Looking for something you can really sink your teeth into on TV this summer?
You need to plate up Barbecue Showdown on Netflix. It is the most delicious food porn, a sizzling cooking competiton for lean times. Vegans, avert your eyes. Things are about to get real.
Have to admit I missed Season’s 1 and 2 of this series. Season 3 dropped earlier this month and it comes together like the ultimate food fantasy. It is not just that this competition series features a ton of something many of us can’t afford anymore: meat. The gravy is in the casting, both the competitors and the judges. The spice is the production. Barbecue Showdown never simply simmers; as the kids say, it is fire.
Shot on a ranch in northern Georgia (so far north you can see everyone’s breath on cold nights), Barbecue Showdown features nine contestants competing in cooking challenges centred on smoking meats. The winner banks $50 grand plus a smokin’ smoker.
The two judges really set the table. Melissa Cookston, the pitmaster of Mississippi restaurant Memphis Barbecue Company, and Kevin Bludso, pitmaster of Los Angeles restaurant Bludo’s BBQ, know what they are looking for and what they are not. They are tough (Bludso is a former correctional officer) but sympathetic and both are very articulate on the subject of food. Their language is as rich as the deserts on this show. Cookston (who looks like Moira Rose but sounds much tougher) called one contestant’s Chess Squares, “the epitome of what the South tastes in your mouth.” Bludo, who gives everyone a nickname, said another contestant’s ribs were so good they were like “singing on Bourbon Street.”
Guest judges spice up the series. Among them on Season 3 are Canadian Matty Matheson from The Bear, celebrity pitmaster Tuffy Stone and chef Kwame Onwuachi who runs Afro-Caribbean restaurants. Stand-up comedian Michelle Buteau brings energy and humour as host. Unlike other cooking competition shows I’ve seen, the banter with the cooking contestants as the clock ticks down seems relaxed and natural and all very spontaneous.
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The casting of the contestants on Season 3 help made this competition very compelling. No two are alike. You’ve got an actual cowboy cook (Kent Rollins, who once defeated Bobby Flay on Throwdown! with a killer chicken fried steak). Then there is the Egyptian cowboy out of Austin, Texas, Kareem El-Ghayesh, who operates his own smoked meats truck and is a tad too into garlic. Fellow Texan Sloan Rinaldi comes from a family of pitmasters but opted for a construction career before opening her own truck near Houston just a few years ago. Nashville chef Shaticka Robinson was an executive chef at Tennesse State university before she began operating her own food truck, Coley’s Jook Junt. From New Orleans comes Gerald Vinnett, who makes ribs so mouth watering you want to reach right through your TV screen and grab them.
The competition is relentless. Shot over a month, the players are sometimes asked to perform a couple of challenges a day, with one long day extending for 20 hours. The set ups are imaginative, with one task a tail gating party, the next a Sunday family BBQ feast. The finale had the two remaining contestants maning their own fantasy restaurants.
There seems to be no limit to the protein that is provided. Side dishes are equally sensational. Things are cooked on smokers, open fires and even holes dug in the ground over flaming embers.
Capturing it all is some remarkable camera work. These contestants work fast, some running between ovens while the judges and Buteau providing pit-side commentary. Yes, it is edited to ramp up the drama with every ending counted down to the second. But these players look truly drained and exhausted as they stagger to the finish line. There is also a lot of great music on Barbecue Showdown.
The personal stories simmer throughout, coming to a boil by the time things get down to the final four. It all adds up to a surprisingly emotional experience, one that stands in sharp contrast to the political convention coverage happening this week on other channels. There is no sense of democracy coming to an end in this swing state, just people coming together over great food. Maybe there should be more food trucks outside convention halls.
Season 3 of Barbecue Showdown is currently streaming on Netflix.
