5 TV Food Shows to Sink Your Teeth Into

By James Poniewozik

TOP CHEF BRAVO, WEDNESDAYS, 10 P.M. E.T. The long knives come out in Season 2 of this competition from the makers of Project Runway. Last spring's edition proved that food preparation can be as telegenic as dress design--what is haute cuisine but fashion that you can eat? With a new, better host (model and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi) and new challenges (this week a lightning sushi round), Top Chef makes food entertaining without dumbing it down, not unlike a good Vegas restaurant. Don't watch on an empty stomach.

GORDON RAMSAY'S F WORD BBC AMERICA, SUNDAYS, 9 P.M. E.T. Turns out Ramsay knows how to do something besides swear. The bad-boy Brit best known for filleting aspiring chefs on Hell's Kitchen reveals his reserved(ish) side, showing off his home kitchen and chatting up celebs between rounds of chewing out cooks at his restaurant. (I didn't say he forgot how to swear.) F Word (stands for food) is enjoyable less for cooking tips than for Ramsay's political incorrectness about, say, foie gras, the buttery liver produced by force-feeding ducks and geese. "Some people think it's cruel," he says. "I think it's delicious." Just like him.

GOURMET'S DIARY OF A FOODIE PBS, CHECK LOCAL LISTINGS Like a Cheesecake Factory menu, this series strives to offer a bit of everything: it's a cooking show, a travelogue, a history and anthropology show. Each episode hopscotches to a new country, visiting restaurants and homes, chatting up average people and experts on food's role in the culture. A segment on international ingredients with Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl is a little elementary-- to viewers raised on the Food Network, oyster sauce is no longer exotic--but the show is a fast, info-packed study in how the world comes to your plate.

SIMPLY MING PBS, CHECK LOCAL LISTINGS "Fusion" food often means one condescending thing: Northern European cuisine fuses with bits of another, subordinated culture. Ming Tsai gives all world foods equal footing and pairs them unexpectedly. In the first show of the new season, Asia meets Mexico with a soy- and sesame-laced mole sauce; later he creates a Mediterranean-Chinese tapenade. Each episode uses one recipe--for a rub, sauce, paste and so forth--as the base of several dishes, a starting point from which the home cook can improvise. Competent and low-key in an era of high-decibel chefs, Tsai delivers more steak than sizzle.

NIGELLA FEASTS FOOD NETWORK, SUNDAYS, 1 P.M. E.T. Nigella Lawson's cooking shows get more attention for the dish doing the cooking than the dishes she cooks. The voluptuous voluptuary is the godmother of TV's food babes (Giada De Laurentiis, Top Chef's Lakshmi), but the real appeal of Feasts--and of Lawson's British series, which it mimics--is her unfussy, wry, practical approach to entertaining and quality comfort food. You can believe, or not, that guacamole and chili are the first things this wealthy, cosmopolitan hostess thinks of when she throws a dinner party. Either way, between the luscious camera shots and Lawson's sensual enjoyment of eating, Feasts will leave you wishing for an invite.