Chefs look for a ‘Rat in the Kitchen’ in TBS cooking competition show
There is a “Rat in the Kitchen” – but no need to call the health department – in a cooking competition show upcoming on TBS.
The premise of the 10-episode hourlong series that debuts Thursday, March 31, is pretty straightfoward. Professional chefs and home cooks compete in a series of creative cooking challenges, earning cash in their bank for every dish that chef Ludo Lefebvre (“The Mind of a Chef,” “Ludo Bites America”) gives his thumbs up. But one is the titular rodent trying to sabotage the others’ creations. So in addition to impressing Lefebvre, they’re also trying to determine the mole among them.
In the end, if the cooks correctly guess the guilty party, they win the contents of the bank. If not, the saboteur gets the cash.
Bringing the layperson’s perspective is comic and actress Natasha Leggero (“Another Period,” “Let’s Be Cops”), whose job as host is to keep things light as the competition progresses. But she also found her palate getting sharper with all the tasting.
“Now, it’s just very hard for me to go to any restaurant,” Leggero explains. “My husband’s telling me I’m complaining about food all the time, and I’m like, ‘No, I’m just dissecting it.’ So I think that just really getting into the food and the game, it just kind of all came.
“And Ludo is so passionate and serious about the food and his standards are so high,” she continues. “So just having fun with that and defusing it, and I think that we did strike a good balance between how serious Ludo is about the food and also not taking it completely seriously. He was very fun to riff with, and Ludo’s very funny, too.”
But spotting the rat wasn’t so easy. Sabotage on this show comes in so many forms, from slipping unwanted ingredients into a dish to neglecting to plate a part of the meal to encouraging a fellow cook’s bad idea. Lefebvre admits he was glad he didn’t have to do it.
“It was hard to figure out what’s going on in the kitchen,” the chef says. “I was not used to seeing a kitchen, like so many different foods in the kitchen, movement, creativity. I mean, there’s a lot of chefs in one kitchen, and a lot of things going on.
It’s very difficult to find the rats . ... The kitchen was very painful.”