Cooking under a strict time limit while TV cameras capture your every mistake has to
be difficult.
Throw in some ridiculous kitchen sabotages and the challenge becomes even more intense.
But what else would a show called Cutthroat Kitchen be?
Here's what you may not have known about the show.
At the beginning of each episode of Cutthroat Kitchen, host Alton Brown would walk out with
a metal briefcase and open it to reveal $100,000 worth of crisp bills.
The contestants' eyes would light up as he handed them each $25,000 to use for bidding
on tortuous scenarios for their fellow competitors.
But here's the thing: that cash was completely fake.
Whether it's Cutthroat Kitchen, Let's Make a Deal, or a big-budget Hollywood crime drama,
studios rarely use real money on camera.
There's simply too much liability when using real cash, so instead, studios use prop money.
Studios take great care to ensure that the prop money doesn't look completely fake on
camera, but still adheres to strict U.S. counterfeit laws.
Even though the cash in the briefcase was fake, the excitement from contestants who
won the actual cash prize was very genuine.
Cutthroat Kitchen didn't have much in common with Good Eats, the show that launched Brown's
Food Network career.
But the show did have something in common with another Alton Brown vehicle: The Next
Iron Chef.
In a few of the Next Iron Chef episodes, the competitors participated in a series of challenges
where certain ingredients would be auctioned off based on how quickly a chef claimed they
could cook them.
Brown said that the scenes proved to be incredibly fun for both the chefs and the audience, and
this led to discussions of how the auctioning concept could be expanded on its own.
The host added:
"My thing was, the judges shouldn't know what's going on, because then everyone's judged on
a level playing field, and that makes the game more fun."
Of course, what Brown might consider "fun," Cutthroat Kitchen contestants probably considered
downright evil.
When it came to just what went into food prep, judges really didn't know what was going on.
It wouldn't be much fun if the judges knew a chef had to make chicken marsala while wearing
Mickey Mouse gloves, so they were kept in the dark about what sabotages unfolded during
the cooking portion.
Cutthroat judge Simon Majumdar said:
"I am locked away, and I can tell you that they are really strict about that.
I go and hide away in my very comfortable trailer, but the guys in makeup don't tell
me a thing."
The judges do eventually find out just what sort of kitchen torture the competitors went
through, after the tasting.
For the truly dedicated Cutthroat viewer, there was an aftershow web series where Alton
Brown walked the judges through the various sabotages that resulted in both the winning
and losing dishes from the contestants.
"A whole canned chicken."
"Ugh!"
Sometimes the judges themselves even tried their hand at cooking with the sabotages in
place.
Majumdar added:
"I just hope that they keep it to a level where the chefs can still cook, because otherwise,
apart from anything else, I still have to eat the stuff."
There seemed to be no limit to the mayhem that chefs inflicted on each other in Cutthroat
Kitchen.
Sabotages ranged from something as simple as having to use really burnt bacon to obstacles
as weird as having to work at a constantly moving "hula station."
But they all had to be possible.
Brown explained:
"Not only do we test them multiple times to make sure they're doable, but we actually
test them in tandem with other sabotages that we might put in the same round.
We would like for people to be able to survive two sabotages."
Brown said the Cutthroat team often worked for weeks before a show taping to put challenges
into practice.
It wasn't uncommon for sabotages to be so ridiculous that they had to be cut.
Brown said that around 20 percent of the sabotages pitched ended up being just too over-the-top
or tricky to pull off, so they never made it to the show.
Some cooking shows pay all their contestants, while others only pay the final winner.
Cutthroat Kitchen was one of the shows where the victor and only the victor took all the
spoils.
Cutthroat veteran Joe Arvin, who appeared on one of the show's Thanksgiving-themed episodes,
said:
"We were not paid to be on the show as a competitor, however, all travel and expenses were absorbed
by the network."
Arvin didn't win his episode, but noted that doing the show was still worth his time.
The media exposure had its benefits, he said:
"Probably more than anything, I learned to adapt to being on a studio set and in front
of the camera."
And it's called Cutthroat Kitchen you didn't expect them to give money to everybody, did
you?
Arvin said that he was contacted by the show's producers after they stumbled upon his cooking
channel on YouTube.
He explained,
"They initially wanted to know how strong of a competitor I was and if I thought that
I would be able to handle the pressure of competing on a show like Cutthroat Kitchen."
It was apparently pretty common for the show's producers to reach out to potential contestants
through YouTube or various other social media platforms.
Once a chef said they were interested in appearing on the show, they would send in a resume along
with a few photographs of their best dishes.
From there, contestants would have Skype calls with the show's producers to discuss their
culinary background.
Arvin said his audition process took around four months and, oddly enough, there was never
any actual cooking as part of the process.
