Cooking, For Men: How Bobby Flay and Competitive Cooking Reinforce Hypermasculinity

I suspect that these shows, which characterize speed and hustle as natural elements of cooking, are part of the male professional kitchen’s effort to divorce their work from the feminine history of cooking.

This is Store-Bought Is Fine, a monthly column by Rax King on TV chefs, food media, and the class barriers of cuisine.

My best friend Katya and I spent much of high school in thrall to celebrity chef Bobby Flay, whom we loathed. This was when he hosted a cooking competition show called Throwdown with Bobby Flay, which was basically his current show, Beat Bobby Flay, without its make-up on. What we hated most about Throwdown was the level of trickery that was involved. Bobby Flay challenged beloved local chefs to cook-offs in their home restaurants, but rather than announce his intentions in advance, he always had his staff tell these chefs that they were getting their own Food Network specials! And then he’d roll up to burst their proud little bubbles! O, wickedness! O, deceit!

Katya and I were sixteen then, and our knowledge of cuisine didn’t extend past an ability to distinguish between McDonald’s and Wendy’s chicken nuggets. But even then, with drugstore kohl ringing our eyes and the entire Spencer’s Gifts body jewelry counter plugged into various holes of our bodies, we sensed something sinister about Flay’s gimmick. We refused to call the show by its name and would call it only Fuck You Bobby Flay, as in:

“Hey, wanna come over and yell at Fuck You Bobby Flay after school?”

or:

“I can’t believe Bobby Flay won Fuck You Bobby Flay again! The other lady’s pad thai was clearly better!”

A fun fact which, if there’s any editorial generosity left in this world, will remain in this column: Your humble author has had sex with not one, but two men who went on to lose on Beat Bobby Flay (or if you like, Fuck You Even Harder, Bobby Flay). This is naturally a source of stark humiliation for me. See, Bobby Flay is the sweet-faced menace of the Food Network, and nearly all his shows are about beating. Whether he’s beating local chefs in cook-offs on Throwdown with Bobby Flay or, uh, beating local chefs in cook-offs on Beat Bobby Flay, the conceit remains the same: Bobby Flay is going to trash-talk and taste-test accomplished local chefs into submission. Which means that, by means of the transitive property, he’s trash-talked and taste-tested me into submission.

For those who have never seen Beat Bobby Flay or any of its cooking competition cousins, I offer the following outline. Multiple chefs cook a dish within a limited time frame. They present their dishes to a panel of judges (other chefs, food critics, or Food Network personalities). The judges judge. A winner is crowned.

Bobby Flay is going to trash-talk and taste-test accomplished local chefs into submission. Which means that, by means of the transitive property, he’s trash-talked and taste-tested me into submission.

These shows proliferate now. It’s hard to imagine the Food Network without them. But twenty years ago, a dubbed version of the wildly popular Japanese program Iron Chef was the only game in town for Americans who wanted to see the act of cooking morphed into a delightful blend of sprinting and professional wrestling. In 2005, America imported the franchise and stuck Good Eats alum Alton Brown at its helm, and then, with typical American excess, modeled a thousand other programs after it once Iron Chef America became a smash hit. Now, we have Chopped, Cutthroat Kitchen, Guy’s Grocery Games, Food Network Star, and, of course, Beat Bobby Flay.

Now, I’m neither a professional chef nor an especially proficient home cook, but I do cook, sometimes for fun. What I enjoy about cooking when I enjoy it is the gentleness of it. I can dice an onion as ploddingly as I like; I can stand over a burbling pan and inhale deeply of thyme; I can drive my fist into a freshly risen ball of bread dough and feel the bubbles krrszh themselves flat.

Far less enjoyable are the meals I prepare because I have to, and as any food lover will tell you, those meals taste worse. Chefs often recommend that meals be “cooked with love,” which sounds like mystical foolishness—except it might be true. Any meal I cook in an unloving hurry tastes like stress and adrenaline. Meats are less tender and vegetables less bright because the clock, not the food, is the focus of these meals. The worst thing I can do for food is cook it after work when I’m exhausted, and yet I do it regularly, because I don’t often have time to treat food with the tenderness it deserves. But if a professional chef cooks a meal on a time crunch, for no reason but to entertain an audience, is that meal cooked with any more love than those resentful messes I routinely produce in my kitchen?

