I saw Nadia G in an interview where she wasn’t in-character. She sounded ‘normal’ (for any value of normal - as a New Yorker who is half-Sicilian, her character is not that far off from many I’ve known).
You can look them up on Yelp (the restaurants). From what I’ve seen it’s about 50/50 who remains producing at an acceptable level and who is staying afloat on the basis of people going there only because they saw it on the show, based on the positive and negative reviews, respectively.
Nadia G rocks. She’s a breath of fresh air (ie. originality) and she has some chops in the kitchen.
I kind of like this show, but I can’t watch it in real time for this very reason… I fast-forward through most of the extraneous bits, and the fact that it’s so predictable makes this part easy 
Here I thought this thread would be about cooking shows, like the ones on the Cooking Channel…
…hey… in the second post I talked about a cooking show not one of the food game shows… I tried man!
I will have to see if I get this channel. Now what channels put on the types of shows that used to be on the history channel and Discover?
Chopped- my wife and I love the show but those behind the scenes parts where the contestants are supposed to talk to each other is just awkward, I suppose it’s there to add reality show drama but its contrived as all get out. That time would be much better spent at the end giving the recipe and cooking tips for the best dish on that episode (which doesn’t necessarily have to be the winner of the challenge).
Is Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals still on the air?
That was the show in which sheprepared an entire meal in just 30 minutes. The ingredients might include 1 cup of diced onion, 2 cloves of minced garlic, 1 whole chicken cut up and deboned, 3 apples peeled and chopped, and 1 quart milk freshly milked from a cow named Bessie.
I can make gazpacho in 30 seconds if someone does all of that chopping for me.
Nadia G is fun and talented, but I can totally understand why someone might hate her schtick.
I will pay good money for someone to forcibly put Christopher Kimball through capsaicin-tolerance training. He’s good, but such a whiny bitch about anything with the barest hint of heat to it. He deserves every bit of crap he catches from the others on the show.
As I’ve often recommended before, Gordon Ramsay’s “The F Word” is a great show, and does focus on cooking and food. There’s a little competition (4 contestants on a team, learn courses from Ramsay, cook for the guests and see how many say they’d pay to eat that in a real restaurant; competing only against teams from previous shows), some schmoozing with minor celebs, but mostly stuff like “here’s a good recipe and how to make it,” “here’s where this food comes from,” “this is the food animal I’m raising in my yard for eventual butchering,” etc. Very little shoutyness/swearyness.
My main issue with Chopped is that several of their rotating judges, particularly Scott Conant, Alexandra Guarnaschelli, Chris Santos and at least another one, possible Geoffrey Zakarian, often have almost impossibly high standards and sometimes very weird ideas about the food they are served, especially considering that the contestants are given a very limited time and ingredients which are intentionally selected and grouped specifically to be discordant. Common complaints are:
“This pasta isn’t perfect, therefore the entire dish is garbage!”
“I HATE red onions!” 
(that one’s really weird).
“There’s a tiny piece of eggshell in here!” (or some other petty, minor infraction)
“I can’t taste any dog shit in here. There was dog shit in the basket, I want to TASTE it!”
Okay, maybe not that last one, but seriously they need to get the fuck over themselves.
Another one: Rick Bayless, I love your food. But your daughter is awkward at best on your show.
I know! This is one of my pet peeves. It’s like those infomercials for a chopping device which say they can make salsa in seconds, but when they toss in the ingredients the tomatoes, onions, etc are already diced up.
It was never that bad. Given my knife skills (and organization of the kitchen), I could prepare the hardest of her 30-minute recipes in about 45 minutes. I’ve tried maybe 1/2 dozen tops over the years though, as I generally don’t like her cooking style. Still, I enjoyed watching the show, sound off, when she was younger. Would have been even better if she cooked in the outfit she modeled for FHM.
I agree. It’s a good show. Very entertaining and informative. He has another show called Great Escape, for which he did two series/seasons. In the first, he traveled around India learning how to cook authentic Indian food. In the second, he traveled around Southeast Asia learning the cuisines of various countries. At the end he tried to make some dishes and had them judged by some local experts. In a couple of cases, he was learning some recipe or technique from someone’s mother. It was a sort of a combination of a travel show and a cooking show.
Yeah ain’t that the truth…and the dead pan face Guaraschnelli gives.
(One of the Chopped episodes broght tears to my eyes when the Chopped Champion gave money to the runner-up so she could visit her Grandmother in France. ( The Runner up burned herself with boild water but continued on) It brought tear to the judges eyes too.
Scott is always the worst (I think he’s that white guy who looks like a mafia hitman). Seriously, with all the time pressures they are under, if you get a tiny bit of stray hair or something, its not a big fucking deal. Yes, get on them for things like not being able to fully cook the item, but for missing a piece of eggshell or something give them a break. Its not the end of the world.
Me too! I loved that episode!
One annoyance about Chopped is that they can’t seem to decide how important it is to use every ingredient. They throw these weird-ass ingredients at people and then waffle when someone leaves it out or barely does anything with it, as long as the food is decent. What’s the point of stupid ingredients like sugary cereals or gummi bears if leaving them out lets a contestant make a great item and not get penalized for not using it?
I was going to say that my wife (and I, by association) have mostly stopped watching the Food Network in favor of the Cooking Channel because the former is now all game shows instead of cooking.
That’s what I was gonna say. I thought this thread was about cooking shows, not reality shows featuring cookery. It’s not like there’s a shortage of proper cooking programs that are bad that we could rip on.