• 'The Chew' features (from left to right) Danny Boome, Iron Chef Michael Symon, Daphne Oz, Clinton Kelly, Evette Rios and Carla Hall. >
'The Chew' features (from left to right) Danny Boome, Iron Chef… (Tina Fineberg/AP)

'The Chew' review: ABC's new daytime food talk show tough to swallow

"The Chew" should be a little easier to swallow.

ABC's much-hyped afternoon food talk show, "The Chew," premiered Monday and it doesn't go down as easily as ABC would have liked.

TV style maven Clinton Kelly hosts an informal round table of regulars who include diet author Daphne Oz and chefs Michael Symon and Carla Hall.

Chef Mario Batali, who will be a semi-regular, joined by remote Monday from the 14th hole of a golf course in Jersey City, where he was running a charity event. His bit would have gone more smoothly if his microphone had worked all the time.

The show's goals are ambitious. It wants to present cool recipes. It wants to report the real cost of the food those recipes require. It wants to deliver tips on quick cooking. It wants to promote healthy eating. It wants to show viewers how to rescue dishes from disaster.

It also wants to radiate the casual friendliness of a talk show like "The View," from which its overly clever title is cribbed.

All this is possible. On opening day, though, "The Chew" too often felt overstuffed, as if its celebrity crew were engaged in a speed-talking contest.

That fast pace, a key part of the game plan, makes it hard to start relating to the panel. We need them to take some breaths.

The accelerated pace also produced some fudge, like when Symons billed his pork over kale and beans recipe as something you can whip up in five minutes.

That may be true if you don't count the time it takes to pound the pork into a cutlet or chop the kale. That was all pre-prepared when Symons started his clock.

The average viewer also should factor in the time it takes to find a bunch of ingredients few average kitchens have lying around.

That's normal enough. It just undercuts the original implication this is some kind of speedy last-minute dinner idea.

Ten audience members are selected to taste a sample of each completed dish. This is essentially a feel-good bonding gesture, since odds are infinitesimal that any audience member, handed a celebrity dish, is going to do a Gordon Ramsay and spit it out.

No, it's safe to say everything will be adored and applauded here, even when Batali's pizza clearly has a burned crust.

What does set "The Chew" apart from a Rachael Ray, though, is that with many major food shows, the audience feels it was part of the host's rise to stardom.

Here the stars arrive fully anointed, a point underscored by the 10,000 times Daphne Oz mentioned her father and the rock-star ovation he received when he made a cameo appearance.

So "The Chew" may need some evolution. But for ABC's purposes, let's remember, it doesn't have to become a phenomenon. It's much cheaper to produce than the soap it replaced, "All My Children," so if it only draws the same couple of million viewers - okay, preferably a little younger - "The Chew" could still be the champ.

Original Article