I suspect that these shows, which characterize speed and hustle as natural elements of cooking, are part of the male professional kitchen’s effort to divorce their work from the feminine history of cooking. With the notable exception of Worst Cooks in America, hosted by Anne Burrell and Bobby Flay (!), these shows are helmed by men who emphasize how extreme the circumstances of these competitions are, how zany, how high stakes. Female hosts are relegated to stand-and-stir instructional shows designed to look like they take place inside a home kitchen, a la The Pioneer Woman or Barefoot Contessa. But women have done most of the cooking since Homo erectus first tossed a bird into a fire and decided he liked the taste. And while I’m sure cooks have always faced pressure to get meals into bellies at the same meal times every day, that pressure must be measured on a different scale from the artificial pressure that is “you must cook a restaurant quality, aesthetically pleasing plate of fish tacos in twenty minutes alongside a competitor!”

Home cooking has historically fallen to mothers (in low-income households) or underpaid domestic laborers (in wealthy households, which has historically led to a recreation of pre-Civil War home-ec dynamics given that to this day, those underpaid domestic laborers are rarely white). But high-end cooking in restaurants has disproportionately been white men’s turf. And home cooking is, well, homespun. Rustic. It requires little specialty equipment; it needn’t look any particular way on the plate. Accomplished home cooks may invest in their kitchens, but have no professional imperative to do so because, of course, home cooks aren’t paid like executive chefs in famous restaurants are paid—if they’re paid at all. A home cook’s imperative is supposed to be deeper. Both home cooks and haute chefs are expected to nourish their charges’ bellies with food that tastes good, but home cooks are expected to do so because they love the people they’re feeding, not because they take pride in their art.

Meanwhile, the artists push their crafts to strange limits because they can. Bobby Flay trash-talks a guy who’s locally famous for his killer lasagna, and the episode airs and both men boost their clout, and Bobby Flay collects a paycheck, and the lasagna guy collects a paycheck, and I work on my column about them in the living room with a brisket in the oven and laundry in the washer because brisket allows me to work on the other obligations that require my attention—just toss it in a pot and worry about something else for the rest of the day while it turns into Shabbos dinner—and secondarily because it’s nice to work in the company of hearty smells.

A Beat Bobby Flay fan might argue that what I’m doing is not artistry. But it is. It’s the artistry of generations of moms and grandmas who had to cram beauty into tight spaces throughout the day. It’s the artistry of poor women who were left with what used to be the toughest, cheapest cuts of meat after the top chefs had snagged all the nice ones (and then, of course, chefs got wind of these magnificent peasant braises and prettied them up for wealthy audiences, and now brisket and short ribs aren’t cheap cuts of meat anymore). But what this food lacks in razzle-dazzle, it makes up for in deliciousness, in the truest good that belongs to food alone more than any other way that food can be good. I defy any food lover to wedge a fork into the tender threads of a finished brisket and say a word against the “women’s work” that is home cooking. What’s more beautiful than turning the impossibly rigid edifice of muscle that is a cow’s chest into dinner?

*

In the days of Fuck You Bobby Flay, Katya and I believed that a professional chef with Flay’s credentials should aim higher than petty competition. Back then, Bobby Flay had not yet earned the sole Michelin star that he’d eventually earn, but a meal at his flagship Bar Americain certainly cost as much as if he had, and yet Throwdown often targeted mom-and-pop operations with inexpensive menus. What did he have to prove?

Looking at his program with an optimistic eye, I recognize that Bobby Flay has always given free Food Network advertising to the chefs who appear on his show. But, crucially, so does Flay’s fellow Food Network personality Guy Fieri, and his Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives does so with more grace than either Throwdown or Beat Bobby Flay. There’s no competition; there’s no trash talk. Rather than turn the love of food into a bully’s melodrama, Fieri blissfully opens himself to it, visiting best-kept-secret restaurants in small towns for no reason but to sing their praises. Fieri’s show exemplifies generosity; Flay’s, insecurity.

Home cooking is about love, at its best, but it’s also about obligation. A mother who doesn’t feed her kids is neglecting her duty, and if she buys them pizza or McDonald’s rather than prepare healthy meals from scratch, she’s seen as failing them, regardless. Even now, if I visit home and my mother prepares a meal for me, she’s quick to tell me everything that went wrong during cooking if I praise her too heartily, more comfortable selling herself short than taking the compliment. The work is not only to nourish one’s family, but to deny any skill or craft in having done so. If a meal comes together beautifully, it’s luck; if it falls flat, it’s the mother’s failure.

In other words, my mother doesn’t feel that she’s participating in an artistic tradition when she cooks for me. She isn’t paid or witnessed by others. She’s simply engaging the drudgery that’s expected of her. And because I am now an adult, and wouldn’t starve if she refused to cook me another meal, I must assume that she still engages that drudgery solely because she loves me.

