Take That, Iron Chef!

Posted December 21, 2007

If the daily grind of preparing dinner for your family seems tough, try this on for size: Once a week, you are presented with a challenge about which you know nothing in advance—say, making dinner for an entire island on a budget of $3,500.

That’s the weekly task for Robert Irvine, executive chef of Resorts Atlantic in Atlantic City, on the Food Network’s Dinner: Impossible (Wednesdays, 10 pm, beginning January 24).

”What makes a great chef is being able to think on the feet,” says Irvine, who insists he has “no clue” about what he’s getting into before each episode. “It’s so evident when you see the show, because of some of the looks on my face and some of the things that we do. Here I am saying I’m a really good chef, and I could fail—for maybe 300 people or 1,000 people waiting to be fed. There’s a lot of pressure there.”

The go-go chef, who cooked for Britain’s Royal Family for ten years before coming to this country, says he loves working in Atlantic City, which in his view has surpassed Las Vegas, “because the location is such a great place. It’s not like you have to fly to Vegas for a week and then try to get into one of those places. You have Bobby Flay, you have Michael Mina, you have Wolfgang Puck. I’ve been to all these places, and they are great. A chef has to find places to eat.”

Keep your eye out for Robert the First, an autobiography, with recipes, co-authored by Brian O’Reilly, which publisher HarperCollins has tentatively scheduled for release next fall.

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