Our latest find is the reboot of Iron Chef on Netflix. Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend features Alton Brown and Kristen Kish as the co-hosts. Mark Dacascos reprises his role as “The Chairman.” Most of the key elements of the original show have been retained, but they have added some twists. The new “Kitchen Stadium” is larger than on the original show. The season will have eight episodes. In the first seven episodes, a challenger faces off against a new lineup of seasoned Iron Chefs. The competition’s most successful challenger will return to battle in a grand finale against all five Iron Chefs for the chance to be named the first-ever Iron Legend.
The new Iron Chefs include Curtis Stone, Marcus Samuelsson, Dominique Crenn, Gabriela Camara and Ming Tsai. Samuelsson is a favorite of ours from Chopped. We had never seen Crenn before, but she has created some fabulous dishes in the episodes we have seen her in. The challengers we have seen so far are also very solid. We really liked Esther Choi, who is the chef and entrepreneur behind Mökbar, a ramen restaurant with locations in both Chelsea Market and Park Slope in New York City, and Ms. Yoo, a Korean gastropub named after her grandmother. There are two permanent judges. They are Andrew Zimmern, best known as the host of the long-running culinary travel series Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, and Nilou Motamed, former editor-in-chief of Food and Wine and Epicurious magazines. There is a different guest judge in every episode.
Iron Chef was one of our steaming favorites and we are glad it is back. It’s great in the “no commercial” Netflix format. Mark Dacascos is even more over the top than he was on the original series and is very entertaining.