Inside Tournament Of Champions With Fans Of Guy Fieri’s WWE Of Cooking Shows

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA — Wendy Montgomery almost missed the shuttle to see her “food stars.” Once inside the “Tournament of Champions” taping Friday, she jumped, clapped, and laughed as chefs she had watched on television cooked before her.

She had traveled several hours from Gustine in the Central Valley to Sonoma County for the taping.

On Friday she arrived near the end of the line on a cold, foggy morning in Windsor, where fans gathered near a boarded-up former school only to face the audience cut-off well before the 9 a.m. departure time.

Staff members counted available seats, scanned tickets, and tried to squeeze a few more people onto shuttles bound for the production site. Some fans never made it aboard. Montgomery was the very last one, and took some pleading to get her seat.

The tickets came with a long list of do's and don't. Do wear bright solid colors. Do wear hip, stylish attire or business casual. That was a mandatory "do."

Likewise, spectators were told they should "remember, you are on camera and when the audience looks great, the show looks great!"

The draw for most people shivering in the line Friday was the semifinals of the eighth season of Guy Fieri’s cooking competition, Tournament of Champions.

Fans traveled from Southern California, Humboldt County, Sacramento, Merced, and Santa Cruz for a chance to trade their living rooms for a seat near the action.

Jen Halpert drove north from Thousand Oaks the night before and reached the check-in area close to 9 a.m. For a while, she wondered whether the trip would end in the parking lot.

A show staffer explained that production limits and fire safety dictated how many people could enter. “Once we hit our limit, we do hit that limit,” he said.

Staff eventually confirmed that the site had room for her. “I’m glad we can get you in,” one staff member said.

Anyone who didn't make it to taping would have a guaranteed ticket to a future show. But this one was the end of the season, not something they could repeat.

Montgomery, the very last woman in line, finally secured a seat on a shuttle. Her worry gave way to the kind of excitement usually associated with a concert entrance or a ballpark gate.

The WWE of cooking shows

Inside, fans cheered the small acts that turn ingredients into dinner: a chef ladling food onto a plate, adding sauce, or finishing a dish before time expired.

The show was more like a sporting event than a cooking show, but seasoned with both.

The Tournament of Champions combines the bling of World Wrestling Entertainment with the culinary curiosity and kitchen camaraderie that have drawn viewers to cooking shows from Julia Child to the Food Network.

On Friday, inside the hangar-turned-kitchen, the audience fed chefs encouragement as they worked.

The competition’s championship belts and showmanship gave the cooking contest the flavor of a sporting event, with spectators applauding the action unfolding in front of them.

From the rows overlooking the studio kitchen, fans followed the chefs like spectators tracking a close ballgame, cheering a spoonful of sauce, jumping up to call encouragement across the set, and counting down the final seconds.

“Looking good, baby.”

“That’s a pretty plate.”

“Okay, sauce it up.”

Mortars and pestles (wood and marble versions) joined the assortment of kitchen tools surrounding the cooks.

Montgomery surveyed the equipment with particular interest. She called herself the “gadget queen.”

“You never know what they’re going to come up with,” she said.

She does not make the dishes she watches on the show, but she loves watching the chefs. She was not the only one.

Like others, her enthusiasm extends beyond television: She planned to take a Chefs Making Waves cruise, where she would see some of the culinary personalities again.

Sonoma County

In the crowd, sat Rob Kissinger, whose connection to Fieri reached back to Louise's Trattoria in Southern California, according to The Los Angeles Times. Wearing a satin jacket bearing the name of one of Fieri’s shows, Kissinger said he knew the host “when he didn’t have two nickels to rub together.”

That was before Fieri became a television fixture. Fieri opened his first restaurant, Johnny Garlic’s, in Santa Rosa in 1996. A decade later, he won “Next Food Network Star,” earning his own series, “Guy’s Big Bite.” His television work grew to include “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” “Guy’s Grocery Games,” and “Tournament of Champions.”

Friday’s audience included other viewers who had followed cooking television before Fieri’s rise.

One fan, Vicky, who drove from Manteca for the show, grew up watching Julia Child and Jacques Pépin with her mother. She still watches chefs to learn, drawn to their knowledge and the unexpected ways they use ingredients.

Another fan, Clementine, said she was a huge fan of Fieri's and his shows.

During a break, popcorn flavored with butter and salt in the old-fashioned red striped cardboard containers was handed out. Fieri's French bulldog, Cash, appeared below and made his way through the bleachers, sniffing for popcorn or just looking for attention. Passing below, Fieri said Cash was "audience therapy."

Getting to the show had been tricky but this was the highlight for her and many who recounted their favorite moments of the taping as though they were citing the best plays of a hometown team.

But access meant no phones and few other recorded mementos of the day.

Staff prohibited phone use on set and filming during the show to “preserve the integrity of the show,” as one man put it. That meant no spoilers. Staff also told audience members they would sign nondisclosure agreements, and they were photographed holding the signature page.

The reward was a view television could not quite reproduce. Neither could the audience hear everything viewers eventually would.

Afterward, spectators compared the live experience with the finished program.

One noticed how quietly the chefs worked compared with the clatter that comes through on television. Another missed hearing the commentary explaining the cooks’ decisions and ingredient pairings.

“Watching that felt more calm than I expected,” one woman said.

The cooking round also seemed to pass quickly.

“It did not feel like 45 minutes,” another said.

Fans discussed the tournament bracket, blind judging, and the challenge of inventing a dish from the randomizer’s requirements. They also compared seats, exchanged stories, and talked about coming alone.

“You meet people,” one fan said, “and there’s a lot of other people that go by themselves.”

For Montgomery, the morning had begun with the possibility of missing everything. Inside, she joined an audience that could find something to cheer in a spoonful of sauce.

“I wanna eat all their food,” she called out.