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    Sunday, May 05, 2024

    Flay and Spiky: Only the best parts!

    Football enthusiasts love television’s NFL Network and, more specifically, their “Red Zone” subscription. It’s a feature that instantly takes the viewer to any game where a team crosses the opponent’s 20-yard-line — a territory called the “Red Zone” — and is likely to score.

    That way, the easily bored viewers in our country don’t have to bother with incidentals like, well, watching the rest of the game. They only get to see touchdowns!

    This is a fine idea, and I’d like to expand the concept to the Food Network — specifically, the shows associated with omnipresent personalities/serial restauranteurs Guy “Spiky” Fieri and Bobby Flay.

    Y’see, Spiky, who has a restaurant in Foxwoods and works the line there several times a week, is the host of such programs as “Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives,” “Guy’s Grocery Games,” “Guy’s Family Road Trip,” “Guy’s Family Road Trip to One of His Own Restaurants” and a surprisingly popular new reality show called “Guy Fieri Naked at the Deep-Fryer.”

    And Flay! He owns or has owned restaurants in every country in the world and is scheduled to open one on the moon in 2026. As a television personality, he’s the star of 17 different programs on the Food Network. These include “Beat Bobby Flay,” “Best of ‘Beat Bobby Flay,’” “No One Has Ever Beaten Bobby Flay,” “The Lost ‘Beat Bobby Flay’ Episodes,” “Richard III starring Bobby Flay” and “The Best Thing I Ever Ate (As Cooked by Me, Bobby Flay).”

    How can we as normal humans — with our own mundane responsibilities and duties including cooking substandard dishes for our own families — hope to keep up with the ongoing adventures of Flay and Spiky?!

    I think the Food Channel should have its own Red Zone-style service. Call it something like “Dinner Bell.” For a fee, we’ll be able to go about workaday routines secure in the fact that Dinner Bell will alert us when something cool is about to happen on “Beat Bobby Flay” or “Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives” et cetera.

    That way, I can work on my taxes or take my dog for spinal surgery and feel safe in knowing I’m only missing tepid show segments like Spiky’s sons, being nepotism’d into fame, applying dry rub to a mutton shank, or Flay regulars like Carson Kressley and Amanda Freitag wandering the “Beat Bobby” set trying to playfully pump up the audience to boo the star of the program.

    We’ll just get the good stuff. Stuff like:

    Bobby: “Chefs, our judges will pick one of you to go head-to-head against me. To do that, you’ll first have 20 minutes to create a dish using an ingredient of my choice. And that ingredient is —” (dramatic pause) — “tenderloin of pony!”

    Or (Spiky breaking the fourth wall with a smirk at the camera as he mails in another exultation such as) “That’s as much of an off the chain, winner, winner, chicken dinner-trip to Flavortown as I’ve ever experienced! And don’t forget to sign up for Dinner Bell — just in case you don’t have 29 hours a day to watch me and my brudda from another mother, Flay Man!”

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