Last Sunday evening I caught a special on the Cooking Channel with Top Chef All-Stars winner Richard Blais called Reinventing the Meal.
The show’s premise has the chef in San Francisco searching out unique local ingredients as he prepares to “reinvent” some Indian dishes for a dinner party. He gathered Tomales Bay oysters, cheese from a local cheesemonger, and produce from an urban garden before setting to work.
Top Chef fans will recognize Blais’ signature cooking style: some accessible dishes and some molecular gastronomy slight of hand, with lots and lots of ingredients.
To be honest, what interested me more than the food chef Blais was preparing was the fact that the show itself has strong local ties to Austin talent. Reinventing the Meal was directed by former Austinite Darin Bresnitz (Dinner With the Band on IFC) and edited by Erik Horn, creative director of Arts+Labor, a branded content production firm here in Austin.
The talented duo have worked together on several projects (Super!Alright! and Dinner With the Band) and are responsible for this show’s strong visual appeal. In a phone conversation, Horn described the show as “a special with the potential to become a series. We’ve got lots of other ideas in the pipeline, other cities where we’d like to shoot. We’ll see how it works out.” Reinventing the Meal will be rebroadcast several times over the next week. Look for air times on the Cooking Channel’s website.
This article appears in April 6 • 2012.