"Jehangir Mehta" news and stories

Last night, the gloves came off in the battle for "Iron Chef" supremacy -- or rather, Jeffrey Steingarten's glasses came off. On the surface, this short, quick season has been building to a mano-a-mano showdown, between polarizing pastry master Jehangir Mehta and whomever rose to challenge him, in this case, ultra nice-guy Jose Garces.

But while they toiled over hot flames, under boiling klieg lights and in the haze of the prerequisite "Iron Chef" fog machine, we were watching the season's real battle come to a head: That's right, the one between behind the judges table, between haughty diva Donatella Arpaia and the toad-like food critic Steingarten.

If you've paid attention over the past few weeks, you've noticed the increasingly bitchy cat fights, the dismissive hand waves, and the incessant eye-rolling -- from both sides. But last night it reached a fever pitch.

If you thought these two could make it through a tuxedo-and-evening-dress finale without going for each other's jugulars, you were wrong. They couldn't even get through the initial round of the critique. It all started with Arpaia taking umbrage at Steingarten's comment that Mehta's buffalo steak in chocolate-wine sauce was too sweet, which in turn prompted a tongue-lashing: "Don't you criticize me!" Steingarten snapped.

At the mid-point of any reality show -- let alone one involving a bunch of ambitious, successful, mostly alpha-male chefs -- a clear villain emerges. And the way things have shaken out on "The Next Iron Chef," we're left with a strange mix: Two are the nicest chefs you could imagine (Jose Garces, Roberto Trevino), two are boy- and girl-next-door types (Seamus Mullen, Amanda Freitag, respectively), and two are the meanest, cockiest, backstabbing-est bastards the Food Network casting director could hope to find (Nate Appleman, Jehangir Mehta).

Picking from among the nice ones is hard -- Garces and Freitag are constantly offering up help to the others and downplaying their talent -- but the heart of banal evil of "TNIC" is a little easier to pin down. Sure, former A16 and soon-to-be Pulino's chef Appleman is your average aggressive, tatted-up, overly confident young chef. And yes, his quote during last night's Indian-themed "pressure" challenge was enough to make us hurl: "I'm a white boy who never cooked Indian before and I just cooked 5 dishes -- I think I've pretty much won this."

But if it's the devious grin, the glint of sabotage, the air of smug condescension you're looking for, there can only be one choice: Mehta. We're sure Graffiti's wunderkind is, as its Web site puts it, "truly a nice guy." But if you've been watching the way "TNIC" editors slice-and-dice Mehta's reaction shots -- not to mention his own proclivity for undermining his co-contestants by hoarding ingredients and gadgets whether he needs them or not -- he's the leading candidate to be the show's mustache-twirling bad guy. And judging by the voting, he'll continue to be.