Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where, as you might guess by the title, things have gone a little lopsided. I’m your Igor of the Edible, Jon O’Guin, and today’s post…well, I wasn’t entirely certain what I was going to do with it, and then things got weird. To wit, my house has lost not power, but Internet, for some reason. Which puts ME in a pickle, since fully a third of my intellect and wit is siphoned from my access to the information super-highway due to digital brain brigands I use to pilfer facts and puns. Also, because the only project I had kind-of been working on to have for today is, as the title suggests, streaming-based. Which rather obviously is heavily impaired by the lack of internet.

But… I really have nothing else to offer. I’ve been a bit of a mess these last couple weeks, between churning out recipes, some minor quasi-medical issues, a real rough week of anxiety, and so on. The end of January was not kind to me, in most measures. To the point where my best idea for a post for today was to watch 4+ hours of television, a decision I made TUESDAY NIGHT, watched 1 of the 4 hours, and said “Man, looks like Wednesday Jon’s gotta crank that shit out.” Spoilers: he didn’t. Wednesday Jon was…preoccupied. Which was honestly kind of amazing: TUESDAY Jon, 10 minutes into his day, felt like his world was already a shit-show, and the day wasn’t going to get better. Wednesday Jon woke up happy and ready, and then just hit hurdle after hurdle, culminating in him going “Jesus, it’s already midnight! Fine, I will finish this YouTube video, and try and crank out at least an hour and a half of the remaining stuff, and Thursday Jon can finish it in the morning.” At which point, with one minute and 14 seconds left in the video, his internet crashed.

Oh, I KNOW why I’m getting an interruption, YouTube. I don’t need you trying to figure it out.

So here we are, in the midst of the kind of situation that would normally make me scream.(Well, not “normally” normally, but “last year and a half of stress disorder” normally.) A process that foolish hope then allowed me to grind even MORE of my barely remaining spirit out of, as attempting to run the troubleshooter just created more technical issues that ate up 10 minutes of work time.

SO, let’s review what we’ve got, and then call it a night, so I can hopefully regain my powers of cognition and comedy quickly.

Return of the Mack

So the show I was streaming is called “The Chef Show”.

Shown here, in Clay form.

It is a Netflix series based on Chef, the movie I plugged last Thursday. It turns out that, since making the film, Jon Favreau had become much more interested in food, and hanging out with Roy Choi, and the two decided to make a Netflix show about food, with the two of them meeting up with other people, cooking or trying something, and just hanging out. Maybe. I can’t tell you what the whole show is about, because I have seen literally 1/10th of the first season. (Though in my defense, that’s ¼ of the first VOLUME, because it was released weird on Netflix: Season 1 was three “volumes” consisting of 8 episodes, then 6, then another 6. Maybe there’s an explanation, but the Wikipedia page is VERY dry and simplistic, and, again, I don’t have many resources for hunting down all the context at the moment.)

The first two episodes of the show promise an interesting dynamic, at least: both of them trade pretty heavily on the cachet of Jon Favreau, with the first episode starting with Jon and Roy at Goop Headquarters with Gwyneth Paltrow , making her a vegetarian “pepper pot” from the Caribbean, in honor of her MCU character, Pepper Potts, and Goop’s preference for covering vegetarian dishes. While cooking, they talk about stuff they’ve all worked on, how they all met (apparently, Gwyneth brought Roy’s food truck, Kogi, to Iron Man during shooting, and that’s what led to Jon calling Roy to be the food consultant for the movie), and how Gwyneth isn’t even aware of how many Marvel movies she’s in: She thought a scene she shot for Spiderman: Homecoming was for Civil War/Infinity War. Which, to be fair: when you’ve got so many Marvel movies, and you’re running a company and raising kids, things like “which exact comic book movie am I playing the same character talking to the same people for?” is a pretty easy question to mess up.

Like, I sometimes confuse things I did during one show for another.