It would honestly seem a little out of place for contestants on a show with the format
and title of Cutthroat Kitchen to be buddy-buddy with one another.
Competitor interaction on Cutthroat wasn't scripted, but producers definitely tried to
nudge the chefs in a certain direction.
Contestant Joe Arvin said:
"There is not any 'planned drama' per se, but the producers highly encourage the competitors
to bash each other."
"That looks like a TV dinner, bro."
The show even had a lawyer on deck to help ensure things never got too heated, and that
each episode had a balance of real world versus the Hollywood-produced experience.
Shows like Top Chef and Mind of a Chef have been lauded with praise by critics, but Cutthroat
Kitchen never garnered similar accolades.
At best, it was called "intriguing" by an Entertainment Weekly critic.
But that same critic also discussed the difficulty of watching it and keeping one's, quote, "faith
in humanity intact."
"Good luck."
"Oh, yeah."
The AV Club's review wasn't much kinder, questioning whether Alton Brown possibly had a twin brother
without any sense of shame, saying that the entertaining thing about the challenges were,
quote, "the fleeting glimpses of improvisational thinking."
Why so much critical hate for a show that turned the standard cooking competition on
its head?
Plenty of TV cooking competitions have competitors trying to prepare a dish within a time limit
using, at times, out-of-the-ordinary ingredients.
Cutthroat Kitchen took the premise one step further and injected an element of comedy.
The competitors were serious, but the show never took itself too seriously.
Perhaps Cutthroat was just too lowbrow for foodies.
As one review from Vulture pointed out, the real stars of the show weren't necessarily
the chefs.
What made Cutthroat Kitchen work were the writers, who episode after episode, found
a way to take the standard cooking competition and combine it with circus-like absurdity.
In 2015, Cutthroat Kitchen got it got its own spin-off with Camp Cutthroat, a version
of the show that took chefs out of the studio and put them out in a "secret location" in
the wilderness.
Rather than bring aboard Cutthroat newbies, the spin-off series brought in previous competitors
and upped the prize money by putting $75,000 on the line.
As for that "secret location," well, as viewers noticed pretty quickly, it wasn't exactly
uncharted TV territory.
Camp Cutthroat was filmed in Santa Clarita, California on the set of a defunct Fox reality
TV show called Utopia, with just a few cosmetic updates.
Utopia was described as having elements of the reality show Big Brother, but proved to
be far less popular and only lasted 13 episodes.
As for Camp Cutthroat, well, perhaps it was too extreme, because camp ended for good a
year later.
The writers of Cutthroat showcased their devilish creativity with each episode and occasionally
turned the reins over to the fans when it came to coming up with new sabotages.
Because what fan of Cutthroat wouldn't want the chance to make the chefs sweat a little?
The show's website offered this invitation:
"Food Network is currently accepting submissions for upcoming challenges, and it's up to you,
Cutthroat fans, to decide with what disruptions future contestants will have to adapt."
Who knows how many fan submissions actually made it onto the show, but there were certainly
some creative ones thrown out there.
One fan suggested strapping a competitor to a Silence of the Lambs-style dolly.
Another suggested hiding the clock with only the highest bidder being able to see how much
cooking time was left.
It's pretty obvious that there was definitely some strategy — besides just being handy
with a skillet — to walking away with the cash on Cutthroat Kitchen.
One of the biggest pitfalls that way too many chefs fell victim to was bidding too much
money in the first round.
Judge Simon Majumdar explained:
"While this may help them survive in the short term, their overspending will often come back
and bite them in the backside during the latter stages.
On more than one occasion, I have seen the better chef lose because they had insufficient
funds to counter their opponent's bidding in the final round and were sabotaged to defeat."
Poor shopping habits can also really do a chef in before the bidding or cooking even
begins.
If a chef is making a cheesecake and forgets cream cheese and sugar, they're going to have
an uphill battle.
Alton Brown said:
"The No. 1 sabotage is the sabotage the chefs do to themselves in the pantry."
There's also a high probability that chefs will lose at least some of their ingredients
in the sabotages, so Brown added:
"Finding alternate acceptable approaches to dishes is always a really good idea."
Cutthroat Kitchen had a solid run on TV, and over the course of four years churned out
192 episodes of culinary mayhem.
The show still regularly airs and is available on various streaming platforms, but Food Network
officially pulled the plug on new episodes in 2017.
Cutthroat viewers got the bad news from Alton Brown himself when a fan asked the host on
Twitter if there were any new episodes in the works.
Brown kept it short and sweet, telling the fan that Cutthroat Kitchen had been cancelled,
adding a hashtag that indicated it was probably his fault.
As to why the show was canceled, it's likely that Brown simply wanted to do something else.
He relaunched Good Eats in 2018 and has indicated he's working on a new, quote, "internet venture."
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Mashed videos about your favorite cooking shows are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.