So much fabulous stuff on the new Cooking Channel. I’m trying to sort through it. A few quick thoughts.
1) The “Stay Hungry” tagline is 50/50 good vs. bad. I like the marketing idea to keep people “staying” and engaged in the network. Unfortunately, and I can’t be the only one, I’m forced to recite it out loud using the Most Interesting Man In The World’s accent from the Dos Equis commercials. “Stay Hungry, my friends.”
2) If you needed any proof that the foodie subculture is growing most around the coastal cities, you really need look no further than these shows — which all seem to be New York, London, or San Francisco based. Basically, they took all the shows that are too niche to appeal to Middle America and moved them off in to their own station. So, now we have Paula Deen’s 150 Ways To Make Fried Butter, Rachael Ray’s Where Am I From This Week 30 Minute Burgers, Giada’s How Awesome Are My Husband And Child?, and Fake-ality experimentation on one station and niche In The Kitchen shows on the other. It also gives we coastal foodies another way to look down our noses at the people who watch regular Food Network.
3) It also definitely outlines the divide in Food Network’s fanbase. The Food Network’s crowd is split between family-types who are haggard and cooking for their kids and single-types who really just want to read MyFoodSubscription and experiment with cooking. There aren’t enough hours in the day to satisfy both groups. So they split the network. Cooking Channel’s entire marketing and advertising structure is dedicated to the single or young couple foodie crowd with the implication that “THIS is your network”. This is why Aida Mollenkamp — a San Francisco foodie — will likely wind up as this channel’s Bobby Flay. None of these shows will make any references to the host’s spouse, or family set-ups like on Giada At Home or Easy Entertaining. For instance, on Chinese Food Made Easy the host went to cook for the British Olympic rowing team — a much cooler set-up than Robin Miller’s “I’m so worn thin that I have to cook for the whole week on Sunday!” premise. Also, this network gives me hope that What Would Brian Boitano Make gets another season. I doubt that show played well to Food Network’s core. I bet it plays much better to Cooking Channel’s desired core. On a separate network, the jokey set-ups can poke a little harder fun at the sister network.
4) At the moment, a lot of these hosts seem really generic. I assume there was a template given for the first bunch of episodes filmed in each show, and I really look forward to seeing people breaking out in to their own personalities as the weeks go by. At the moment, even all the kitchens look the same.
5) I do hope that Drink Up! winds up much better than The Thirsty Traveler. Don’t get me wrong — I desperately wanted Kevin Brauch’s show to be good. I actively seeked it out at first, but it spent too much time doing ridiculous things and not enough times actually, you know, on the subject material. My only two complaints on Drink Up! after one episode are: I hate the name “Dr. Mixologist” and Darryl Robinson opens the show with “What’s Poppin’?”. This is unacceptable. Also unacceptable: “What’s crackin’?”
6) I’m fascinated so far by the range of shows. The shows about cooking Chinese and Indian cuisine are amazing. I don’t really bake and even the baking show is good. Again, regular Food Network probably wouldn’t care about teaching people to cook Chinese or Indian food because, mostly, Food Network is based on cooking for families. For those of us without children, though, learning how to make a marinade with Chinese flavors is pretty fascinating.
7) My only complaint about the Chinese and Indian show — and this would extend to any type of cross-cultural cooking — the shows’ websites need a glossary of ingredients. She’s using a lot of stuff that I don’t have, so I need things divided in to “stuff you probably have” and “essential stuff that you probably don’t have”. Like, on the Chinese food show, the host blows through ingredients like “Chinese rice wine” and “groundnut oil” that I’ve never seen in a regular store. I also don’t know the difference between “light soy sauce” and “dark soy sauce” or even which one I currently have in my 365 Soy Sauce from Whole Foods. This entire channel is for younger people — don’t be afraid to talk about the website and use them as a tool.
8) Finally, Memo to the British Baking Lady: Your use of “grams” as a unit of measurement is meaningless here. Please desist. Your devilish measurements frighten me.
