Restaurant Apocalypse

Snowy Tuesday morning. Brooklyn by way of the L train. I agreed to participate in a bit of reality TV.

"24 Hour Restaurant Battle" is a show on the Food Network. Two teams have 24 hours to create their own restaurants. It's a blatant rip-off of the "Restaurant Wars" challenge from TOP CHEF. But it's a free "gourmet" meal and they need to recruit more diners than TOP CHEF, so I decided to go with a sous-chef friend.

Let me be clear: we both just wanted to try the meal and hoped to maybe blend into the background. Neither of us wanted to be on TV. The meal may have been free but the price was having to be on TV.

Check-in was at this cafe across the street from the Brooklyn studio.

Everyone had to sign standard release forms. There were many "actor-types" who were clearly looking forward to being on TV.

Obviously, all picture-taking was banned when we entered the studio.

There was a waiting room that looked like a warehouse space. They made everyone hang up their coats so it wouldn't be so obvious that we were shooting this in the dead of winter. We all had numbers and they brought us through in groups, like boarding a flight.

At various stages, they're offering us instructions on what to do and what not to do.

As soon as they send you in, there are two restaurant spaces set up side-by-side. You check their menus and make a decision to go to one or the other.

And the cameras are immediately swarming...

Clearly, there was a deli theme going on in this episode. Since my friend's a sous-chef, I let her decide which one we were going to hit up. We based it mostly on the menus—and from the menus alone, there was one that called out. It looked a little more like an "elevated" twist on a deli.

Here's the thing: these aren't massive restaurant spaces where you can hide in the background. The camera crews are covering everything and constantly moving. On one or two occasions, I was telling a personal story to my friend and stopped myself when the camera/sound people approached—they'd never use it in a food show, but when you're telling a personal story to a friend and a boom mic gets lowered between you... that illusion of privacy gets shattered pretty easily.

Worse yet: the interviews. Occasionally, a producer would swoop in with a camera crew and ask us questions about what we thought of the restaurant. But she was constantly correcting us and asking us to rephrase things for the editing.

"Tell us why you chose this restaurant. But say the name of the restaurant and repeat my prompt within your statement: I chose RESTAURANT X because..."

Which I understand on a technical level but neither of us had done anything like this before, and it's 10am and we're drinking wine and slightly disoriented in Brooklyn. And we're not so interested in being on camera let alone being interviewed on camera. There was one point where the producer actually rewrote an entire line for my friend to recite.

I ordered a trio of mini knishes as an appetizer. Cameras swooped in as soon as the plate was set down. I started cutting into them and noticed the crust was really dense, and start commenting on it to my friend. Before I can even taste it, the producer is crouched before me interviewing me about my thoughts on it. So I say a bunch of negative things. She gets the goods and moves on. When I actually had a chance to eat some of the dish, it wasn't actually so bad. There was more I could've said about it, but the cameras had gone onto other tables. I could have flagged them over and asked to be re-interviewed... but the last thing I wanted was to be on camera MORE.

My friend and I ended up saying a lot of negative things on camera! That's like candy for reality TV producers. Between the interviews and voyeur cams, I'm pretty sure we're guaranteed to be featured in the episode. And we were laughing a lot throughout the whole thing, so we're gonna be That Laughing Couple in the background of a lot of shots. Perfect.

Afterwards, we had the option of heading back to the waiting area and trying out the other restaurant, but we had had enough. The food wasn't that great. I had a stomach ache. It was time to go.

What struck me most was how EASY it was to get yourself on television. Get on television and speak on television.

Now I need to avoid that program at all costs. I have a feeling it's going to come back to haunt me at some point down the line. It's cool if you wanna get yourself on national TV but that's just not part of my dream.