History Series / IronChef

There are several further spinoffs: an Israeli version (''Krav Sakinim'', literally, "[[BadassIsraeli Knife Fight]]"), a UK version (''Iron Chef UK''), an Australian version (''Iron Chef Australia''),[[note]]It even flew in Mark Dacasos to chair! Which makes it easier to add to the greater {{Kayfabe}} of ''Iron Chef America''[[/note]] ''Iron Chef Thailand'', ''Iron Chef Vietnam'', and most recently, ''Iron Chef Indonesia''.

It ran for six years on Fuji TV; after being popularized by a few Japanese-language stations in the United States, it was picked up by the Food Network and broadcast across the US. It proved so popular that ''two'' spinoff series were made: an [[ShortRunners abortive series]] of specials on Creator/{{UPN}}, hosted by Creator/WilliamShatner, and the Creator/FoodNetwork's own, far more successful ''Iron Chef America'', hosted by Creator/MarkDacascos and commentator [[Series/GoodEats Alton Brown]]. That itself has a spin-off: ''The Next Iron Chef'', a competition a la ''Series/TopChef'' where the prize is ascending to a position as an Iron Chef. The original ''Iron Chef'' is now running on Food Network's sibling channel, The Creator/CookingChannel (formerly the Fine Living Network) as well as on [[https://pluto.tv/en/live-tv/6148c756ce8091000748d113 the website]] Creator/PlutoTV.

[[caption-width-right:350:''[[{{Catchphrase}} Allez cuisine!]]''[[labelnote:Translation]]To the kitchen![[/labelnote]]]]

** Most of the catchphrases go to Kenji Fukui: "Bang the gong, we are on!" "From the floor, Shinichiro Ohta. Go!" "The [theme ingredient] battle is ''ovah!!''" "And now the moment of truth: tasting and judgment." "Who takes it? Whose cuisine reigns supreme??"

*** And there's his catchphrase in ''The Next Iron Chef'', "you survive to live another day", to the point that it gets annoying.

** "Kyo no tema wa .... kore desu!" (Today's theme... is ''this!'') Used by Chairman Kaga before the reveal of the secret ingredient.
*** In the English dub, the subtitles say, "We unveil the ingredient!" Rather more disappointing.

* EccentricMillionaire: One could make a good argument that Kaga qualifies as this. For perspective, the final count for how much he spent on ingredients came to ¥843,354,407 (around $8 million at the time). (Yes, Fuji TV really paid for it, but I'm talking Kaga the ''character''.)
** Chairman Mark is outright portrayed as this, to a [[AffectionateParody deliberately]] [[NarmCharm hilarious]] degree. He is not only credited with having built Kitchen Stadium (or rather, several Kitchen Stadiums, one of which is in space) and paid for all the ingredients, but on ''Next Iron Chef'' Alton explains that the reason the Chairman puts him in charge of so much is because being a globe-trotting millionaire doesn't leave him enough time to take care of everything in Kitchen Stadium himself.

** The puns sometimes gave away that the English dub was not trying to be faithful to the original Japanese. "Looks like he ducked the duck!", for example, is a joke that only works in English.

** Bobby Flay started out as a jerkass on ''Iron Chef'' and the early days of ''Iron Chef America'', but has mellowed out a bit over the years.
** Contrast that to Alton Brown, who's becoming ''more'' of a jerkass.

* LargeHam: Both Takeshi Kaga and Mark Dacascos. Dacascos has really laid the ham thick in recent years.
** When he fills in for Dacascos as "Vice Chairman," Alton too has moments trying to do this like Dacascos:
---> "Chef Duff, you have been known as the Ace of Cakes. So...will you have the winning hand today...or be forced to bluff with marshmallow fluff, Duff?!?"

*** When Chef Ballasteros tells Alton she wants to keep it "ladies only" and challenges Cat Cora, Alton says with smug smile:

* ABirthdayNotABreak: The dried abalone battle between Chen and Gao Jinyi was apparently filmed on Chen's fortieth birthday. Chen was less than pleased with the ingredient and regarded it as one of his tougher battles (though he did end up winning).
** Michiba's final battle as an Iron Chef (to win the Mr. Iron Chef title against Chen Kenichi) was on his 65th birthday.

* AntiClimax: Pretty much any battle that ends in a tie, but especially so in the 1997 World Cup, because it happened in the ''final''. The 2000th/2001st dish battle, Team French vs. Team Chinese, ended in a tie. Kaga was allowed to cast the deciding vote, which he did for Team French.
* ApronMatron: Katsuyo Kobayashi, a challenger in the early days. More akin to Julia Child than Escoffier, she nevertheless defeated Chen Kenichi (becoming the second woman to defeat an Iron Chef) and was the first one to make the record eight dishes.

