Chef Alex Guarnaschelli is a titan of cooking competition shows. A “Chopped” and “Guy’s Grocery Games” regular and the host of “Supermarket Stakeout,” Guarnaschelli has also beat Bobby Flay and conquered the Kitchen Stadium to become an Iron Chef. And now that she’s put her name on her own cooking competition show, you better believe every episode is a knock-down-drag-out. In fact, a Season 2 episode quite literally got bloody when the chef suffered a scary kitchen injury — and in true Guarnaschelli fashion, refused to give up anyway.
With “Alex vs. America,” Guarnaschelli welcomes talented chefs from around the nation who try to beat the Food Network star at her own game. Hosted by Eric Adjepong, every episode finds Guarnachelli battling three chefs, each an expert in a new episodic theme, which ranges from “Chocolate” to “Spicy” to “Brunch.” And anyone can go home in any round – including Guarnaschelli.
It was the “Brunch” episode that proved to be a surprisingly difficult – and “make or break” – match for the celebrated Chef, who sliced off the tip of her finger while using a mandoline to slice sunchokes. Asked how her finger was recovering since then, Guarnaschelli told TheWrap, “Well, my finger’s not round at the end anymore – it’s not like you can fake this, you know?”
“You watched it, that’s just really what happened! I didn’t even think ‘You’re on camera right now,’” she continued. “When I came to for a second, in my out-of-body state, I think I said, ‘Don’t film me bleeding.’ Like, thinking to myself, ‘Who wants to watch me bleed?’”
“It’s hard to have that happen. It’s hard to be filmed. And it’s hard to then have it air on national television. These are all honestly risks, because you don’t know how the viewer is going to react. You don’t know,” Guarnaschelli said.
“Could we have edited around it and not even showed it? Sure. You know what? We could have. They’re deliberate choices. But have you ever made a bunch of choices and then closed your computer or, you know, logged off a Zoom and just thought, ‘Oh, my God, should I go back? To undo what I just did?’ We all have that moment in our field of work. And I would say for me, you know, it’s a make or break moment for me.”
That behind-the-scenes access to the highs and lows of cooking competitions doesn’t just make for dramatic television, it’s representative of Guarnaschelli’s overall creative approach to “Alex vs. America.”
As a Food Network mainstay, who also happens to be an enthusiastic consumer of cooking competitions in her off hours, Guarnaschelli wanted the series to “explore dropping that fourth wall of it a little bit and kind of peeking inside and really having the viewer kind of in on the experience with us.” That creative instinct is all over “Alex vs. America,” from the extra-wide action shots that reveal all the cameramen scurrying to keep up with the chefs to the competitor interviews candidly set in the open air of a backlot tent.
“I think what we’re learning and trying to do with ‘Alex vs. America’ is harness the two aspects of the genre at the same time,“ she said. “One, there’s a competition. There’s a winner. There are people that don’t [win], when the food is delicious. The ingredients and the context are exciting and dynamic. And then there’s the other aspect of it, which is, what does it really take to put something like that together?”
She continued: “I think in a lot of athletic competitions, for example, we see a lot of the different aspects. The coaches, you know, sort of can be the emotional barometer for the team, the players that are on the bench watching, the players that are playing, the crowd. We kind of wanted to represent sort of all those different emotional states, but with a cooking competition. I have really felt for a long time that the viewer is really curious about kind of lifting up the rock a little bit and looking underneath, all the while still believing the narrative and I think that’s what ‘Alex vs. America’ is striving for.“
Looking forward, Guarnaschelli sees even more opportunity in light of the recent merger between legacy Hollywood studio Warner Bros. and Discovery Inc. (which owns Food Network). In particular, the chef is excited about the possibilities for “an opening up of platforms and opportunity.”
“I see a lot of very excited internal dialog about forms and genres and, you know, different people, programs, sort of visiting with each other and sharing ideas,” Guarnaschelli told TheWrap. “I think much like the company has become much bigger and opened itself up in size, so has the scope of what the talent is able to do.”
“Honestly, so far it’s been nothing but exciting,” she said. “It obviously has all aspects, right? You know, it’s not all roses, but it is honestly I think just exciting. It just feels like I got on a motorcycle and I thought I was going across town and I’m actually going to go all the way to Arizona on the thing.”
New episodes of “Alex vs. America” air Sundays on Food Network.
