The "next restaurant" fails to reconcile its fun side with the ridiculous and chewy side

The deep problem of Network 13's new reality show is that it is split between two different elements that do not reconcile with each other: an original and surprising encounter around food with extraordinary characters, and against it an oppressive and bloated reality of self-importance.

Nadav Menuhin

25/01/2022

Tuesday, 25 January 2022, 09:17 Updated: 10:14

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Promo "The Next Restaurant" (Network 13)

Each format finally comes to its end.

The audience is already full, everything has been heard and seen, the judges are repeating themselves and the superlatives are unreliable.

The TV food competitions have been there for a long time.

Sometimes it seems like it's been the same program for ten years and every now and then they just change its name.

The network's new food show, a sort of "Chef Games" spin-off, also preserves this feeling.

The name chosen this time sounds almost automatic - "next restaurant".

A dry and uninspired name like toast from the day before yesterday.

This time, the three judges of the "Chef Games" Moshik Roth, Yossi Sheetrit and Assaf Granit, and the food journalist Ruthie Russo - joins the cauldron, after years of only male judgment in the "Chef Games" - go out to four "restaurant" studios in the pilot phase, eat two dishes and talk Some.

The first show, then, consisted of a total of four endlessly stretched auditions, which included a Thai restaurant, an Italian restaurant, a corrupt American diner and a tavern serving home-cooked food.

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Engineered calls.

Judges of the "next restaurant" (Photo: Micha Loveton)

The judges rate each of the restaurants, and in the end decide that one of them will be opened "tonight" for invitations, and will also stand for the audience to judge - but the last part has not yet arrived on the first show.

The encounter between reality and the immediate feedback of the audience should arouse interest, but it is doubtful whether these times are appropriate.

On the one hand, it is unfortunate to launch restaurants in the middle of a wave of epidemics, but at the same time, and it is worth mentioning, there is also some pointlessness in the endless recitation of gourmet food and chef dishes in an era of chronic economic crisis.

So the concept is simple, the studio restaurants are invested to the last detail, everything looks delicious - but the execution is still lame and cumbersome, and an example of this can be seen in the four judges' dialogues between presenting one restaurant to another - these sound filmed and forced.

Dynamics can be improved, but the deep problem of "The Next Restaurant" is that it is divided between two different components, which somehow do not quite reconcile here with each other: an original and surprising encounter around food with unusual characters (Aviva Avidan!), And on the other hand - oppressive, bloated reality Self-importance ("we have a responsibility"), with smeared and sentimental editing.

One side is fun, interesting and even entertaining - and the other side is ridiculous and chewy.

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The competition is not interesting.

Lee Malili, winner of the first program of "The Next Restaurant" (Photo: Micha Loveton)

This dissonance also separates "classic" and "serious" contestants from contestants in a different style, who are perceived as a gimmick or a joke.

Precisely when there are more opportunities to talk and converse, and when all restaurants are asked to present a story and concept - which is less present in other types of reality - the commitment to think "business" and "chef" only interferes with enjoying what just diversifies the usual yawn.

The competition isn't really interesting anyway.

This is supposedly a new program, but with "The Next Restaurant," the wide audience of food programs will get, most likely, more of the same dish he has already eaten more than once or twice, for better or worse.

Is not it time to try a different kind of dish?

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