'Iron Chef America' - Have Saffron, Will Travel

Sunday night means so much to us Americans. It's a time for family feasts -- a time for reflection. A last chance for calm before the work week. Meanwhile, over on the Food Network, it's just another opportunity for shrieking, back-flipping, strobe-lit, fog-machined insanity.

Yes, another Sunday means another Iron Chef defending his or her honor in the futuristic appliance showroom that is the "Kitchen Stadium." In this season, at least, we've about given up on there being any shocking upsets, any major ripples in the order of the Iron Chef universe as we know it.

Even this week's defender, Chef Morimoto -- who, if you believe Wikipedia, has one of the lowest win percentages of any of the current Iron Chefs -- has seemed fairly invincible as of late. So we were hopeful when yet another random chef was plucked from semi-obscurity -- or rather, Minneapolis -- to attempt to ascend to the throne. Chef Sameh Wadi's restaurant description didn't give us hope. (A midwestern, mid-east fusion joint called "Saffron"? If memory serves, we've eaten at about six of those, and gotten terrible indigestion at five of them.) But his bio piqued our interest: A Palestinian-American who dabbles in North African, Indian, Spanish and Mediterranean cuisines?

Faster than you could say "prix fixe," we were in for his five-course take on the humblest of secret ingredients, the lowly mackerel. (Estimated elapsed time until host Alton Brown made a "Holy mackerel!" pun: A restrained 20 minutes.) We're never quite sure if the chefs get any time to actually plot out a thoughtful menu after The Chairman barks "begin," but Wadi mapped out a complex, intricate path through all of the above regions, and did so with a flair truly worthy of Iron Chef-iness.

All of which is not to say that Morimoto wasn't coming up with some intriguing concepts of his own, just ones we've mostly seen before. While Wadi's sous-chef improvised a wood-chip fish smoker with a little aluminum foil (we'll have to remember that one), Morimoto was sealing some mackerel with yuzu, garlic, thyme, and duck fat in a bag and cooking it all sous vide. His fried-mackerel on a bagel was inspired (not to mention the fact that he whipped up a perfect New York bagel while cooking everything else).

Maybe it was the editing, but to our eyes, Wadi was the more creative -- making his close loss, particularly in the "originality" category, all the more baffling. His mackerel spanakopita was like no spinach pie we'd ever seen before -- cut face-up on the plate like a blossoming flower -- and we could practically smell the fennel rising up from his last-course tagine.

We wish we could say more about the judging, but frankly, with snotty contrarian Jeffrey Steingarten sitting out this episode, there just wasn't that much tension. You could practically sense Donatella Arpaia's disappointment at not getting to argue with someone -- anyone. Maybe we've had it wrong all along -- their playground name-calling does serve a purpose. Antagonism like that breeds more passionate scoring, scoring that might very well have put Wadi over the top. Come back, Jeffrey, wherever you are!