It’s the episode we’ve not been waiting for; the remaining cast of Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off tackle the sinister and mysterious food truck craze, if you define a “craze” as just a “thing that has comfortably and unexcitedly just gone on existing for what seems like over half a decade now." This episode was almost so legit that I had to quit, you know? I hate throwing around the word “authentic,” but everything about this lunch cart challenge was très, très authentic. Is there anything cooler than eating food served to you by a guy in a truck? Maybe Terry Richardson riding on the back of Justin Theroux’s motorcycle during Fashion Week and photographing you while you eat a doughnut off his erect penis, maybe that is slightly cooler. But it’s close.
It’s hard to imagine Rachael Vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off teaching anybody anything useful, save perhaps when to say no to class A drugs and elective surgeries, but most reality competition shows could learn a thing or two from the Cook-Off’s six-episode season. Six is plenty of episodes for this sort of horseshit. “On episode sixteen of America’s Next Master Cook, it’s Battle: Turkey Salami.” Enough. The third week of Rachael Vs. Guy may have sagged a bit, and how could it not have, what with the crushing losses of Big A Carter and Miss USA, but it’s all propped up by the fact that we are nearly halfway done. There are only three episodes left and then everyone on the show will be handed shovels and told to start digging and they will be all, “Why are we digging? Why does the hole have to be so big and deep?” and Food Network is just like, “It doesn’t need to be that deep, just big, but maybe you could get more leverage if you actually got inside the hole.” And then everyone goes to sleep for a while.
As someone who watches Top Chef, a number of things have always troubled me about the format. One, almost none of the chefs were in the movie Young Guns. Two, many of them seem to have previous cooking experience, or at the very least to have eaten normal human food through their mouths. Three, not a single person mentoring the chefs ever wears their sunglasses on the back of their heads. Very often, they aren't wearing any sunglasses at all! These things have always nagged at me, but now Food Network's Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off is here to "solve" these problems.
