This Season: Mario Batali And Kim Kardashian in "Beef N' Buns Of Love" (or the state of Celebrity Chefs on TV today)

This Fall -- Mario And Kim dash across Europe. Cooking, eating and getting body tan sprays with various potential love connections to find their perfect mates. Each week, those chosen to move to the next round are handed a deep fried Italian beef n' bun sandwich on a stick. In the premiere episode, everything is going great for Mario and Kim, until Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto shows up with a new recipe for fish eye and hair gel soup because Snooki from "Jersey Shore" is his sous chef!

Don't laugh! (Well, okay, go ahead and laugh) But this could the future of celebrity chefs on television. Because, when looking at the state of the new crop of so-called celebrity chefs on TV (on Bravo, Food Network, Cooking Channel, TLC, NBC, Fine Living, FOX, Travel Channel, ABC, Oxygen -- damn, just throw up some Scrabble chips and take your pick), where else is there to go?

But first, before we go further, let's lay out a few facts:

#1 -- There has only been one TRUE celebrity chef. ONLY ONE! And the fact that person rejected the label of "celebrity" makes all other celebrity chefs not worthy of cutting that person's cheesecloth.

If you did not say the name "Julia Child" as that one chef, then you need to stop reading this blog, and go into a corner to watch her shows on PBS. Every goddamn EPISODE (and read her books too)! And if I still have to explain why she is the only one, then I'll just stick my hand through this computer screen and slap you silly!

#2 -- There are only two types of celebrity chefs: The ones that cook, and the ones that cooked (past tense) to get on TV. Bobby Flay cooks on TV, Andrew Zimmern is on TV. That doesn't mean one is good and one is bad (though I will talk more about Zimmern later), it's just about how those chef present themselves to the viewers.

#3 -- Rachael Ray IS NOT a celebrity chef. To her credit, she never said she was one. Ray got famous for fast meals, cheap eats, being the working class Martha Stewart, and talking. And talking, talking, and talking. I challenge all you haters to say you would not have done the same thing to make the phat cash she did, if offered the same chance. So quit hating. It's a good thing, bitches!

Now, back to the point of this blog.

Celebrity chefs. They are dead. Done. Gone. It's over!

Though Gordon Ramsey is great, his show "Hell's Kitchen" sucks (though "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares" is good, if only to point out how many idiots go into the restaurants business thinking it would be fun, and how many so-called chefs are bad). Don't even get me started on how many stupid stereotypes "Hell's Kitchen" taps into in order to produce each show (The loud, angry Black chick; the fat guy who can't cook). The funny thing is that if the show hired a bunch of Latinos to work the line, like everyone else, things would work so well there would be no show. No creativity, but the food would get out.

The last good celebrity chef show to air was "Iron Chef" from Japan. The chefs cooked, it had story lines (like the once-famous chef who lost everything after killing someone while driving drunk), it had drama (the Ohta Faction against Morimoto's Americanized Japanese food), a sports-coverage like presentation, and Chairman Kaga was the best host since Ed Sullivan. Add the dumb hot actor/singer chicks and the bad voice-overs, and the show was even better. It was brilliant on almost every level!

Now we have chefs on TV who just eat, or talk, or pretend great cooking is easier than it is (there are the exceptions like "Top Chef," "Top Chef Masters," and "Iron Chef America"). Andrew Zimmern, who always has that smug look on his face (like "aren't you glad you are American, and don't have to eat this every day), gets rich chomping on a fried spider that people have been eating for...oh, I don't know, a thousand years. Of course there are those like Graham Elliot Bowles and Michael Symon, who strike me as chefs who are more about the cooking being all about them (and both CAN cook), than the actual food. Those chefs are not like Anthony Bourdain, who approaches every food and culture with a curiosity that is within all of us (he is like: "What the hell is going on, show me how you cook this, and should I eat it?").

Then there are the cake shows that make pastries, that look GREAT, but taste like crap. Or the shows that no longer offer a unique method to cook food, but promote how unique they are at making it (which a new show "Food Jammers" sounds like it just ripped off my friends from Annapolis, who had a unique show "The Feasty Boys" for years where they used power tools and drank beer while cooking. But the core of their show got lost when they were aired on a major cable TV).

So it's not about cooking anymore on TV. Celebrity chefs today -- for the most part -- seem to be about bad reality television, becoming reality TV stars, and the money. Are you gonna tell me that Rocco DiSpririto is as good as Wolfgang Puck? One was about changing how American chefs presented the ever-changing world of modern western food, the other was about just being famous.

And, sadly, the latter seem to be the overriding goal today.

I miss you so much Julia!