A better recipe for restaurant reality on TV

NBC’s summertime series “The Restaurant” has attracted widespread media attention -- stories in the nation’s major newspapers as well as in Time, Newsweek and People -- and its second episode was the third-most-watched TV show of the week in Los Angeles. But I think the Food Network summer series “Into the Fire” offers far more satisfying fare.

Although “Into the Fire” is not a reality show, it is far more realistic -- and far more entertaining -- than “The Restaurant.”

Like “The Restaurant,” “Into the Fire” is six episodes long. Each episode is a 30-minute mini-documentary about the operation of one restaurant -- Campanile was featured in the first episode -- and each airs four times this summer. There is still plenty of time to see all six, beginning with my favorite, the episode about Trio, the cutting-edge, defies-description restaurant in Evanston, Ill., just outside Chicago. That segment airs for the first time Friday night.

Each show begins with shots of a busy restaurant and a somewhat overheated introduction: “From the front entrance to the front lines, go behind the scenes of America’s most renowned restaurants on their busiest nights as we discover the magic behind the menu, a journey that takes you out of the everyday and into the fire.”

The Campanile episode focuses on chef Mark Peel and his kitchen staff and on maitre d’ Brian Armenio as he juggles reservations and attends to waiting diners on a very busy night.

“If you can get it exactly right, it doesn’t have to be fancy,” Peel says, and that is indeed the Campanile approach.

The emphasis in the Commander’s Palace episode is more on service than food. Not that chef Tory McPhail is slighted. But he was preceded in the kitchen by at least two superstars (Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse) and New Orleans being New Orleans, it’s the Southern hospitality that takes center stage.

Charm fairly oozed out of my TV set as I sat watching and listening to the Commander’s Palace staff, headed by Ella Brennan, the matriarch of the family that owns the restaurant.

In a line that captures the Brennan philosophy of service as precisely as Peel’s comment on good versus fancy captures his philosophy of cooking, Ray Brinkman, the manager of the dining room, says, “Never let ‘em see you sweat. It’s OK to glow, but never let ‘em see you sweat.”

I haven’t been to Commander’s Palace in years, but I can still remember how attentive, yet effortless, the service was, and I found myself nodding in agreement as Brinkman spoke.

A TV appetizer

On the other hand, I’ve never been to Trio, and while watching that show, I found myself not nodding but drooling.

Chef Grant Achatz, who won the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year award in May at age 29, sees cooking as both an art and a science -- an exercise as cerebral as it is sensual -- and his “Into the Fire” creations made me want to jump on the next plane to Chicago. (My editor, alas, refused to spring for the trip.)

Talking while he works, Achatz makes a ravioli filled with liquefied black truffle juice and essence of bacon. He makes a chilled English pea soup accompanied by a cube of eucalyptus sorbet. He creates a 1-inch-square “pizza” using fennel pollen -- “the key ingredient in flavoring pepperoni.” He sears fresh Maine diver scallops in prosciutto fat, naps them with a butternut squash nage and serves them in a bowl that sits atop a larger bowl filled with orange rind, over which the waiter pours boiling water to create an orange vapor.

“Your palate,” he says, “will be tricked into tasting orange with the scallop.”

Achatz also talks about pairing caviar and white chocolate -- and passion fruit and Dijon mustard -- and one of the running themes of the episode is his effort to create a dish “built around an aroma that’s not a foodstuff ... an aroma that smells like the forest.”

He wants people to feel as if they’re “in the woods, mentally” when they eat the dish, and with that in mind, he considers several possibilities before settling on frogs’ legs served on a bed of pine needles. We see him and his staff tasting the dish and deciding that “it works.” But he continues to worry aloud that “if we envelop someone in the smell of pine” -- what the menu calls “an evergreen vapor” -- they’ll think more about Christmas trees than dinner.

Some of what Achatz tries sounds too gimmicky to be tasty, and he admits, “It’s hard to do what we do and actually make it physically taste good.” But I’ll bet he succeeds far more often than not. After all, his remarkable innovation and experimentation notwithstanding, he’s not quite the unique, all-by-myself-on-the-gastronomic-frontier trailblazer that the show would have you believe.

He did spend four years at the French Laundry, working under Thomas Keller, no slouch in the innovation department himself. And in Europe, both Ferran Adria at El Bulli, two hours north of Barcelona, and Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck in Bray-on-Thames, 40 miles west of London, have turned their kitchens into scientific laboratories that produce dishes as delicious as they are exotic. The two meals I had at El Bulli in 1999 -- a year before Achatz spent a week in the restaurant’s kitchen -- were among the best I’ve ever had. I can still remember Adria’s caramelized trout eggs, his Parmigiana-Reggiano ice cream sandwich and his tagliatelle a la carbonara, in which the “pasta” was made of thin strands of agar-agar, a seaweed gelatin, infused with consomme and lightly perfumed with truffle oil.

Moreover, for all the hoopla surrounding Achatz’s “black truffle explosion” ravioli, the dish sounds like a modification of the kromeskis created in Burgundy by Marc Meneau, who readily acknowledges that he adapted them from a 19th century Polish recipe. (Meneau blends truffle juice, melted foie gras, port and cream, covers it with fine breadcrumbs and shapes it into 1-inch cubes that are quickly deep-fried. Pop one in your mouth, and you’ll get a real explosion of flavors and textures.)

Still, we’re talking about a very small club of culinary pioneers here, and as “Into the Fire” makes clear, Achatz is definitely a member in good standing.

Not all the episodes of “Into the Fire” are as satisfying as those on Trio, Campanile and Commander’s Palace.

“I tried to make each episode in the series different from all the others,” says producer Joseph Levy, and toward that end, he included programs on the Cheesecake Factory, the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas and the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.

But it’s preposterous to characterize any of the 61 Cheesecake Factory outlets as being among “America’s most renowned restaurants.” The Greenbrier is a luxury resort, better known for its three golf courses than for its cuisine, though it does have an excellent cooking school and kitchen apprenticeship program.

The Bellagio episode focuses on the supplies required to serve 4,000 people a day at the hotel’s buffet. In fact, the show seems to be mostly about big numbers -- 800 to 1,000 pounds of salmon a day;5,000 to 7,000 pastries a day; 500 to 600 pounds of bacon a day; 25 cases of bananas a day; 7,000 lobsters a month!

Boy, what could Achatz do in that kitchen. I can already taste his banana split -- scoops of lobster instead of vanilla ice cream, crumbled bacon instead of nuts, a small piece of salmon cut to look like a maraschino cherry and, to give one a sense of eating ice cream at the beach, whipped cream infused with salt water vapor.

*

‘Into the Fire’

The Food Network’s “Into the Fire” series airs at 10:30 p.m. Fridays and 1:30 a.m. Saturdays. The remaining schedule, in order of appearance:

Trio -- Friday and Saturday, also Sept. 26 and 27

Cheesecake Factory -- Aug. 22 and 23

Bellagio -- Aug. 29 and 30

Campanile -- Sept. 5 and 6

Commander’s Palace -- Sept. 12 and 13

Greenbrier -- Sept. 19 and 20

(Note: All but Trio previously have been shown twice this summer.)

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com