"chef academy emmanuel" news and stories

Something about Bravo's latest cooking/lifestyle experience "Chef Academy" brings out the easily amused grandma in us: Oh, those wacky young classmates -- what zany pranks will they pull this week?! These here whippersnappers, the hijinks they concoct! How saucy -- pun intended! Get it?!

In general, food TV tends to stick to a formula, and boy, have our friends at Bravo stuck with theirs. You can count on the first 40 minutes of any given episode of "Chef Academy" to consist of mostly canned hijinks interrupted by about 10 scattered minutes of cooking instruction -- which almost always include some fancy French-chef nonsense to wow Aunt Agnes and Grammy Geraldine at home, like a grated-Parmesan bowl or a marzipan flower.

And the remaining 20 minutes? It's what we live for, the inevitable tasting, judging and ridiculing of the nine amateur party planners, would-be actors, housewives and sleazoids who make up the (spoiler alert) yet-to-be eliminated pupils of "world's sexiest chef" Jean-Christophe Novelli.

Three strikes and any one student is out, but these three strikes -- despite the cruel, plate-throwing, sneering critiques this week -- seem damn near impossible to accumulate.

Like a bad community college class, two weeks of "Chef Academy" -- Bravo's latest experiment in food-competition/sexed-up reality show -- is starting to make us wonder why we signed up in the first place.

Actually, make that a bad community college class in L.A., where everyone seems like he or she is permanently out on an audition. Whether it's their "candid" confessions to the camera, their home lives or their googly eyed reaction shots, Jean Christophe Novelli's nine would-be culinary students all seem so practiced, so rehearsed, there's nothing left to chance, and even less at risk.

Case in point: Emmanuel Delcour, the Mick Jagger-with-a-six-pack Frenchman who sauntered onto the set last week, demanding to be given a shot in this would-be rarefied kitchen on the basis of his sheer "passion" for food. On this week's episode, he was revealed to be a recovering porn star named Jean Val Jean. (Any reference to the lead character of "Les Misérables" is purely intentional, we think.)