Bravo’s new ‘Chef Academy’ mixes in laughs

I’ll admit to looking askance at the review DVD for a new food show called “Chef Academy.” It’s easy to tire of these reality shows and I plead guilty. But the fact that this show is on Bravo, which is home to the wildly popular “Top Chef,” meant it had to be taken seriously.

When I finally popped in that DVD, I found myself laughing out loud at the premiere episode. It’s still reality programming and features a cast of characters who might well do anything to get on television. But there is something about this group that made them different from the usual models turned actors who inhabit the TV screen so much of the time.

The show stars chef Jean Christophe Novelli billed as a “world renowned Michelin and 5AA Rosette award-winning chef with restaurants in London, France and South Africa, and voted ‘World’s Sexiest Chef’ by the New York Times,” according to Bravo’s press release. French born and residing in London, his Novelli Academy Cookery School in the UK has placed in the “Top 25 Cookery Schools in the World” and now he wants to open a similar school on Venice Beach in California.

I’ll admit I had never heard of him and some of the contestants who want to cook with him said the same thing. But he’s excited to come to America with his pregnant fiancé and run this cooking school for passionate students. They are picked up at the airport by his new assistant Joel, who comes right out of central casting to be a foil in this cozy group of foodies as he doesn’t cook and knows nothing about food. But Joel’s qualified because he was Tori Spelling’s assistant.

Novelli doesn’t seem to know who the 90210 girl is but asks his eager new assistant to do whatever he has to arrange a meeting with Columbo, his favorite television detective. After a debate about whether actor Peter Falk is dead or alive, Novelli does his own impression of the actor. The subject of Columbo comes up again when he meets his chef students. Go figure.

So what made me laugh? Novelli and his stateside sous chef interview 15 candidates for the school. This almost goes by too fast as some of them are real characters, including the 47-year-old Valley Girl housewife who comes in with a food basket bribe; and the 26-year-old bride-to-be who has been ordered to learn to cook by her future mother-in-law.

Then the real laugh riot starts when chef brings in a little single burner and well-worn pan and rows of eggs and herbs, cheese and mushrooms. Cook me eggs, anyway, he tells each candidate. Most of them fail miserably, which, of course, begs the question of their passion for cooking. He is most horrified when several of them pick up the minced garlic in a jar to use instead of the fresh garlic. They burn things, don’t finish and one almost cries.

From this he selects a few real chefs: a Navy chef who cooked on a submarine and a culinary school grad, along with a motley crew who may succeed in the kitchen yet.

At least they’ve made me care if they do in this first episode.



Source