Next Food Network Star Review: Who Ate All the Bacon???

It’s the week before the season finale of The Next Food Network Star, and the four remaining contestants travel to New York City to prove, once and for all, they have what it takes to become the Star. It’s all sweet dreams, but for one of the contestants The City That Never Sleeps bites back with a harsh reality: elimination.

Okay, so, last week was tough. Brad’s elimination was shocking to say the least. But we must soldier on, carry on, even though it feels that our hearts have been torn from our chests.

We meet up with Tom, Herb, Aarti, and Aria in NYC where the chefs celebrate making it to the final four (undeserving though they may be {no bitterness}) and express their nervousness over what the upcoming task will be. Too soon they find themselves at Kitchen Stadium, the battleground for Iron Chefs. There they come face to face with Iron Chefs Bobby Flay, Masaharu Morimoto, Cat Cora and Michael Symon. Fear; that’s the word for it.

Alton Brown explains to the contestants their next challenge. Two things are needed to be a Food Network star: the first, excellent cooking skills, second, the ability to talk about food “on the fly.” For this challenge the contestants will be pitted against each other in groups of two in an Iron Chef-like battle. The contestants must prepare 3 dishes using a secret ingredient. And for those contestants not in battle, they will serve as floor commentators reporting the action to Alton.

Herb vs. Aarti
The first match up pits two completely different chefs. While Herb is all frenetic energy racing back and forth across the kitchen, Aarti is moving at a much slower pace. The judges worry both about Aarti’s pace as well as her frequent trips to the ingredient table. The judges are impressed with Herb’s energy and it is clear that he is loving this environment. Tom stands on the sideline of Aarti’s kitchen and he is great in reporting to Alton; he’s calm, informative, and has great personality. Aria on the other hand is ridiculously awful; she has no clue what’s going on and seems to take this all too lightly. She messes up the ingredients to Alton a few times and seems to have her head stuck in the clouds, it’s very frustrating. At the judging, both Herb and Aarti fare pretty well. The judges LOVE Aarti’s dishes, and two of Herb’s three dishes are great. The last one, not so much.

Aria vs. Tom
In this match up you have two different approaches to the challenge. Whereas Aria decides to really stress her homecooking pov, Tom tries to create these insane dishes worthy of Iron Chef. I really don’t know what in the world Aria was thinking. Their secret ingredient is bacon and so she makes three meals that happen to have bacon in them. Really? A breakfast platter, a salad? I can do that, for goodness sakes. It was really underwhelming and not worthy of being anywhere near Kitchen Stadium. If a certain someone was there (which he was as a sous-chef to Aarti) he would have given anything better than that. It was disguistingly disappointing. Herb, on the other hand went bacon crazy. He made a Bacon Steak, which was so tough the judges couldn’t cut it, a Bacon crab cake, which garnered mixed reactions, and a bacon stuffed French Toast. The judges weren’t really feeling any of Tom’s dishes and though he was being creative, it didn’t really work out. On the commenting, Herb seems to have a handle on it. That is until he has to talk to the camera. There he stumbles over his lines and is made to do it over and over again with the judges laughing on. Aarti does even worse. She doesn’t report to Alton and when she does her information’s wrong. It’s like she’s not even there.

In the judging room a winner is chosen from each match-up. Because of her stellar food, Aarti is crowned from the first and by default Tom wins though cautioned that there wasn’t really a winner in that round. It’s down to Herb and Aria, and it’s completely obivious to me who should be going home. But I saw how that worked last week so I’ll refrain judgment. Herb has great personality, though the judges worry about his inconsistent performances. And though Aria has great natural energy the judges feel that she lacks culinary authority. At the end, Aria is sent home and Herb is sent to the final three.

Next week: the Finale, the chefs shoot a pilot with Rachel Ray in the director’s chair.

Season 6, Episode 10: Iron Chef Battle (originally aired August 8, 2010)

For more on The Next Food Network Star, click here.

Sundays at 9/8c on Food Network

Photographs courtesy of Food Network.