From there, the duo go to an unnamed kitchen where they’re making Cubanos like they do in the movie (an interesting choice, since episode 5 or so is NAMED “Chef Film recipes”, which will be an interesting sell given they’re covering THE most famous recipe from the show in episode 1) with Bill Burr joining them halfway through the process, and then the three make Grilled Cheese sandwiches together, which is another dish highlighted in the film, particularly via a clip that plays during the credits of Roy teaching Jon how to make, and FOCUS on said sandwich for the scene.

And the dynamic is pretty fun: Jon is frequently asking Roy questions about how to do X or Y correctly, or what goes into this idea/step, or that one, while Roy is answering the questions, and keeping an eye on the food. But Roy does so with an attitude that feels very genuine and invested. At one point, making a marinade, Roy is listing stuff for Jon to put in a blender to blitz all together.

Roy: “Minced garlic.”

Jon: “Now, why did we mince this before putting it in here?”

Roy: “Uhhh …I don’t why I did that.”

That that little chuckle Jon does is the perfect reaction.

Implicitly, he was just on auto-pilot when he was prepping the stuff to bring for the recipe, and minced them without thinking, which is a fun mistake to see in a ‘cooking’ show, and something that feels very real for a professional in a field suddenly having to explain everything they’re doing to a relative novice.

Bill Burr comes, and the three talk about the movie, cooking, comedy, and various things. It feels, again, very genuine. It’s smooth, but not intensely polished. There’s no “premade sandwiches in the oven”, hell, they UNDERCOOK the first grilled cheese they make. Bill asks Jon questions, who, if he doesn’t know the answer, asks Roy, it’s just a very chill dynamic.

Then, in the second episode, they go out to real restaurants (I should note this show premiered almost 2 years ago, and was likely filmed in like, 2017-2018, as in the second episode, they note that Iron Man was “almost 10 years ago”. Because the second episode has an extended sequence with Roy and Jon hanging out with Kevin Feige, the Russo Brothers, Robert Downey Jr and Tom Holland. 

I love how the show KNOWS that Tom Holland and RDJ are the big talent here. Kevin Feige (far right) is BARELY in this shot.

Roy and Jon came to the restaurant earlier, and learned a couple of its dishes, and are now “getting crushed” along with the guys, where Roy explains that “getting crushed” is a sort of gift/challenge from one cook to another: a series of comped dishes, some not even on the menu, pushed one after the other to the visiting chef. A sort of “here’s what I can do, you think you can do better?” challenge, mixed with “I want to share with you the dishes I’m proudest of, one craftsman to another.”

And again, there’s a beautiful level of honesty to the interactions. At one point, Jon Favreau notes that a great difficulty of making Lobster Rolls on the West Coast is that the traditional buns are very difficult to find. To which the chef responds, slightly hesitantly, as if unsure himself how happy he is to be saying it, that at a Lobster Roll competition he took part in, one of the winners used Hawaiian bread as their stand-in. he does so with the perfect energy I have seen in a variety of crafters of “you know, I’ve HEARD of a potential solution to that issue, but I never had to try it myself, so I don’t want to oversell it.” It’s the same way I’ve seen wood-turners suggest a glue they don’t use, or theatre techs discussing crazy things they’ve seen at other theatres.

These are the eyes of a man who is still suspicious of the information he’s about to give.

Roy explains the call-and-response of a pass conductor and the rest of the kitchen to Tom Holland. If that was gibberish: in a ‘French style’ kitchen, there is a position called “the pass”, and that’s the person between the kitchen and the servers, who shouts out to the kitchen the next things they need to be working on, like “I got an alfredo, one steak medium, one steak rare, and a chicken!” to which everyone yells back “yes chef!” or “oui, chef”, to acknowledge they heard, and then the conductor goes on coordinating all the stations so the dishes all come out at roughly the same time. (You probably associate this role with like, the chef judging competitors in reality TV, because often that position is handled by the head chef of the restaurant, but some restaurants use high-ranking waiters, or have a person whose specific job is the Pass, so the head chef can handle other issues. (This is particularly common with celebrity chefs/chefs more connected with their community, who might have to step away from the kitchen to handle prominent guests/front-of-house affairs.)

