The Iron is Hot

I have finally discovered a sport I can stand to watch:

Cooking.

Thanks to Iron Chef, I can now experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

Iron Chef is a campy, cultish soap opera that The Food Network imports from Japan. It pits visiting chefs against an Iron Chef at the whim of Takeshi Kaga, a Liberace-like millionaire gourmet who rules the castle where the Iron Chefs live. Challengers choose which chef to face — Iron Chef Japanese, Iron Chef French, Iron Chef Italian, or Iron Chef Chinese — and Chairman Kaga announces the secret ingredient they must use in all dishes. Sometimes it’s tofu, sometimes eggplant, or eel, or limes.

If you can’t buy that premise for a battle royale, keep clicking.

The opponents cook madly for 60 minutes, then submit five or so dishes to a mismatched panel of judges. Most are Japanese celebrities, from waif actresses to Sumo wrestlers. They earnestly dissect each dish, micro-analyzing whether it has done justice to the secret ingredient and honor to Japanese cuisine. The actress usually giggles something like, “I’m getting hooked on this,” and the English dubbing always has lots of hearty laughter alongside the amateur introspection on best-quality bean curd.

When a friend first told me about Iron Chef last fall, it seemed too absurd to watch. Now it seems too absurd to miss. It has the hype of WWF wrestling, the self-importance of the Olympics, and the middle-of-the-action camera angles of the NBA, the NFL, and NASCAR rolled into one.

(I’m making an assumption on that last part. The only sports broadcast I’ve ever been able to sit through was the 1985 Super Bowl, and that was mostly to see Otis Wilson from behind.)

Iron Chef usually wins, which causes my husband — the chef in our family — great consternation. The hands-on favorite is Iron Chef Japanese Masaharu Morimoto, who was born in Hiroshima and has his own restaurant in Philadelphia. His record is 16-7-1. Rumor has it that, when the Iron Chef trading cards come out this summer, there’ll only be one Morimoto card. Boys don’t get more Golden than that.

Morimoto takes on Bobby Flay this month in an Iron Chef 3 rematch airing June 3. Iron Chef Weekend kicks off Food Network’s new season, with show premieres and a Taste the Adventure sweeps, the network’s biggest-ever promo. On-air, print, and online elements gets viewers to sample new shows like The Cowboy Kitchen and Al Roker’s Around the World in NYC (I’m not sure if that whets or squelches the appetite). Winners take a “culinary journey” through New York City, San Francisco/Napa Valley, and Hawaii via private jet.

Iron Chef is a huge draw for the network. Pre-orders are rolling in for Iron Chef: The Official Book, with rules of the game, chef interviews, a glossary that will do wonders for your Japanese, and Chairman Kaga’s favorite recipes. The New York Times has called the show “Pokémon for grownups.”

Maybe that’s why I like it. It’s absurd, but you know that going in. It takes itself so seriously, viewers can’t possibly do the same. Sure, it matters who wins — we always want the challenger to win, just because we know his (or her) chances are so slim. But it doesn’t really matter who wins. It’s a parody of professional sports.

Of course, the other reason I like it is because it’s about food. I’m always interested in food. (I’m waiting for the episode with chocolate as the secret ingredient.) Cameramen fall all over themselves to get up-close-and-personal shots of tofu bricks emerging from brine. Kitchen Stadium Reporter Ota gives breathless updates on how Iron Chef Japanese is slicing up a window blind to wrap around ingredients, tamale-style. The chefs strike dramatic, stone-faced poses under lighting worthy of a Broadway finale. High school Home Ec was never like this.

Food is almost incidental to Iron Chef, but it’s the ingredient that makes the show accessible. Hey, everybody eats, right? And if the Sumo wrestlers and starlets can be expert enough to decide the fate of Bobby Flay, can’t we be, too? You can’t taste what Iron Chef Japanese is cooking, of course, but the sensory overload makes up for that.

Perhaps the best part is the way Iron Chef makes sport of itself. After all, as every good chef knows, success is in the presentation.