Last week, NBC debuted its new cooking competition show Yes, Chef! Under the guidance of highly decorated, Emmy-winning kitchen mentors Martha Stewart and José Andrés, the show groups 12 of what are presumably the most emotionally volatile, prideful, egocentric chefs the network could find into a high-intensity competition to see who can overcome their bad behaviors to best work with new dishes and new team members. (Or, as the press release puts it, “blends the high-stakes thrill of a cooking competition with the raw emotion of personal transformation.”) The reward for winning this comically Nanny McPhee-coded stunt? Image rehab and a whopping $250,000 prize.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and years following, many American viewers turned to softer shows that celebrated the Good Guys, the overeager home bakers, the contestants competing for bragging rights and… a plate. When it felt like everything was going wrong globally, these shows provided a moment’s reprieve. But after years of cozy viewing taking precedence — particularly in the world of competitive food shows, thanks to the Great British Bake Off, Nailed It!, and Is It Cake? — mean is back. In broader reality TV right now, liars, thieves, and jerks are stealing shows altogether, from NBC’s The Traitors and Netflix’s Million Dollar Secret to E’s House of Villains (the network’s most-viewed series since 2020 when it debuted in 2023). Today, lies, lost tempers, and real-time crashouts reign.
Yes, Chef! is trying to have it both ways. The show couches its specific brand of mean under the premise of acknowledging, and wishing to fix, the industry’s many faults. (The first words that greet the viewer are Stewart’s opening voiceover admitting that “for far too long, the pressure of the kitchen has been an excuse for out-of-control behavior.”) This is public relations at its finest and least subtle.
But frankly, food television never fully stopped making it okay to be a raging asshole on TV. Whether it’s in pursuit of culinary excellence and plating precision or due to a deeply personal trauma, that poor behavior has always been on display. Across two decades, multiple series, networks, and guest appearances, Gordon Ramsay has built an empire off of a two-sided persona as the ruthless, riled-up chef with a rough exterior and a heart of gold. “He’s not a horrible person; he’s mean because he cares,” the shows seemed to say. (Sometimes, saying those words verbatim through contestant confessionals or Ramsay’s signature motivational speeches.)
And numerous other shows have explored our communal fascination with how intense cooking under pressure can be. There’s a reason why there are 22 (!) seasons of Top Chef, a plethora of domestic and global spin-offs and remakes of Iron Chef, and consistently released forays into the backstabbing tension of reality TV kitchens, like Netflix’s Pressure Cooker, Dinner Time Live!, and Culinary Class Wars. While non-food-focused shows can entice viewers at home through communal gawking at a contestant’s outfit or blatant judgment of a performance based on how it looked or sounded, there’s no equivalent for televised cooking competitions. So, they rely on carefully sculpted narratives, tear-jerking confessionals, and production edits to cast stressed-out contestants as clashing heroes and villains, all to cement the show as the ultimate arbiter of good and bad on and off the plate.
But what’s the value of a cooking competition like this right now? What is the end goal of weaving together a series-long Snyder Cut of harrowing backstories and childhood traumas into tear-jerking confessions from people suffering from the consequences of their own actions? (Especially when allegations of sexual misconduct, abuse, professional horrors, workplace cruelties, real-life traumas, and lighter-but-still-important verbal wounds are still staples of the restaurant industry and the production sets of these cooking shows?)
Put plainly, it’s the chance to see how these “toxic chefs,” as NBC calls them, react in the face of accountability. It’s the chance to see beyond the words and actions posted on social media, and meaningfully interrogate whether the people claiming reinvention or clamoring for second chances mean what they say when the pressure is at its max. On Yes, Chef!, that tension looms near in the form of teamwork-based prompts that might as well have been scientifically (psychologically?) engineered to create strife.
Consider the first episode’s challenge, which asked 12 chefs to submit a menu embodying the best four-course meal they’ve cooked. The show then split them into three teams and required all the chefs to prepare whichever menu Stewart and Andrés chose as a “stand-out” from each team, under the direction of whichever chef’s menu was chosen. In short, it’s a series of tasks guaranteed to bruise egos, rattle confidence, and supercharge inferiority complexes.
However, this isn’t to say that all of these contestants will receive comparable amounts of criticism or be given the space to be similarly problematic. As conversations surrounding the role of sexism in Martha Stewart’s ascent; the launches, successes, and struggles of Duchess Meghan Markle’s various food businesses; and plenty of other examples of food television viewers and judges disproportionately critiquing women and people of color during competitions have shown, gender, sexual, and ethnic minorities already navigate these industries with less slack to be unpersonable, and more scrutiny that projects aggression into minor actions. A show like this brings the opportunity to plainly discuss how the restaurant industry and modern media have afforded some chefs the space and time to be emotional terrors.
Still, for this show to crown a winner suggests that accountability and redemption are goals to be adequately “achieved” by checking a few boxes, going on a social media hiatus, or simply crying to the camera during a deeply personal confessional. In actuality, they’re both processes that require prolonged, consistent effort. There is no black-and-white Good™ or Bad™ checklist or moral report card. All we have are the impacts and consequences of our words and actions. Unfortunately, no amount of image rehabilitation can overshadow the damage already done.
A small part of me still hopes that some small amount of tangible good can come from a show pairing emotionally unregulated cooking talents with mentors who can directly empathize and relate to them firsthand. Whether that leads to satisfying results or meaningful efforts toward apology or atonement in these contestants’ personal circles remains to be seen. In the meantime, what this shows banks on is that we’ll find it entertaining to see villains take on villains in their own toxic grudge match: As any (every?) Real Housewives franchise has taught us, sometimes it takes the worst person imaginable to hold an antagonist accountable.
