Bourdain is gone. Zimmern disappeared from the center of the dial. Top Chef isn’t an event anymore. And Gordon Ramsay is apparently legally required to appear on television every 14 minutes. What the hell happened to food TV?
I have a question.
And before anyone answers, please understand that “Guy Fieri has another tournament” is not an acceptable response.
Here goes:
Where the hell is the next great food television show?
Not another cooking competition.
Not Chopped: Antarctica.
Not Beat Bobby Flay: Bobby Has Been Kidnapped and Must Prepare a Sea Bass to Escape.
Not Guy’s Grocery Games: International Space Station, where four chefs have 22 minutes to prepare dinner using powdered Tang, freeze-dried ice cream and whatever has been floating behind the toilet since Expedition 47.
I mean a great food show.
The kind you actually talked about.
The kind that made food seem connected to travel and people and culture and history and all the other messy things that make eating interesting.
We had those once.
I know because I wrote an entire book about bizarre food.
I’ve seen things.
Jell-O has committed crimes.
REMEMBER WHEN FOOD TV FELT IMPORTANT?
There was a stretch when food television was genuinely fantastic.
Anthony Bourdain wasn’t really making food shows by the end.
He was making shows about human beings that happened to involve dinner.
That’s an important distinction.
Bourdain could sit at a plastic table in Vietnam eating noodles and somehow, 12 minutes later, you’d be thinking about colonialism, mortality, your relationship with your father and whether you had wasted your life by ordering the chicken fingers.
That was a television show.
Andrew Zimmern took a different route.
Bizarre Foods basically began with the premise:
What if a cheerful bald man ate the thing everybody else was afraid to eat?
And it worked.
Because Zimmern wasn’t simply doing gross-out television.
He’d eat something that looked like it had recently escaped from a Ridley Scott movie and then explain why people ate it.
That’s the important part.
Food became anthropology.
History.
Economics.
Geography.
Family.
Survival.
Then there was Top Chef.
Remember when Top Chef was THE THING?
“Did you watch Top Chef?”
“Oh my God, Restaurant Wars.”
“Pack your knives.”
People knew contestants’ names.
Restaurants became destinations because somebody had competed on the show.
You’d watch a chef make a celery-root foam over sous-vide quail and suddenly become a culinary expert from your couch.
“Interesting. The acid isn’t quite there.”
Sir, you’re eating Doritos.
Top Chef hasn’t actually disappeared—it completed its 23rd season in June 2026, with Kristen Kish hosting alongside Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons.
Twenty-three seasons!
That’s remarkable.
But culturally?
It doesn’t feel like 2009 anymore.
AND THEN FOOD TV DISCOVERED THE TOURNAMENT BRACKET
At some point, television executives apparently held a meeting.
EXECUTIVE #1: People like food.
EXECUTIVE #2: Correct.
EXECUTIVE #1: People also like competitions.
EXECUTIVE #2: My God.
And food television changed forever.
Cook something.
Clock counts down.
Judges stare.
Contestant sweats.
Someone says, “This dish represents my grandmother.”
Judge eats it.
Commercial.
Repeat.
I don’t even blame Food Network.
Okay.
I blame Food Network a little.
Have you looked at food television lately?
Food Network’s own 2026 programming includes Chopped, Guy’s Grocery Games, Tournament of Champions, Bobby’s Triple Threat, Flavortown Food Fight, Pitmasters and Guy’s Grocery Games: Global Games.
Apparently dinner now requires a playoff system.
I remember when Food Network taught you how to cook.
Now turning on Food Network feels like walking into ESPN while everybody happens to be holding spatulas.
WELCOME TO THE 2026 RISOTTO SEMIFINALS.
“Kevin enters tonight as the number-three seed in the Southwest region, but remember, Linda has the immunity shallot.”
I JUST WANTED TO LEARN HOW TO ROAST A CHICKEN.
FOOD NETWORK HAS BECOME THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE OF GUY FIERI
I like Guy Fieri.
I genuinely do.
Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is television comfort food.
Guy drives somewhere.
Guy meets lovable restaurant owner.
Guy eats sandwich containing six cheeses.
Guy leans backward.
“Brother.”
Everybody wins.
But Food Network has expanded the Fieri-verse to a point where I’m expecting a post-credit scene.
In 2026 alone, Food Network launched Flavortown Food Fight, continued Guy’s Grocery Games, created a Global Games version of Grocery Games, and ran another season of Tournament of Champions.
At this point Flavortown needs congressional representation.
There must be zoning ordinances.
Who’s collecting the garbage?
Does Flavortown have a school district?
Is Mayor Fieri facing reelection?
I NEED LORE.
AND THEN THERE’S GORDON RAMSAY
Gordon Ramsay deserves his own paragraph.
Actually Gordon Ramsay probably already has his own paragraph competition series.
PARAGRAPH HELL.
Twelve struggling paragraphs enter.
One leaves properly punctuated.
Ramsay remains enormously watchable because he understands something many television chefs don’t:
Television requires a personality.
He can cook.
He can teach.
He can travel.
He can insult somebody’s scallops so comprehensively that the scallops themselves begin reconsidering their career choices.
And Uncharted proved he can still make an expansive food-and-travel series.
But Gordon Ramsay cannot personally carry Western civilization’s entire food-television industry.
The man is 59.
Let him sit down.
Give him some tea.
Someone else has to host something eventually.
WHAT WE LOST WITH BOURDAIN
Here’s where I stop yelling at Guy’s Grocery Games for a minute.
The thing I miss isn’t really cooking television.
It’s curiosity television.
Bourdain was curious.
