put on presentation and technique vs. taste. While we came in fourth in sides, we lost ribs because they were too fall-off-the-bone, and I am still trying to figure out why that’s actually a bad thing. (Also, for a competition about ribs, other people sure spent a whole lot of time on making sure the kale underneath looked good.)
Personal grievances aside, I think at the end of the day judging food by taste is one of the better ways to do it, and the way that this show prioritizes taste is by leaving the judging up to random people that host Eddie Jackson pulls in from the street around the studio in New York City. These tasters are not professionally trained, so their judging is free from industry preconceptions, and they simply have to pick which of two dishes they prefer.
This works so well because the two chefs competing are always a well-known professional chef and a home cook who showed up that day thinking they were there for an audition and now find themselves in a surprise competition.
The show takes on a more supportive tone by virtue of the rule that the home cook only needs one vote to win prize money, and that tone is reinforced by a camera feed of the home cook’s loved ones watching and commenting from the green room. When the show is done, the pro signs and apron for the amateur as the pals come out of the green room for congratulations.
The whole thing comes off as a celebration of these home cooks, which I love (though I always wonder how let down the contestants feel after by not getting the audition they were expecting …).
2. Alex vs. America: We’re in this together
Where Outchef’d is a celebration of home cooks, this show is a love letter to professional chefs. There’s a chef host, Eric Adjepong, and the titular Alex Guarnaschelli (my favorite competitive chef & an excellent cookbook author) competes against three professional chef contestants over two rounds.
The most unique rule here is that Alex can lose in the first round. She never does because she’s a badass, but the fact that she could shows a level of respect for the other competitors that is echoed in the way the chefs’ accolades are read as they are introduced, as well as the way that all contestants discuss three key choices instead of being assigned surprise ingredients. There’s even a nice moment in every show when Eric and Alex walk around after the cooking is done and compliment the dishes made by the other contestants.
Judging here is done by two people who simply agree on winners and losers instead of messing around with assigning points for food. I think this is probably the best form of judging subjective competitions because it requires small group consensus building.
And while this show does an excellent job putting everyone on an equal playing field, it also shows off just how competitive and talented Alex is, because she still almost always wins the whole thing.
3. Bobby’s Triple Threat: I’m tired of beating home cooks, I’d like to host a lot of high-end cooking
I have learned so much over the years from watching Bobby Flay cook, whether on the grill, for brunch, on Iron Chef, or battling it out on Beat Bobby Flay, so I can understand why he didn’t want to cook this time around. On this show, which does everything over the top, one pro contestant competes in three rounds against Bobby’s “Titans”—Brooke Williamson, Tiffany Derry, and Michael Voltaggio—with one culinary icon serving as the judge. In the first round the contestant chooses which Titan to face, and they cook two dishes featuring two secret ingredients, then the same thing happens in Round 2, and then in Round 3 the contestant chooses the two secret ingredients to make one final dish against the last Titan.
OK, time to breathe. I told you it was over the top!
The best thing about this show is that once you get through with the clunky rules explanation up front, there is a ton of amazing cooking. You get to see a total of 10 high-quality plates of food featuring all sorts of flavor combinations and techniques and ingredients, putting this up there with Iron Chef in terms of sheer volume of good cooking to learn from.
The other best thing is that the show’s high-end tone is presented with a high kitsch factor, with the set presenting like a speakeasy replete with a secret password and Bobby handing the winner a bag of cash at the end. Take a tour of the set and you’ll see what I mean:
It is endlessly fascinating to me to think about why decisions are made and what happens from them, and sometimes its nice to think about it in a fun sandbox like cooking shows in order to practice making those more important decisions that come up in life and in business.
Are there any food shows you love that I’m missing? Is there another thing that you think shows off distinct branding? jed@kindandfunny.com.