Apparently this is a pretty common challenge on Hall’s Kitchen, if you want to check out how it works.

And that’s the gist of the first two episodes. I didn’t cover EVERTYHING, since I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, and I wanted to leave myself some stuff to talk about if I ever fully review the season. Like I’ve said, it has a really fun vibe that comes across very genuine and interested. I’m digging the first two episodes, and I’ll certainly try to finish the first season once I have internet again.

A Little Starch, to Cleanse the Palate

IS this post long enough? …hmmm. Probably. I was going to do some basic food reviews of stuff I picked up from a new place (or rather, “ a place that is new to me”) that I found on Tuesday, but… I think…alright, hold on, I’ll cover like TWO things. Dip my toes into restaurant review, since I’ve got nothing else going on. So, on Tuesday, I was in Silverdale (semi-local ‘town’ that’s mostly a huge cluster of retail) because I desperately need a new mattress, but I’ve never BOUGHT a mattress before, so I don’t know what I like, what the options are, etc. And when I pulled up to the store to do some shopping/reconnaissance, I discovered that basically next door was a Ramen and ”Island Barbecue” place called “Peter’s Kitchen”.

It was also, I swiftly discovered, almost hand-tailored to appeal to my family: A place dabbling in Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Hawaiian foods, selling Spicy Ramen, Kimchi, Hawaiian Macaroni salad, Spam Musubi, Lumpia, Yakisoba, Bulgogi, Galbi, and that’s just the list I bought myself for Dinner! I joke, I joke…Silverdale is 25 minutes from my house, there was no way I was going to risk Ramen in to-go container for 30 minute, most of it on the highway. (Also, most of the order was a “we’ll buy it now, and try it for lunch over the week.” idea)  I got the Spam Fried Rice, which surprised us by coming in an omurice –esque egg wrap. I should note, the menu says “Spam, Garlic, Onion, Japanese omelet”, I just assumed that meant the little chunks of omelet. I did briefly consider “do they mean, like, almost an omurice situation?” before  discarding the idea as ridiculous.

Boy, is there egg on my face. And rice.

(editor’s note: Past Jon just threw the word “omurice” around like he’s talked about it before because he legitimately thought he had. To quickly explain the dish, omurice (a portmanteau of omelet and rice) is a Japanese dish consisting of Fried rice with a ketchup or demiglace sauce, topped with a Japanese omelet, where the inside of the omelet is baveuse. Meaning that, when you cut open the omelet, glistening soft eggs flow over the rice. Look, here’s a video of the guy who many consider the best in the business doing it.)  We also bought Yakisoba, a dish my mother loves, which was surprisingly green: the seasoning of the yakisoba includes a lot of furikake, meaning there’s little flecks of seaweed everywhere. It was a real eye-opener, given how programmed I am to envision yakisoba as a mass of beige or brown, with maybe a couple chunks of celery, to see a version so redolent with green.

I mean, it’s still MOSTLY brown, but there’s a surprising amount of green and red.

Honestly, I had a really good time with everything we got, and I’m more than happy to try the place again the next time I’m in Silverdale. Now I just have to hope I get internet back before this is supposed to go up.  (Editors’ note: It did. Obviously. Expect a more complete overview of the show eventually. )

MONDAY: GOOD NEWS, I FOUND THE COOKBOOK I WAS LOOKING FOR. BAD NEWS, I DON’T LIKE THE ANSWERS IT’S GIVING ME. WE’LL FIGURE SOMETHING OUT.

THURSDAY:MAYBE WE COME BACK TO CHEF SHOW, MAYBE WE REVIEW THE COOKBOOK THAT’S BETRAYING ME, MAYBE I JUST FALL INTO HIBERNATION. THERE’S A WINTER STORM WARNING THIS WEEKEND.