Zimmern was curious.
The best episodes of their shows weren’t asking:
Who cooks the best food?
They were asking:
Why do these people eat this?
That’s infinitely more interesting.
Why does this town cook this animal?
Why did this dish survive?
Why did immigrants bring this recipe here?
Why did poverty create that cuisine?
Why does one generation consider something comfort food while another thinks it belongs in a hazardous-waste container?
Those questions are exactly why I wrote Bite of the Bizarre: 100 Weird Foods That Time Forgot.
Because weird food isn’t really weird.
It’s evidence.
Turtle soup tells you something.
Aspic tells you something.
Organ meat tells you something.
Foods preserved in ways that would currently get you escorted from Whole Foods tell you something.
Every ridiculous thing humans have eaten happened for a reason.
Usually the reason was:
“We’re hungry and this is technically not poisonous.”
Human civilization!
WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER CHEF YELLING AT A CLOCK
This is my pitch.
Free of charge, television executives.
You’re welcome.
The next great food show shouldn’t be about finding America’s 47th best competitive chef.
Get out of the studio.
Go somewhere.
Find the foods we’re losing.
Find the 87-year-old woman who is the last person in her town making something the way her grandmother taught her.
Find the fourth-generation diner whose signature dish hasn’t changed since Eisenhower.
Find the immigrant neighborhood where an old-country recipe became something entirely new.
Find regional dishes that make people elsewhere say:
“You people eat WHAT?”
Go to county fairs. Say yes to funnel cakes & deep-fried Oreos.
Church basements.
VFW halls.
Fishing towns.
Reservation communities.
Little Italys.
Chinatowns.
Appalachian kitchens.
Louisiana gas stations where the food is inexplicably better than the restaurant you spent $190 at last night.
Don’t give anybody a timer.
Don’t eliminate anybody.
Don’t make them cook using ingredients selected by a roulette wheel.
JUST LET THEM TELL US WHY THE FOOD MATTERS.
BECAUSE FOOD TV HAS FORGOTTEN THE FOOD ISN’T REALLY THE POINT
The great food shows understood this.
Food is a Trojan horse.
You think you’re watching somebody eat noodles.
You’re actually watching a story about immigration.
You think you’re learning how sausage gets made.
You’re learning why a town exists.
You think you’re watching someone eat something disgusting.
Then somebody explains that their grandparents survived a famine by eating it.
Suddenly it’s not disgusting anymore.
Or it’s still disgusting.
But now it’s historically significant disgusting.
That’s progress.
THE GOOD NEWS: SOMEBODY COULD STILL GET THIS RIGHT
There are encouraging signs.
Top Chef continues to put serious cooking at the center of its competition, and its 2026 season incorporated regional food culture in the Carolinas.
Food Network’s new Pitmasters even brought Andrew Zimmern back into the network’s 2026 lineup as a judge.
So maybe the appetite is still there.
But I’m waiting for the breakthrough.
The show that everybody suddenly says:
“You have to watch this.”
Not because someone got eliminated.
Not because somebody won $50,000.
Not because Bobby Flay has apparently been challenged to mortal combat by another chef.
Because it showed us something we’d never seen.
SO WHERE’S THE NEXT BOURDAIN?
Nowhere.
And that’s probably the correct answer.
There shouldn’t be another Anthony Bourdain.
Trying to manufacture one would be unbearable.
“Meet Chad. He has tattoos, smokes occasionally and looks contemplatively out train windows. America, meet your new Bourdain!”
No.
Stop it.
Put Chad back.
What food television needs isn’t another Bourdain.
It needs someone with the same permission to be curious.
Someone funny.
Someone knowledgeable.
Someone willing to shut up when the person across the table is more interesting.
Someone willing to eat the terrifying thing.
Someone who understands that a great meal isn’t necessarily prepared by a Michelin-starred chef.
Sometimes it’s cooked by somebody’s grandmother.
Sometimes it’s served through a window.
Sometimes it’s been simmering in the same pot since approximately 1974.
And occasionally it’s an animal organ you didn’t previously know had culinary applications.
That’s television.
FOOD TELEVISION, CALL ME
Actually, don’t.
I wear a paper bag on my head.
There are insurance complications.
But somebody needs to figure this out.
Because food remains one of the greatest subjects television has ever had.
Every country has it.
Every family has it.
Every immigrant brought it.
Every generation changed it.
Every city argues about it.
Everybody needs it.
And somehow we’ve reduced much of food television to:
YOU HAVE 30 MINUTES TO TURN THESE SIX RANDOM INGREDIENTS INTO A RESTAURANT-QUALITY ENTRÉE.
No.
I want to know why the guy in Pennsylvania is still making scrapple.
I want to know who first looked at a sea urchin and thought:
I’m going inside that.
I want to know why aspic happened.
Seriously.
We need closure on aspic.
The next great food show is out there.
Somebody just needs to stop looking for contestants…
…and start looking for stories.
The Critic has spoken.
STILL HUNGRY FOR SOMETHING WEIRDER?
If this article has made you nostalgic for the days when food television occasionally left the studio and ate something that required a liability waiver, I’ve already prepared the tasting menu.
The Unknown Critic Presents: Bite of the Bizarre — 100 Weird Foods That Time Forgot dives into 100 of history’s strangest culinary creations—from turtle soup and questionable gelatin experiments to foods that prove our ancestors possessed stronger stomachs than we do.
It also includes my takes on three shows that understood food television could be about something bigger: Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted.
Think of it as culinary history served with sarcasm.
And possibly antacids.
Get Bite of the Bizarre on Amazon
Until next time, I’ll be under the bag