Chef Robert Irvine, star of the Food Network’s Restaurant Impossible, is coming to New Jersey to do the impossible…or fry trying. On December 2nd at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, audience members will spin a digital wheel of fortune to determine the ingredients, the insane cooking task and the time limit Irvine will have to succeed or fail at the stoves live on stage. On December 3rd, he will again take on live cooking challenges on the stage of the State Theater in New Brunswick.
On Restaurant Impossible, Irvine swoops into failing eateries with $10,000 and tries to turn them towards success in just 48 hours. His unscripted live shows can be equally outrageous and energetic, involving challenges like making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every kid in the audience while hanging upside down 10 feet above the stage.
“The show really tests my ‘nothing is impossible’ philosophy and keeps the audience on their toes the entire time,” says Irvine. While recently performing for American troops in Japan, “I was challenged to make a dish with octopus and rotten fermented soybeans.”
In past editions of Robert Irvine Live, the road show’s producers would dream up numerous devilish challenges, which, for the most part, Irvine would have no inkling of until they were thrown at him.
For what is being billed as Robert Irvine Live 2.0, the challenges and their specific components will be displayed on a digital carnival wheel projected above the stage. Audience members, in some way not fully spelled out, will get to spin the wheel to determine the jam Irvine will have to cook his way out of.
“Most of the challenges are designed to make it close to impossible for me to succeed, which only fuels my motivation to kill it up there,” he says.
Some audience members–perhaps as many as 30 over the course of the two-hour event–will be invited to join Irvine onstage to act as his assistants. The job comes with tasting privileges for whatever Irvine concocts.
Irvine, an Englishman who joined the youth division of the British Navy at 15, brings military discipline and strength to everything he does. During his more than 25-year career, he has cooked for the Royal Family aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia and helped train U.S Navy chefs. He recently established the Robert Irvine Foundation, a non-profit supporting military personnel and their families, an effort that won him a 2015 award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
Physically, Irvine looks like he just finished boot camp and is ready to charge up any hill. That’s because of his commitment to healthy eating and vigorous activity. He recently published Fit Fuel, a book of recipes and lifestyle tips for eating well while staying trim, healthy and energized for all the projects that keep him flying across stage, screen and globe.
Tickets for Robert Irvine Live 2.0 are $25-$50.