Iron Chef rocks. In fact, I'm wearing my Gormet Academy T-shirt right now in preparation for my own Paella Battle tonight:
Wikipeda has a nice summary of the original cult classic. I really enjoy the quality of the translation, especially for the typically vapid movie starlet judge, "...the ice cream is going round and round."
I've been fortunate to eat at both Sakai's and Kenichi's restaurants in Tokyo, along with Morimoto's places in the US. Michiba is next on my culinary adventure list...
My favorite facts from the original:
Broadcast history
The stage setting for the show, "Kitchen Stadium" (キッチンスタジアム), the high-quality (and sometimes very expensive) ingredients used in the cooking battles, and Kaga's extravagant costumes required the show to have a budget far higher than that of most other cooking shows. Some statistics: 893 portions of foie gras, 54 sea breams, 827 Ise shrimp, 964 matsutake mushrooms, 4,593 eggs, 1,489 truffles, 4,651 grams of caviar, and 84 pieces of shark fin were used during the show, bringing the total grocery bill to ¥843,354,407 (or about $8,000,000). One of the most expensive battles was Battle Swallow's Nest, which ran over $40,000 solely for that ingredient, not counting large quantities of shark's fin; for the battle, the producers were permitted to return any unused portions to Hattori Nutrition College. Chairman Kaga, who tried every dish, consumed a total of 10.0 gigajoules (2,390,000 calories).