*

As a child, the story goes, wee Bobby Flay wanted an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas and got one only against his father’s will. Papa Flay insisted that the boy be given a GI Joe as well, lest he grow up confused. Further details about the little guy’s home life are tough to find, as Bobby Flay isn’t given to memoir and speaks about this incident only in media-friendly sound bytes, but the next easily placed fact on his biographical timeline is Flay’s dropping out from Catholic school at seventeen in favor of working in his first professional kitchen. And from there, the rest is, as they say, history.

I want more than these details, these tiniest points on a timeline, insignificant and tantalizing. I burn asparagus at home and I want more. And I set off the smoke detector while trying to pan-fry a steak I can’t afford and I want more. And I burn that steak while disabling the battery in my smoke detector and serve the bastard thing on a bed of burnt asparagus and I want more. Artistry always tempts us in that way, no? We see people doing something exceptional on TV, something we may not even like but still know we’re not skilled enough to imitate, and we feel that we must know everything about them. I think I detect shades of Papa Flay’s GI Joe in the little Flay’s trash talk, his competitive spirit, his need to be the best in the room even when doing something that can’t be objectively quantified as Best or Worst. But I can’t say for sure—the junior Flay is too tight-lipped, and his on-screen mask is clipped too tightly to his face.

Both home cooks and haute chefs are expected to nourish their charges’ bellies with food that tastes good, but home cooks are expected to do so because they love the people they’re feeding, not because they take pride in their art.

Because Bobby Flay speaks so infrequently about himself, I am forced to hunt him through his restaurants, his recipes, and his shows. His shows and recipes are, I’m confident saying, a dead end: His persona on every show he hosts is insouciant, wisecracking, flirtatious in that way that straight men flirt with one another—they’re out of practice; their flirting is just one man trash-talking past the other in a feint towards friendliness, lacking warmth or fellowship. In short, he’s a brick wall.

As for his recipes, while a vast range of them appear on his website, what I notice most is the lack of backstory. For all that people mock cooking bloggers’ tendency towards long-windedness in the backstory sections of their recipes, I genuinely believe we mock this meme out of love. We enjoy hearing that this cooking blogger proposed to her husband over these mashed potatoes and, if we don’t, we can scroll past those paragraphs to the ingredient list (though I personally track my favorite bloggers’ lives from post to post like an auntie watching her soaps). Bobby Flay’s recipes, though, are sparse. He’s all business: ingredients list, steps, fin. He may not be doing so consciously, but he’s drawing a line between himself and the unprofessional mommy bloggers of the world, who ruin perfectly good tacos with their stories.

His restaurants offer a glimpse of daylight in the dark room. Bar Americain is an old white dad’s dream menu: raw bar, clam chowder, mahi-mahi, the usual steaks, some pleasant-sounding desserts. His fast casual chain Bobby’s Burger Palace is, fittingly, all burgers and fries and milkshakes (all of which items I am staunchly in favor of, for the record, but this menu paired with the previous one does paint a telling picture). Mesa Grill is an adobo’d-up version of Bar Americain, for the same dads on a day when they’re feeling adventurous—the proteins are all the same, but the preparations differ by means of a few shakes of cumin. Little differences abound, but at the end of the day, Bobby Flay is preparing dad food.

I’m no psychologist and wouldn’t dare read into this data, minimal as it is. That said, I do take interest in the absence of mommy food on Bobby Flay’s menus. Where’s the chicken noodle soup? The stew? The spaghetti invisible beneath its blanket of meat sauce? Even haute restaurants often have short ribs or finicky ragùs on their menus these days. Bobby Flay may well cherish mommy food, of course, and it’s true that the dedication in his cookbook Bobby at Home: Fearless Flavors from My Kitchen is to his mother and her home cooking. But what I notice every step of the way in his career is a pointed aversion towards the womanliness that cooking can hold. His cooking is impatient. Instead of collaborating, he competes, fights, beats.

Katya and I are adults now. We know how to cook. I personally would melt into a puddle of anxiety diarrhea if I had to throw down with, or beat, Bobby Flay, but I know how to cook. The two of us have always judged and despised him and, of course, we’ve always known we can’t hold a candle to him at the task he performs best, though we’d certainly never admit it to him. But in those moments of kitchen panic, burning steaks that I intended to serve people and setting off alarms and ruining my guests’ meals and apologizing, what am I doing? Cooking, unfortunately, with love—for no money or recognition or accolades—but with love all the same. My cooking may be unathletic and my drive for competition minimal. Still, I’ve heard it said that the cook’s greatest imperative is to cook with love, and at that I must insist I excel.