Netflix Is Set To Bring Back The Best Competition Series
It's back!
This article is more than 2 years old
It’s time to reawaken your inner culinary ninja: Netflix is bringing back the iconic cooking competition series Iron Chef! The new incarnation of the series, Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend, will premiere on June 15 on the streaming service. Alton Brown, who hosted the popular spinoff Iron Chef: America, is returning to the franchise as host. In a move likely to make fans very happy, Mark Dacascos is also returning to his role of The Chairman, to oversee the competition. Netflix has just released a teaser trailer, which is already making us hungry.
According to Deadline, joining Brown as co-host will be Kristen Kish, a past winner of the cooking competition show Top Chef. The first season of the new series will include eight 45-minute episodes, and will be structured much like the original, but with a “supersized” approach, according to producers. Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend will feature a battle-royale format, in which five new chefs will be challenged by promising “Challenger Chef” newcomers in a reimagined Kitchen Stadium. The competition will lead to a grand finale at the end of the season, in which the most successful of the challengers will return in a battle to earn the title of Iron Legend.
In the current and past iterations of Iron Chef, a chef faced off with a celebrity challenger to create a full meal within one hour, in which each course must integrate a featured ingredient. A panel of judges sampled the meals and decided who made the superior meal. While the meals are prepared, the hosts would provide commentary much like a sports competition, complete with a sideline-like reporter on the Kitchen Stadium floor, providing an up-close look at the process. Takeshi Kaga, a noted Japanese actor, served as Chairman in the original Japanese version of the show, with martial artist and actor Mark Dacascos taking on the role for Iron Chef: America.
The original Iron Chef, by Fuji Television Productions, premiered in Japan in 1993 and ran for seven seasons over ten years, ending in 2002. It was picked up by The Food Network for broadcast in America in 1999, and although it required an English dub, it became a cultural phenomenon. It spawned a spinoff, Iron Chef: America, which was just as popular and ran for 13 seasons, from 2004 to 2018. Netflix will also premiere two more Iron Chef shows later this year: Iron Chef Mexico and Iron Chef Brazil.
Alton Brown tweeted about the return of Iron Chef along with the teaser trailer. Both Mark Dacascos and Kristen Kish (who runs the restaurant Arlo Grey in Austin, Texas) both retweeted announcements of the new show, but did not provide additional comment. Brown has essentially been the face of the Food Network, ever since his series Good Eats premiered on the network in 1999. Kish has been the host of Fast Foodies for the past two seasons on TruTV. In that show, a celebrity guest discuss their favorite dish, which Kish and fellow chefs Jeremy Ford and Justin Sutherland then recreate in their own way, in a friendly competition.
