Ryan Kirksey
Looking for an All-American cooking show built around some of the many things Americans love (food, excess, and competition)? Let me recommend BBQ Brawl to you, airing right now on Food Network and streaming on HBO Max. The finale of the seventh season is coming this Monday night, but I can promise you this isn’t your run-of-the-mill food competition series.
One criticism I hear about other, longer-tenured cooking shows and cooking competition series is that they feature food that, sure, it looks supremely complicated to make and present, but it’s never something the average person is going to eat, and it’s certainly not served at the type of restaurant that the average person will ever get to experience.
Well, if you want a cooking show that features weekly dishes that look like they are straight out of your favorite barbecue joint, and that look like something you would want to order over and over again, may I introduce to you BBQ Brawl.
This series brings 12 master grillers, smokers, and pitmasters from all over the country (and this season, the world) into three teams that are captained by celebrity chefs. Bobby Flay has been a captain every season, and the other chefs have rotated throughout the competition. Season 7 features Brooke Williamson and Maneet Chauhan as the other team captains, with Maneet the reigning champion because her team member won Season 6 and the title of Master of ‘Que.
Each week, the teams are critiqued by three judges, who determine a winning team and the bottom two chefs from the losing teams who will battle head-to-head to see who gets to stay in the competition and who goes home (very similar to Next Level Chef, for example). For Season 7, we have longtime judge and TV personality Carson Kressley, alongside Adrienne Cheatham and Season 3 winner Rashad Jones.
Apart from the amateur competitors, Carson Kressley is the star of the show with his constant food puns and references to all his little “Barbecuties,” but he also genuinely knows his stuff when he is judging a plate of barbeque. He must have picked up a lot next to Ted Allen on all those years of Queer Eye.
However, the most underrated aspect of this show is how it is able to find the most diverse set of barbeque masters on the planet. A season might feature a pitmaster from Texas, a whole-hog specialist from West Virginia, and an Asian BBQ expert from Vietnam. This season, there is a contestant named Edith Mattiuzzo, who has a barbeque restaurant located in Italy, of all places.
Of all the food competition shows I consume, BBQ Brawl certainly ranks as the most consistently mouth-watering for me. If you want to catch up before the Season 7 finale on Monday, it’s not a hard lift. This season only has aired eight episodes so far, and they are a tight 41 minutes on HBO Max.
The penultimate episode, titled “Stars, Strips, and Smoke,” is the perfect July 4th barbeque companion if you’re spending your holiday on the grill cooking for family, friends, or festive celebrators of America’s 250th.
Do yourself a favor this long holiday weekend. Skip the pretentious food preparation, and get back to cooking the way the Founding Fathers intended: outdoors on a grill with a beer in your hand.
