July 14-20, 2005

food

Win, Lose or Slaw

does he feel lucky?: Michael Schulson goes "spatula-to-spatula" with other chefs on a Discovery Channel reality show. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Pod's Michael Schulson toughs it out in Go Ahead, Make My Dinner.

by A.D. Amorosi

"Nancy" wants to learn to cook. Southern style. Yet she doesn't want to go through the drudgery of reading a cookbook or wet-thumbing through index-card recipes.

So she gets her ass up to a Manhattan television studio with a live studio audience for Go Ahead, Make My Dinner! Here, on this new Discovery Channel show, two top-notch chefs are thrown into a kitchen with shiny tools and bold orange walls, where they must compete "spatula-to-spatula" to create savory dishes in 20 minutes.

Rather than the high-tech Ninja joust of the Iron Chef, "Nancy" will watch chefs rip through whatever is in the refrigerator (an average refrigerator — pretty much only four items). Before they finish, host Marc Silverstein (a Food Network stalwart) will not only throw in a mystery item, he will supply each chef with a helper who may or not be as clueless as "Nancy."

"It's a jungle in there," Michael Schulson says with a laugh. Schulson, the executive chef of Stephen Starr's mod Asian boîte Pod, takes turns competing on Go Ahead with five other chefs --all New Yorkers, including Mas' Galen Zamarra and Sueños' Sue Torres.

Schulson, 32, knows his exotic terrain. Along with being Starr's main man for eight years and readying himself to take the reins of the yet-to-open 260-seat Buddakan in New York City's Chelsea Market, Schulson spent his culinary career in Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and Indonesia before winding up at Pod.

Now, it's the terrain of television that Schulson hopes to conquer. True Entertainment and the Discovery Channel's Judy Plavnick contacted Starr at a James Beard Awards ceremony in Manhattan to find chefs for a new show based on the BBC's Ready Steady Cook. "We wanted it to be faster paced than RSC, but filled with real people," says Plavnick, the show's executive producer. "It's easy to get caught up in the fact that chefs are people who cook every day. How could I do that?"

The network took a shine to Schulson, but at first, he had doubts. "I had no idea what RSC was and didn't know if I wanted to do something uninformative where two chefs had their heads down the whole time, just cooking, just racing the clock," says Schulson. "The food was good. But nobody learned anything."

Go Ahead promised something more — where anyone could learn to do this, even those with ice-cream scoops for thumbs. "My wife could do this and she can't cook to save her life," says Schulson.

Schulson was excited about the challenge of mystery ingredients ("we have no idea what the five things are until we open the pot"), and making something good with a helper ("and who knows how helpful they'll be; that's a surprise too") using food more commonplace than not.

In reality, Schulson had been down this route before. On at least 10 other occasions, he says, producers had called upon him to audition and test for Food Network programs. He wanted to be on television. Why not? With his athletic good looks and jovial, street-ish voice, Schulson chews up the screen with casual cool, like your buddy would.

"We wanted the next wave of restaurant stars — chefs being talked about in restaurants being talked about," says Plavnick. "And they had to communicate, walking you through the process without it seeming like Cooking 101."

Filmed at the Unitel studio where Dave Chappelle isn't doing his show, Go Ahead shows Schulson and company unveiling their lifetime's wealth of knowledge in one swoop. On one show, Shulson was presented with salmon and Japanese eggplant. On another, it was skirt steak, peppers, Gruyére cheese, onions and snow peas. With his Philly background he made a cheesesteak as well as beef stir-fry and a fondue. In both cases, Schulson is there to answer all questions: Never salt an eggplant before cooking it; the salt bounces off. The beef for the stir-fry was marinated and deep fried as opposed to the meat used for the cheesesteak, which was seared and caramelized. Though Go Ahead is fast-paced — and this is before the 10-minute bonus dessert round where questions like "what's a chocolate roulade" are not unheard of — its info is nicely placed and thorough.

"The premise is real people with real problems using real food with real chefs to help them," says Schulson. "Seriously, the Iron Chef is great. But you're not going to cook that stuff."

Go Ahead, Make My Dinner! airs every weekday, Monday through Friday, noon-1 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.