"Govind Armstrong" news and stories

Oh, this is going to be fun. We can tell right now. Last year, the folks at Bravo decided to get chocolate in our peanut butter, as it were, by taking our favorite chef-competition show and mixing in not a bunch of brash young upstarts, but a handful of egotistical, brilliant and/or eccentric James Beard-honored, Michelin-star granted, five-star-chefs.

If they weren't quite "putting their reputations on the line," as host Kelly Choi so dramatically put it, they were at least exposing themselves to the demands of cooking without their sous chefs, their own signature line of cookwear and a Today Show audience full of doting guests (Michael Chiarello, we're looking at you). And they were doing it all for a good cause (other than driving more people into their fine-dining establishments during a recession, of course).

This year, they've thinned the ranks of the cheftestants from 24 to 22, asked back some of the first season's most colorful characters and shook up the elimination process (what, a team challenge in episode 1?!). But the formula remains the same: Put a bunch of headstrong masters of very diverse cuisines in a room, give them unusual little tasks like they're schoolchildren, and let the egos fly.

Since the show is divvying them out six at a time, we have a few weeks to get acquainted with all of them; that is, unless they're summarily rejected as if they were community college grads looking for line-cook gigs.

NBC's Celebrity Cooking Showdown premiered last night after weeks of less-than-optimistic reviews. The show, in case you missed it, is Dancing with the Stars meets Iron Chef America. A celebrity, of whom the most famous is Tom Arnold, is paired with a real chef, either Cat Cora, Wolfgang Puck or  Govind Armstrong. The chef must attempt to train the celebrity to cook in a mini "boot camp", after which the celebrity and chef will face off Iron Chef-style against another team. Confused?

Last night's premier episode featured the following teams: Cindy Margolis and Wolfgang Puck, Tony Gonzalez and Cat Cora, Alison Sweeney and Govind Armstrong. When the show began, the celebs came out. Cindy was almost not wearing a shirt, Tony was twice as tall as Cat and Cat's hair was styled professionally, like it never is on Iron Chef America. Alison was wearing a short dress, but seemed to have more culinary prowess than the others based on her cooking-lesson clip.

{spoilers ahead}