STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Your weekly restaurant column has been 86’d to honor a reader’s request: she needs to laugh today, not cry in her coffee. Fair enough. The world seems heavy, so let’s lighten it—ideally with a Buono Bakery pastry in hand, or even last night’s Seabass Taverna fish and veggies revived with a poached egg.
A few of you recently asked about when I judged Bobby Flay on Beat Bobby Flay. Picture bright TV lights, a live audience perched above like an amphitheater, and Bobby Flay just steps away doing his unflappable Flay thing while I stand there smiling, trying to take it all in—pearls on, of course.
The episode was shot in 2019 but didn’t air until February 2022. COVID-19 appeared, tilting perspectives sideways, and I’d forgotten about the whole thing until it resurfaced like a slow-cooked memory. It was dubbed Smoove Moves, with sharp-talking comedian JB Smoove and celeb chef Michael Symon stirring up some fun while chefs Mia Castro and Brandon Carter handled the real cooking. Depending on the source, it’s Season 29, Episode 1—or close enough.
The producers sent a car out to Staten Island, which for me was surreal enough. I rode up the FDR from the Brooklyn Bridge, taking in what used to be the Ma Bell building and the former Fulton Fish Market—just a native New Yorker feeling small in the face of Manhattan’s history and the opportunities it has offered so many.
Lights, makeup, Flay
At the Food Network studios somewhere on the East Side, in the “talent area,” a makeup person dabbed powder on my face while I met my fellow judges—James Briscione, a chef fresh in from the Left Coast, and Chris Cheung, a Brooklyn dumpling-shop owner—for the first time. A production assistant led us through a maze of hallways and then—boom—we stepped into a glowing fishbowl of a set, a live audience perched above, and Bobby Flay standing there calm, blue-eyed, and laser-focused.
Under those lights, the world shifts: steel taps on cutting boards, garlic hits hot oil, and harsh lamps blaze in an otherwise chilly studio—and there I was, trying to eat like a lady on national television and make St. Joseph Hill Academy proud. I scanned the crowd for a Staten Island face—there’s always one—but not that day. So I channeled my inner food beast and thought: Focus, yo.
The producers said “go,” and I tasted two versions of arroz con pollo. One was respectable—solid chicken with intentionally sticky rice. The other was another edible universe: pimento, culantro, maybe a little aioli, and a crisp shard of chicken skin that transported me straight back to a Bronx apartment where I first warmed up to arroz con pollo.
Judges James Briscione, Pamela Silvestri, and Chris Cheung, as seen on Beat Bobby Flay, Season 27 . (Courtesy of Food Network)
In my early restaurant days, the Bronx ladies I worked with became my family. Lourdes’ pernil, her arroz con pollo—those dishes are seared into a food grunt’s memories. And as I stood there in that studio, every one of those years rushed back: cleaning deep fryers (still my favorite job), working the line shoulder-to-shoulder, deveining shrimp for a colleague in the weeds. Somehow, in a few simple bites, everything came together.
And yes, since everyone asks: Mia Castro beat Bobby Flay. Her arroz con pollo, straight from her Abuela’s heart, deserved the crown. Bobby got flayed. Womp womp.