Kitchen Sink Drama

Cook out: Rob Rainford, frenetic host of Licence To Grill. Courtesy Food Network Canada.

Nowhere on specialty TV do programmers work harder to cook up drama than Canada’s Food Network. Weeknights, you might witness a famous chef trying to burglar-proof her marriage with a chicken-salad sandwich or watch a “barbecue-ologist” create a modern caveman fantasy.

The Food Network began in 2000, but Canadian food shows have been around longer than that. In the early ’60s, Madame Jehane Benoit taught host Adrienne Clarkson how to clean a goose — use vinegar — on Take 30. Later, the Galloping Gourmet, Graham Kerr, vaulted onto the TV kitchen scene, once opening a show by hurdling a chair with a goblet of wine and shouting, “Throw your breasts in the pans, ladies!” like a soused prince stumbling into a bawdy house.

Alas, old-style cooking and clowning don’t cut bread anymore, this television critic discovered, after taking a stroll through the modern food-TV universe. Today, it seems, food is drama and cooks’ lives are the main course. When it works, it’s very good; when it doesn’t, the results can be pretty unappetizing.

The biggest change in food television over the last five years has been the move away from showing cooks prepare food to revealing how they manage their careers and lives. Instead of just recipes, we get stories; in the place of expert chefs, ingratiating food celebrities. Meals are too complicated, producers seem to be thinking. And so chefs are sold like politicians — personality first.

Many current Food Network shows are serrated documentary dramas. The renovation series Restaurant Makeover and Opening Soon pair temperamental food industry experts with big ego restaurateurs — guaranteed food fights. Another Canadian series, I Do…Let’s Eat, takes us through real-life wedding meals, again with occasional flare-ups.

Even Food Network’s daily countdown-to-dinner segment (4 p.m. to 7 p.m.) is alive with theatrics. Take for instance, The Barefoot Contessa (5 p.m.), an ungainly attempt at reality TV featuring Ina Garten, a budget analyst who left the Carter White House to open a legendary specialty food store, Barefoot Contessa, in the Hamptons. A successful book series and then this TV show followed.

Garten the writer is a gracious hostess whose love of food and company is infectious. Her cookbooks are great; her TV show, however, could give you indigestion. Someone has imposed inane storylines on the chef, remaking a lovely, confident woman into a Barefoot Desperate Housewife.

Every cookie has a story: Ina Garten's home kitchen doubles as the set for her show, Barefoot Contessa. Photo Mary Altafer. Courtesy AP.

The series is shot in Garten’s airy, bright-with-flowers Connecticut home. In a recent episode, the chef snuck out of bed early to dazzle husband Jeffrey with her culinary talents. The breakfast surprise is a generous enough act: banana sour cream pancakes ladled with warmed maple syrup crowded next to apple-smoked bacon. But while preparing it, Garten is also packaging business-trip meals for hubby, throwing together a Chinese chicken salad before moving on to her famous butternut squash soup. (I’ve had it. It’s a poem.) Before long, Garten has enough plates spinning to start a vaudeville act. All the while, she talks about you-know-who.

“Jeffrey’ll love it,” she says, breathing in the soup, “he’ll think about me all week.” After breakfast, the chef attends to one more surprise. “His two favourite movies are Chicago and Apollo 13,” she confides, holding both tapes in hand, wondering which to put into her I Really Care package. “Chicago is way too sexy for a guy on his own,” Garten chuckles, packing her little astronaut off with Apollo 13.

Blame reality TV and The Iron Chef for this maudlin kitchen sink drama. Garten should be doing a relaxed, Julia Child kind of thing — except no one has been doing that kind of show for years. Before the reality-TV craze, The Iron Chef revolutionized cooking shows in the ’90s, staging elaborate kitchen battles between master chefs in a $3-million medieval Kitchen Stadium. (Audiences for some shows reached over 22 million in Japan.)

Perhaps we can no longer sit still for old-fashioned, first-you-chop-this, then-you-add-that cooking shows. Truth be told, watching Everyday Italian with Giada De Laurentiis — the closest thing to a classic cooking show on Food Network — I found myself dozing off. Great food, but why would you want to watch someone read you a recipe that you could follow more easily in a cookbook?

Food Network’s most inviting (and popular) dinner-time show, Licence to Grill (6 p.m. weekdays), is an example of a story-based cooking series that makes good food and good television. A recent show opened with a phone message. “It’s Rob,” chef Rob Rainford’s machine tells us. “I’m pumped and ready for the big bike tour and the barbecue afterwards, with sweet veal ribs, crusted rack of lamb, steelhead trout and delicious salad. See ya!” We see Rob pedalling his mountain bike through a swaying field as the message plays. After a commercial break, he returns home to tell us, “I just came back from a little ride ’cause the guys are coming over for a power ride later on.” In fact, he’s chosen today’s menu because he’ll need “lots of carbs and proteins.”

Cue the 'cue: Rob Rainford, in his element. Courtesy Food Network Canada.

The set of Licence to Grill is the backyard of a red brick Ottawa home equipped with a fridge, twin gas barbecues and a swimming pool. Just as the answering machine handled our phone call, the fridge and barbecue will do the cooking, Rob tells us. “We’re gonna let the jerk marinade do the work here … let the veal get real happy in the fridge for three hours,” he says. After throwing together a salad and dressing the lamb, he places the marinated veal over a smoking rum-soaked packet of cherry-wood in the barbecue. Then he’s gone for that 180-minute power ride.

The trip lasts exactly two TV minutes — when we return from commercial, there’s Rob, lathered in sweat. “Whew, just got off the mountain bike,” he says. “Nobody told me it was uphill both ways. My veal ribs — they’ve been smoking now for three hours.” He opens the barbecue, releasing a cloud of smoke. “Whee-hooo,” the happy chef exclaims. Seconds later, he allows himself to fall backwards, smiling, bicycle helmet still on, into the pool.

Licence to Grill is a suburban fantasy. A self-proclaimed “barbecue-ologist,” Rainford cooks everything outdoors, over an open flame — caveman-style. The cave’s great, probably goes for a million-five. There’s a stream, better yet a chlorinated pool nearby. Machines do the work, answering phones, cooking food. And our caveman is so on top of things that he can tailor food intake to maximize leisure activity.

Who wouldn’t want to come home from work to live in Rob’s TV dream world? But the series isn’t good food television because it makes you fantasize a simpler, richer life. It works because, even as you’re watching it, you feel like racing out, perhaps even on a mountain bike, and purchasing all the ingredients to make the dishes yourself.

Rob Rainford may or may not be the best chef on the Food Network, but he’s perfected the trick of turning cooking into a rewarding real-life drama.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.