Hungry for Restaurant Stardom

I'm going to venture a guess that just about everybody in America, at one time or another, has gazed in pride and wonder at some improvised masterpiece in his or her skillet, oven tray, broiler pan or wok and thought: Gee, I ought to open my own restaurant. Granted, for most of us that reverie dissipates in a few seconds, as soon as the smoke detector goes off and we realize that our culinary tour de force has been reduced to a smoldering heap of inedible could-have-been.

That's one reason why it's so easy to identify with the would-be restaurant magnates vying for a shot at success on NBC's new reality competition series, America's Next Great Restaurant, which debuted on Sunday night. They're like us, only hopefully they can cook better.

For baby boomer viewers, another thing that resonates is that the show is not about haute cuisine, but fast food ("fast casual" or "quick service" in restaurant industry lingo). As this article from the dining trade website QSR.com details, we're the first generation that grew up eating from takeout containers we got from drive-through windows; much of the $2,600 a year each of us typically spends dining out annually still goes for meals at assembly-line eateries. In the show's introductory voice-over, celebrity TV chef Bobby Flay issues a clarion call for aspiring entrepreneurs eager to emulate quick-and-cheap immortals such as Colonel Sanders and Fred De Luca, whose single sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Conn., spawned the Subway franchise chain.

To get a shot at opening their own chain of three fast-food restaurants in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York, the contenders must impress Flay, the Food Network superstar who is to would-be restaurateurs what Simon Cowell is to people who like to sing in the shower. His panel of investor-judges includes Chipotle founder Steve Ells, Latin-Asian fusion chef and restaurant founder Lorena Garcia, and NBC's chef-in-residence Curtis Stone, who appears regularly on the Today Show and The Biggest Loser.

Another thing I particularly like about this show, and what elevates it above the manufactured thrill-of-victory, agony-of-defeat format of most reality competitions, is the authentic nature of the competition. We don't have to watch anybody eat worms or struggle to do push-ups with the insufferable Jillian Michaels screaming at them, things that don't generally happen in the real life of anybody I know. But like most of us, I do know a lot of people -- fellow boomers, particularly -- who've cooked and waited tables in restaurants and others who've dreamed of having their own business to run. The format resembles the sort of investor committees that would-be entrepreneurs deal with in real life, and the judges actually analyze their business proposals and offer meaningful, informed insights, rather than just generically questioning whether they have heart or whether they brought their "A" game, in the usual superficial fashion of reality shows.

But what appeals the most to me about America's Next Great Restaurant are the contestants in the top 10, who were selected in Sunday's pilot episode. Thankfully, they don't belong to that contrived, deliberately outrageous, playing-to-the-camera genre of professional reality show contestants whose big goal in life seems to be getting their own series. (There seem to be so many of those reality TV poseurs these days that I'm half-expecting the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics to create a special occupational category for them.) Instead, these competitors seem like real people striving to launch their second acts, characters whose actual dreams and cycle of struggle, loss and redemption is more interesting than any contrived storyline on MTV's Real World Las Vegas.

That several of the competitors are midlife self-reinventors is even more appealing. Sandra Digiovanni, a 54-year-old bartender from Kansas City, wants to start a restaurant that would serve a dual menu of healthy food and sinfully decadent items for the occasional times when you feel justified in indulging your inner glutton. She's a blunt, earthy working-class hero, the sort who's had a job since she was seven years old and looks as if she's got a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks.

Sudhir Kandula, a 40-year-old New Yorker whose day job is working as a sales director at a software company, has a humble ambition: He dreams of introducing Americans to the flavorful, aromatic, nutritious vegetarian fare of his native southern India. (At the judges' insistence, he reluctantly agrees to include meat items on his menu.)

Detroit native Jamawn J. Woods is a relative youngster at 32, at least chronologically speaking. But he's already lived through the pain and humiliation of losing his job in the auto industry and having to find a new path in life. He's looking for a new future peddling chicken and waffles (a classic soul food combination that baffled Australian judge Curtis Stone, who apparently hasn't been to the famous Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Hollywood).

Perhaps the most charismatic contestant of all is Joseph Galluzzi, a 40-year-old financial industry worker from New York, who has faith that all Americans, regardless of race, creed or national origin, share one thing in common: a yearning for meatballs, which he sees as the quintessential comfort food. Galluzzi is irrepressibly ebullient but unaffected. His Italian grandmother not only provided him with a tasty three-meat recipe, but also apparently instilled in him the ability to get joy out of slaving over a hot stove. It's hard to imagine this guy hunched over a PC, crunching numbers, when he could be ladling his secret marinara sauce over pasta and sizzling spheres of ground beef and pork, and savoring the gusto of his customers as they dig into his "Saucy Balls." We can't help but want to see him reinvent himself as a restaurateur.

Read more: From Home Cooks to Gourmet Startups