Coming to you taped on a set that looks live from the bowels of a casino nobody has ever heard of in Reno, it is the Barbecue Championship Series!
What?!
Though the cast of characters looks to have a combined IQ of 20 if you leave out the wisecracking New Yorker Emma Feigenbaum (in which case it would hit the roof) this show, or show of shows (remember, this is the barbecue playoffs) does hit you with some drama and a purse totaling $100,000. The series was won by Mike Davis, a retired U.S. Army sergeant from Oklahoma who defeated Sara Horowitz of Dallas. The runaway winner of the series overall was Davis, low-key and even self-deprecating about his BBQ talents. The fact is the man can cook-and basically obliterated the rest of the competition up to the finals. If Davis wouldn’t have won the competition, count me as the most surprised.
The more disappointing part of the show were the three judges, most of whom were off the E-list five years ago (or whenever that WB TV show went off the air) and who are purportedly barbecue experts.
And save for incessant plugs for so and so’s Web site, in which they supposedly claim to have the secret to eternal life (or good barbecue) and the many moments in which the judges have actually become, through hard work and not osmosis, bonafide culinary bon vivants, they come off like idiot savants.
To be fair, one judge is not. Michel Richard is actually a renowned French chef who looks like he’s never met a jar of mayonnaise he didn’t fall in love with and make lip-smacking sounds in the direction of. In one episode I watched he actually did, once he discovered that Davis actually splattered some mayo on the pork steak he was cue-ing.
The other two are, oddly enough, a former basketball star and an actress. Though “Chocolate Thunder” is well known for ripping down backboards, Darryl Dawkins kind of threw me off as a judge of barbecue, though he is quite strict on what passes as BAR-BE-CUE. He routinely gave some of the lowest scores in the competition. The actress is none other than Megyn Price, who was lead actress in the TV series “Grounded For Life” with comedian Donal Logue from 2001-05.
If you think the cooks-or BBQ artists-are any better, you’re wrong. Their outfits come off like walking billboards for BBQ sauce, rubs and anything else considered apropos for charbroiled, down-home capitalism. The preferred outfit is that of a hat (usually the company they’re plugging) an apron, some hideous Levi’s shorts and high tops. They mainly stand around the grills looking for something to do with their serious looks and their steely demeanors remind me of Coach Tom Landry after the Dallas Cowboys scored a touchdown.
But the only entertainment (if you can call it that) comes from the barbecue artists themselves-and they’d probably kill you if you called them sandwich artists. The contestants range from young to old (but most have completed culinary training) and everything in between K.C. and Miami, seriously. Though I’m really having a hard time trying to figure out how young Emma Feigenbaum can hold barbecues in NYC-unless she lives on the balcony, some of these BBQ cooks can actually cook meat, which is the whole point of this thing.
But hold the phone; these here judges like to throw a wrench into people’s plans and after two rounds of pork and beef, out come the crawdaddies! Yee-ha! In the third round the meat is a mystery and it has been known to be frog legs, salmon or even tripe. The grills on which the cookers cooked their specialties was also unique; some used tiny smokers that you would find at Wal-Mart, while others like Mike Woszniak from Chicago probably had his trucked in on a tractor-trailer.
Check your local listings for the Barbecue Championship Series on Versus. Beginning with the first round on January 19, see it again and salivate Sundays at 10 p.m.
