Not a lot of heat in this ‘Kitchen’

“Here’s the thing about a great restaurant,” chef Jack Bourdain (Bradley Cooper) tells us in the pilot for the new Fox comedy “Kitchen Confidential.” “It’s like great theater. It’s our job to dazzle you, amuse you, delight you ... while keeping you totally ignorant of the Hiroshima going on backstage.”

Here’s the thing about a show that’s about a great restaurant where only bedlam reigns backstage: As a comedic idea, it feels so very familiar. Kitchen chaos was in the ingenious British series “Fawlty Towers” and in last year’s NBC reality show “The Restaurant,” starring chef Rocco DiSpirito.

TV embraces the Type A chefs, the megalomaniacs or whirling dervishes personified by the Food Network’s Emeril Lagasse. “Kitchen Confidential’s” Jack Bourdain is loosely based on Anthony Bourdain -- egoist, sensualist, no-nonsense chef and author of the bestseller “Kitchen Confidential” who has a show on the Travel Channel called “No Reservations.”

The book “Kitchen Confidential” is an entertaining mix of picaresque story, rock ‘n’ roll tour of the world of New York restaurants and credos -- about the proper mise-en-scene, why Ecuadoreans are good line cooks and why you shouldn’t order seafood on a Monday.

Adapted to the Fox schedule by a team that includes “Sex and the City” creator Darren Star, who fashioned cute-as-a-button comedian Sarah Jessica Parker out of real-life “Sex and the City” columnist Candace Bushnell, “Kitchen Confidential,” the show, is easy enough to watch. But it’s also airbrushed: It feels like a “Sex and the City” knockoff, with a star chef where Carrie Bradshaw would go.

Jack, for instance, covers great restaurants and second chances in the “Here’s the thing about ... “ voice-over portion of the “Kitchen Confidential” episode airing tonight, and it’s enough to remind you that the goofiest moments of “Sex” were when we heard Bradshaw’s thought process alight on some homily about relationships.

The show opens with a flourish, winging you through Jack’s brief rise and fall in the culinary world -- the cocaine, the women, the Page Six fall from grace. The brief, sad period working in a Buca di Beppo pasta joint.

If Bourdain’s book was a tour de force through a culinary underbelly, “Kitchen Confidential” will apparently reside in one upscale place, Nolita, where owner Pino (Frank Langella being Frank Langella) gives Jack a shot at redemption. His first move is to poach staff from other kitchens and then to poach a bass for opening night, but not before giving the staff working the floor a stern lecture. “I’m not your friend,” he says. “I’m not your daddy.”

He will, however, poach that bass and garnish it with leeks, all the while dealing with a raucous table of bachelorette-party girls, a missing fingertip and the New York Times food critic, who’s come to review opening night.

The show goes to great lengths to convince you that Bourdain is a bad boy. But as drawn by the writers and played by Cooper, he’s more harried, with reappearing ex-dalliances. Even when he brushes a tuna tartare onto the floor, saying it looks like “something that fell out of my dog,” Jack is more cute-hateful than hateful, a distinction that deprives “Kitchen Confidential” of being more deliciously dark or surprising.

This is light comedy, a kind of comfort food, but any recommendation comes with reservations.

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‘Kitchen Confidential’

Where: Fox

When: 8:30 to 9 tonight

Ratings: TV-PG DLV (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for dialogue, language and violence)

Bradley Cooper...Jack Bourdain

Bonnie Somerville...Mimi

Owain Yeoman...Steven

Nicholas Brendon...Seth

Jaime King...Tanya

John Francis Daley...Jim

Executive producers and co-creators Darren Star and Dave Hemingson. Executive producers Jim Rosenthal, David Knoller. Director Darren Star.