As cooking shows fill our TV sets, they offer lots of sleek settings.
“The contestants are always working in these fabulous, million-dollar kitchens,” said Matt Cahoon, a creator of the new “Next Level Chef” on Fox. They have “the best equipment in the world, using the highest-end ingredients that money can buy. And that’s not real life.”
Now real life – or three variations of it – arrives. “Next Level Chef” debuts after football (at about 8 p.m. ET) on Jan. 2, then moves to Wednesdays. It instantly shows its extremes.
“We’ve got these three incredible kitchens, three stories high, 85,000 tons of steel,” said Gordon Ramsay, who produces the show with Cahoon and Lisa Edwards. (The structure is shown here, with Richard Blais, Ramsay and Nyesha Arrington.)
Three teams (coached by Ramsay, Blais or Arrington) each enter an elevator, with no idea where it will stop. It could be the gleaming top, the sorta-average middlle or the bottom – which, it seems, is where most chef careers start.
“I remember waking up at 4 a.m., to go to culinary school … and then going to intern for free in a basement,” Arrington said.
She spent hours there, peeling potatoes. “My hans were hurting, my calf muscles were burning and I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this career.’ And I remember stepping into the hall and pulling myself together. And I think that was a real turning point in my career.”
Ramsay’s darker memories go back further. He’s Scottish, but his family moved often. At 9, he moved to Stratford-at-Avon in England, where his mother “got her sort-of head chef’s job. I used to go there after soccer practice and help her prep, literally peeling with blunt knives, no chopping boards.”
Everything was difficult in his early years, he said. “There was the depleted equipment and fridge and freezers that weren’t working, stoves that weren’t getting up to temperature, no peelers, no mixers.”
After catering college and work in some English hotels, Ramsay decided to study French cooking – first at an upscale London restaurant and then in Paris … with a quick problem:
“I couldn’t speak fluent French,” he said. “So I got stuck downstairs in the basement, turning sorbets – literally 15 sorbet machines turning …. I was desperate to get up to that next level.”
Those may seem like sad stories … but not to Blais. Arrington was making brunoise cuts and Ramsay was in Paris, he said. “My first job was at McDonald’s.”
And he didn’t master it instantly. “I was serving open-face fish sandwiches, because I forgot to put the bun on the first batch.”
It was a basement kind of mistake … even if the place didn’t have a basement. Like the contestants on the show, he was eager to get to the next level.