Iron Chef America

Iron Chef America (ICA) drives me crazy. It STARTS with a cheesy premise. Kevin, Alton, stick to whatcha do best and give up the hokey emcee duties. The original Iron Chef is admittedly cheesy, but it is apparently done in full earnest. Although, the fellow playing "Chairman Kaga" does seem to be having a good time playing a parody of a Japanese Liberace. You can see him cracking up in the opening credits.

Note to the people at Food TV: hamburger, cheese and chicken are not good "secret ingredients". One of the charms of the original Iron Chef (apart from the incredibly bad voiceovers dubbed in) is the use of ingredients which are totally weird. Live pike eels and sea urchins that Iron Chefs have to actually kill and dissect on camera. Giant turnips and burdock leaves. Potatoes probably ARE a challenging secret ingredient in Japan. They don't freaking GROW the damn things in copious quantities there.

Also, could your psuedo Chairman pick Morimoto once in a while? He is currently the Masahiko Kobe (Iron Chef Italian on the original) of the show in that he only gets picked about one out of ten times. Bobby Flay has about 40 shows on the Food Network if I want to watch him cook and he displays little of Sakai-san's (Iron Chef French, Hiroyuki Sakai, on the original) charm while doing so. Mario is on every day. And did Kat Cora just get tired of being the token girl chef? I realize that your choices of female chefs are limited to Kat Cora, Sarah Moulton and Gayle Gand (pastry chef, but still an actual chef), but c'mon!

Why do the judges on ICA all have something to do with food? Again, part of the charm of the original Iron Chef is having a baseball player, a bimbo, a legislator and a fortune teller judging the dishes. And wondering just what in the hell a Rosanjin scholar is and how it qualifies a person to be a food critic.

Finally, would you just take the damn ice cream machine away? Most of the Iron Chefs have wised up enough not to use it any more unless they are actually making something appropriately dessert-like, but it is no longer shocking when a challenger purees the secret ingredient to make a sorbet out of it. And you can all stop sounding like it is really wild when they do.

I am boycotting Iron Chef America. Swear to God.