As the holiday seasons approach, I have a soft spot in my heart for Iron Chef Japan. My family established a holiday tradition almost a decade ago of binge-watching as much Iron Chef Japan as we could find through the holidays. The creativity and flair on display helped inspire some of our family’s traditional dishes and, though we have seen almost every episode more than a few times, we always appreciated learning something new every time we watched.
As 2021 draws to a close, I’m looking forward to be renewing this holiday tradition for the first time in a while! Iron Chef Fan Joe wrote in to let us know that FilmRise recently acquired the rights to dubbed episodes of Iron Chef Japan and that Pluto TV is airing ICJ on its free-to-download app. Along with the Twitch stream, this provides more access to Iron Chef Japan than we’ve seen in a while and answers some long-running questions many of you have had about the possibility of seeing it aired again.
Check out FilmRise and PlutoTV and let us know if they have what you’re looking for!
This is definitely something I wanted to share because it combines a few things to say the least that we don’t see too often (or at least, things we didn’t see too often during Iron Chef‘s original run): Iron Chefs dealing with the loss of someone they know, Morimoto doing a full English interview and an Iron Chef being on CNN.
How it came about was definitely something that was all too understandable, though. When Anthony Bourdain died in 2018, Morimoto went on Quest Means Business in order to pay tribute to the No Reservations star, who had been a friend of his to the point that they’d worked together onscreen as well.
This one’s definitely a bit bittersweet because it’s all about the late, great Kobe, but I couldn’t possibly not share it. This is something the Iron Chef Episodes Twitch Channel introduced me to: Shortly after Kobe’s debut in Battle Short Pasta (522), a 26-minute documentary aired showing Kobe’s life story up to that point and how he was balancing his debut as Iron Chef Italian with his day-to-day business – which would mean this is from 1997 in all likelihood. Really hope you enjoy this one.
Hey all! I’m so excited to share with you all that one of my personal passion projects for the site is now something I’m working on (a little each week) for the next few months – a data source for statistics on Iron Chef Japan. With any luck, we’ll be able to use the completed data to drive interactive trivia on our website! We’ll see how far we get at the end of the year, but this is easily going to be one or two years in the making (because we’ve got to catch each ep on streaming or rerun to capture the data) and will take quite a bit of time to complete. I’m a bit of a nerd for data and databases, so am excited to show a sneak peek of my Iron Chef Japan-related development system so far:
I only recently came across a YouTube video profiling a sushi chef with a name that looked familiar, and on further inspection, it was!
It was Kenji Nakazawa, the Edo-style sushi specialist who had challenged Iron Chef Japanese Morimoto in Battle Sushi (722). In 2019, Eater caught up with him when he was running an omakase in Hawaii that was already one of the best outside Japan for their video profile series, also titled Omakase (the Japanese term used in sushi restaurants that indicates you’re leaving it up to the chef). It’s mainly in Japanese but is subtitled. Hope you enjoy!
Hey, Iron Chef Fans, old and new alike! I hope that all is well with you and wanted to take some time to share what our site has been going through, some of the amazing things we’ve had happen already this year, and an idea of how I’d like our year to play out!
As all of you know, 2020 was a disruption to businesses, lives, and the best-laid-plans across the board, and our Iron Chef Fans site was no different. Our 2020 ideas included a site redesign, new contributions, and even some interactive content! We searched to find a content curator and were successful, but as all of our lives changed, their availability was uncertain. Similarly, our tech ideas went on hold as life, work, health, and so on took precedence.
One thing we did NOT expect from 2020 was bots, but boy did we get them. Each week for the last 12-14 months, we have about 12 new accounts created on our website looking for access and admin privileges. Some of those accounts have even sent emails to my webmaster account asking to be upgraded. The majority of my time with our site has been trying to separate the fake accounts from the real members, and it’s work that, hopefully, will pay off soon.
By the way, I floated the idea of coming on board to that content curator I selected and I think they’re ready to start by the end of the summer! The job is going to be pretty background from the website’s point of view: going through our decades of WP content to find our most celebrated and unique items and bringing those archives to a special area for display. We have been a resource to many folks and even many other sites over the years, and I definitely want to show that value off!
A few months ago, we shared information about the Twitch channel that has been streaming Iron Chef Japan, and I’d like to hear from you whether you’ve used that stream to reconnect with the things you’ve loved about Iron Chef! Have you run into other streams featuring other Iron Chef content?
Before I close, I want to welcome you to Summer – at least everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, that is. With grills and other cooking implements flying off of store shelves, and outdoor events becoming more and more possible, leave a comment here on what YOUR summer “Secret Ingredient” of choice would be if you went up against an Iron Chef. Allez cuisine!