Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Secret Chef’ On Hulu, A Cooking Competition Where The Chefs Judge Each Other, And They All Have Aliases

Are you a bit tired of the cooking competition genre. We sure are. The format that Top Chef started has been so done do death, that the elements of each show are entirely predictable by anyone who has watched even a few of these programs. But a new series from chef David Chang and Vox Media, takes this tired format and shakes things up a bit.

SECRET CHEF: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Someone with a white glove turns on an old TV. “Let’s play a little game,” says a voice that we’ll come to know as a chef-hat cartoon mascot named Chefy (Arden Myrin).

The Gist: In Secret Chef, ten chefs find themselves in tiny tasting rooms a la The Circle, wondering what they see in front of them, including a conveyor belt. A cloture comes down the belt and tells them what the game is. Oh, and it also has an egg.

Essentially, the chefs will all be given aliases, like “Chef Blueberry” or “Chef Gherkin” or “Chef Arugula”. There will be a quick challenge and a main challenge. In the main challenge, after the meals are made the chefs will go back to the tasting rooms and judge each meal, only knowing who made it by their aliases. Reviews are then printed out on an old-fashioned dot-matrix printer; the reviews are also listed by the chef’s aliases. There will be an elimination every week; the last chef standing wins $100,000.

It’s not that the chefs don’t meet each other; they come out of their tasting rooms and see each other and the name tags on their aprons. They’re a combination of professional chefs, home cooks and social media cooks, but in the first exercise they make an egg dish, and everyone sits at a table and eats, just to get an idea of what all of them are capable of (there’s four different shakshuka dishes!).

Then they get introduced to Chefy, who tells them about the first elimination challenge, about teamwork. Two chefs will be assigned to one dish and switch back and forth in 15 minute shifts, trying to continue what the other chef did. Neither chef knows who the other one is. Then, after three rounds, the chefs go back to their tasting rooms and fill out review cards. The team that had the lowest-rated dish gets eliminated.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like we mentioned above, Secret Chef is like a culinary version of The Circle. Cross that reality sensation with Top Chef, and you’ve got this show.

Our Take: We love the idea behind Secret Chef. Instead of having some imperious judges giving tasting notes on the chef contestants’ hard work, the chefs judge each other, albeit anonymously. In fact, we really enjoyed how they set up the chefs during the egg challenge and had them taste each other’s meals at one table; there, we saw nothing but praise. But get them in a room and give them an alias, then the truth comes out.

We are a bit less excited about the execution of the game, especially in the early stages. The aliases just don’t stick to the chefs well enough, so when they’re referred to by their aliases, even if we see their pictures, we just can’t make the connection. And when the chefs read the reviews of the meals, we tend to forget if the alias and picture shown is referring to the person who made the dish or the person who reviewed it.

It was intriguing to see that the chef’s guesses of who their teammates were during the elimination challenge were mostly wrong. It was also interesting to see what the partners did to either make the dish better or completely mess it up. We hope the contests going forward have that much intrigue, though it’ll likely be tougher to do as the number of people are winnowed down. We also wonder if people are going to figure out the chefs behind the aliases at some point, especially as the numbers of contestants dwindle.

We do give the producers, one of which is chef David Chang, credit for mixing up the cooking contest formula. But the format just needed a bit more tightening before the cameras started rolling.

Sex and Skin: None, except for food porn.

Parting Shot: Chefy talks about the next challenge, where the chefs will try to reconstruct a dish from memory, and also not use any knives.

Sleeper Star: There’s always one chef who’s the arrogant SOB who thinks he’s the one to beat and that’s Joshua. But we’ll also cite Lanky, mainly because his nickname is Lanky.

Most Pilot-y Line: The animated visage of Chefy is suuuuuper creepy. He/she/they/it looks like Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and then blurs in and out like Max Headroom. If I were one of the contestants, I’d think someone was playing a dystopian prank on my by making me take orders from a floating chef’s hat.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We hope the execution of the “secret” part of Secret Chef is easier to follow as the number of contestants gets whittled down. Still, it’s a solid attempt at doing something different with the cooking competition genre.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.