AN ODE TO IRON CHEF

The commentary. The Chairman biting that yellow capsicum. The truly excellent cooking. Iron Chef was the only ’90s food show worth watching, recalls ALEXANDRA CARLTON.

From the cheesy commentary to the excellent cooking, Alexandra Carlton reminisces on the ’90s TV show.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I’d eagerly park myself on our Brescia sofa to watch Iron Chef, the cult classic Japanese TV show that was part cooking, part crazed gameshow. The judges on the show would be feasting on uni and tonburi seeds. I’d be eating a French Onion Le Snak and kiwi-strawberry Snapple.

Australian food TV up to this point had been little more than Geoff Jansz chucking a lamb cutlet onto a barbie and Peter Russell-Clarke bellowing “Where’s the cheese?!”

Iron Chef was real, intelligent cooking. It was melodramatic, sure. Inexplicably, the host bit into a yellow capsicum in every opening sequence. But behind the goofball theatrics (played up by the cheesy English dubbing), real chefs were doing extraordinary things with udon, duck feet and cuttlefish, using salamanders, earthenware pots and pressure cookers. It was a sight was to behold.

Iron Chef was a global phenomenon that ran from 1993 and first aired in Japan on a youth network known for game shows and comedies – explaining the melodramatic flourishes – and spread globally after getting an English translation in the late 1990s. The basic premise of the show was to pit an acclaimed chef against one of three (or sometimes four) so-called Iron Chefs in a gladiatorial food fight. The show was set in a dazzling arena called Kitchen Stadium, overseen by the mysterious Chairman Kaga who was, we were told at the beginning of every episode, an eccentric millionaire who poured his fortune into this televised dégustation duel for kicks. In reality, the Chairman – who sported a natty wardrobe of bedazzled black catsuits and boleros – was an actor (he once played the title character in Jesus Christ Superstar in Japan and he appeared to retain many of his messianic qualities – the man was very fond of a sweeping cape and a hard stare). The Iron Chefs, however, were very real. There were three or four in every episode, with each specialising in a specific cuisine (Japanese, Chinese, French and the mysterious Italian Iron Chef who’d appear religiously in the credits but then almost always be oddly absent from the show itself). Between them they ran some of Japan’s best restaurants.

A challenger chef would appear, a theme ingredient would be selected and, as one of the commentators, Kenji Fukui, would cry every episode, “Bang a gong, we are on.” It was more thrilling than any sport.

“Fukui-san!” the roaming reporter would bark to the panel of hosts watching from the stands, who would jump to receive their live update, treating it with the reverence of a breaking news story. The chefs wrestled live octopus. They broke down whole birds. Their recipes heroed everything from luxury crowd-pleasers like caviar and fois gras to foods as mundane as onion or milk; and they made magic with all of them. “I can really taste the sweetness of the potato!” was a typical judge’s remark. The scoring could also be brutal. “I don’t agree with you combining these ingredients,” recurring judge Shinichiro Kurimoto once said witheringly, when a challenger presented him with a grim-looking dish of abalone wrapped in smoked salmon. Kurimoto was, rather startlingly for a cooking show, a politician. But the guy had taste, even in an era where smoked salmon was routinely draped over anything that sat still.

The show wasn’t without its problems, most notably that it was wildly sexist. Any young actress appearing on the show as a judge was forced to endure leering remarks about her prettiness, and when popular female Japanese cook Katsuyo Kobayashi beat the Iron Chef Chinese, Chen Kenichi, she was repeatedly belittled for being an “ordinary housewife”, while Kenichi was mocked for losing to a woman. But it was also the first time Australia saw inside a real kitchen, with world-class chefs cooking at an expert level, anywhere on our screens. Suddenly, Geoff Jansz and Iain Hewitson twiddling around with a fussy little soufflé didn’t quite cut it any more.

The show ended in a triumphant crescendo, with Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai – who had studied under one of the pioneers of French cooking in Japan, Fujio Shido, and owned the venerable La Rochelle in Tokyo – taking on a man who’s had Michelin stars rained upon him like glitter, L’Arpège’s Alain Passard. Sakai won which, if Michelin had bothered to take note at the time, more or less established him as the best chef in the world. And with that, the Chairman chomped his last capsicum – he would’ve been pleased, rumour is he hated them – and the burners in Kitchen Stadium flickered their final flame.

Behind the theatrics, real chefs were doing extraordinary things with udon, duck feet and cuttlefish.