HuluĮach episode feels like a speed run of the wildest challenges from Chopped, Guy’s Grocery Games, and any other manner of amateur cooking competition. Instead, as every challenge gets increasingly convoluted, one is left wondering what the point of it all is, and how this showcases anyone’s true culinary skills. But the unintuitive and ever-changing tasks all but guarantee that no one is cooking at their best - the challenges feel particularly sinister, or at least designed to ensure that there is no way to succeed. “With their true identities concealed, everything will be hidden except the one thing that matters most. The judges/contestants cook and eat each others’ food isolated from each other, receiving what they need via those conveyor belts. The 10 contestants must compete in a series of bizarre cooking challenges, with one eliminated each episode, to ultimately win $100,000. Secret Chef throws together both home cooks and professionals, to see if the home cooks can cook as well as the pros, and to see if contestants can figure out who is who.

No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.) (Disclosure: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. Secret Chef, the new cooking competition show now out on Hulu and executive produced by David Chang, seems less concerned with actually celebrating talent than taking every trope that already exists in the long history of cooking competition shows, plus some new ones, and throwing them in a blender to create some sort of monster-competition. Competitors who must keep their identities secret and are given aliases so you have to remember both their real names and who is “Chef Radicchio.” Competitors who are sometimes chefs, sometimes home cooks, but also always the judges, tasked with rating each dish within the confines of their secret kitchens. An animated host that is equal parts Jigsaw from Saw and the creepy doll in Squid Game.

Here are the basic components of Secret Chef: an underground “secret cooking facility” of private kitchens connected by conveyor belts (per the press release).

Name that tv kitchen game