Bobby Flay’s The Line review: a fun face-off that’s more process than food

Bobby Flay’s latest Bobby Flay Food Network competition, Bobby Flay’s The Line, is effectively Beat Bobby Flay: Restaurant Edition, with Bobby Flay and three chefs facing off against four others.

While I didn’t need another Bobby Flay show on Food Network, Bobby Flay’s The Line is something new: a competition that focuses more on process than food, and expands blind judging to a real-time scoring system from 240 plates, each of which is scored up to five stars by diners who have no idea who’s cooking.

Fold together the intensity of service during Top Chef’s Restaurant Wars and the playful competition of Beat Bobby Flay: Holiday Throwdown, and sprinkle on some of Tournament of Champions’ blind judging, and you have a show that delivers something new—and less of Bobby Flay than you might expect, judging by the size of his head in this art for the series.

While Bobby claims this is “truly behind the scenes of the restaurant world,” it’s not taking place in an actual restaurant. Rather, it’s using the Food Network kitchens—I think the real one, not the recreation built in an L.A. soundstage for Wildcard Kitchen—to emulate a real kitchen.

While Bobby already has three chefs who work for him on Bobby Flay’s Triple Threat, he has not brought his titans, not even his significant other Brooke Williamson. Bobby’s new team is Antonia Lofaso, Claudette Zepeda, and Michael Jenkins, who together face off against another celebrity chef and three members of their restaurant team.

After two hours of prep, which passes quickly, the two teams serve 240 plates to 40 diners in 90 minutes.

That’s 12 dishes per diner, six from each kitchen, and 1,200 points that can be awarded to each team. The diners have no idea who’s cooking, but the chefs see the diners’ scores in real time, averaged for each dish. That’s the most expansive attempt at blind judging I’ve seen on reality TV, and it works, even if some of the diners act as though they’re auditioning for their own Food Network shows.

Chefs can therefore adjust their cooking, and that’s the major component of this Bobby Flay reality competition dish that sets it apart from others. Most chefs in cooking competitions prepare a dish and that’s it. Run out of time, make a mistake: tough shit, you’re cooked.

Not here. Laurence Kretchmer, Bobby’s business partner, acts as restaurant manager, communicating feedback between the kitchen. So when Bobby’s tacos drop to the bottom of his team’s leaderboard, with the lowest average score, he learns why (texture) and adjusts his taco from soft to crispy.

The other team gets similar feedback. In the premiere, the challengers are from Marcus Samuelsson’s Hav & Mar, with its executive chef Fariyal Abdullahi (who you’ve probably seen on other Food Network shows), Greg Pena, and Ed Brumfield joining Marcus.

Teams of people who work together and know their competitors create an instantly relaxed environment., and the shit-talking starts immediately. “You’re smart,” Marcus Samulesson says to Bobby when he learns Antonia Lofaso is expediting for their kitchen, “because you brought the one that talks the most.”

Later, Bobby asks Antonia about wearing her glasses to make pasta, and she says, “I can’t see the fucking numbers!” There are warm moments, too, like Fariyal telling us that “the industry is not very forgiving, especially for women of color,” but that Marcus was “the first chef to empower me.”

The chefs talk through some of their dishes, telling us what they’re making and how they’re doing it, but since they’re churning out hundreds of dishes, this is a show about process: how food goes from order to plate, and all the steps between. Oh, and the chaos. Lots of chaos.

We watch that chaos unfold as the chefs occasionally share tidbits of information, often in interviews recorded later. Antonia tells us what “all day” means (a total number of one dish, though ironically not for the entire day) and what it means when a kitchen is “in the shit” (too much uninspected lettuce).

The one part of Bobby Flay’s The Line that grated on me was a twist. A VIP shows up in the dining room, and each kitchen has to prepare a brand-new dish for their table, competing for 10 bonus points. In the first episode, Esther Choi gives her 10 points to Bobby’s team—and those make the difference between Marcus team’s winning and losing.

Marcus’ team earned 881 to Bobby’s 877, but the bonus kicks that to 887. So the production saves $25,000 and the team from Hav & Mar loses based on a dish that didn’t really come off the line like all the others.

That undermines the competition part of Bobby Flay’s The Line, which is unfortunate because it’s an otherwise creative and watchable new entry in both the cooking competition and Bobby Flay spaces.

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