** Oddly enough, Toshiro Kandagawa, despite being a Kansai traditionalist who tried to "take out" Michiba and Morimoto (indeed, the most prominent of them) doesn't come off this way; his lively personality, his habit of teasing his opponents, and the obvious fun he has in executing his unrivaled technical skills (see: his creation of a lotus-root belt and his wave-cutting of konnyaku in Battle Lotus Root against Sakai), take the edge off his sense of superiority, making his smugness amusing rather than grating. (In other words, when watching Kandagawa, you kind of snort and say "Wow, what an asshole," while with Ohta and some of the others there's no snort.)

** A really egregious example: for one episode they showed the opening credits with Nakamura...for an ''Ishinabe'' battle. They never even were active at the same time.

** Former baseball player and sports commentator Kazushige Nagashima also would receive bigger portions when he judged. He was teased about it every time.

* {{BFS}}: Or about as close as a kitchen knife can get to becoming one anyway. Wielded by Takashi Mera in "Battle Tuna" against Iron Chef Michiba. The blade was long enough to be comparable to a samurai's short sword... naturally lampshaded throughout the entire battle.

* CharacterizationMarchesOn: Tadamichi Ohta, in his appearance as a challenger several years before becoming the leader of the Ohta Faction. While his high rank and skill level as a chef was clearly put on display (he was one of few challengers to sweep an Iron Chef), his purity in regards to Japanese ingredients isn't apparent from his use of foie gras, caviar, and mayonnaise during 'Battle Octopus'.

* DarkestHour: The Suckling Pig battle in Season 7, where Chairman Kaga boycotted this battle due to the Iron Chefs going 3-6 in their last nine battles, including back-to-back losses in the last two battles. Chen also lost two of his last battles; an Iron Chef has not lost three consecutive battles at that point. Eventually, the pressure was on Chen to not only break his losing streak, but to also restore the Iron Chefs' reputations. As to show how serious this was, all four Iron Chefs, including Kobe, were summoned by Acting Chairman Yukio Hattori, and Sakai, Morimoto, and Kobe sat in the Royal Box.

** Hattori himself would actually be a challenger twice, the first against Michiba, the second against Nakamura in Nakamura's retirement battle. [[spoiler:(He lost both times.)]]

* {{Determinator}}: Kumiko Kobayashi, who challenged Sakai in 'Battle Mishima Beef'. Within the first five minutes of the battle she badly cut her hand, but just wrapped it up (with what looks like... tape?) and kept battling.

* TheDragon: Yasuhiko Yoshida, the DualWielding switch cutting right hand man to Kandagawa, seen [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX_AylrA14s here]]
* DubInducedPlotHole: In the dub of a [[https://youtu.be/D5vn0tNJ0vk?t=1734 sea urchin battle]], Ohta asks Chen during the post-battle interview about using a torch, to which Chen's (dubbed) reply is wanting to look like Morimoto. Thing is, this was a Michiba-era episode...which meant Morimoto wouldn't have been Iron Chef for another three years.

* GrandFinale: The King of Iron Chefs TournamentArc, which served as the conclusion to the original series. All four Iron Chefs dueled each other for the title, "King of Iron Chefs".

** The second cuttlefish battle has the challenger, Akira Watanabe (a chef who got a lot of experience in California as a slight contrast to Masaharu Morimoto's New York experience), claim in English that he wants to challenge "Mr. Morimoto." Morimoto looks back at him with his lips moving and while we can't hear him, his commentary said that he replied back in English, "Come on, baby!"

* IWorkAlone: In the original Iron Chef, challenger Masanobu Watabe took on Sakai by himself in the Peach Battle. Sakai eventually decides to send his assistants away minutes into the battle. Despite managing to win, Sakai deemed this as one of his toughest battles to date.

** [[LethalJokeCharacter Then there's Shinya Tasaki]], at the time the world's top sommelier, who challenged Kobe in 'Battle Fatty Tuna'... ''and won.'' The first sign that there was more to him than anyone expected was his good-luck ceremony at the opening of the contest -- breaking the neck off a champagne bottle '''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabrage with a SWORD.]]'''
** "Mad" Koji Kobayashi, an Italian chef who hadn't cooked professionally for years and who worked as a grocery truck driver, only cooking on rare occasions for his wife and child. [[spoiler:He turns out to be the [[LethalJokeCharacter lethal type]] as well, defeating Chen.]]

** Both the initial battle between Dominique Corby and Chen (Foie Gras) and the ''tiebreaker'' (Asparagus) ended in a tie. Kaga just decided to declare both chefs winners (probably to save the chefs from exhaustion and the judges from overindulgence).

* ChristmasEpisode: A few of these, scattered across versions, starting with the original Japanese version (if you're surprised, [[UsefulNotes/ChristmasInJapan you shouldn't be]]). Both Turkey Battles in the original series were Christmas episodes; incidentally, both featured a challenger trained in the French tradition taking on the Iron Chef Japanese (Michiba for the first, Morimoto for the second).

** Outside of the theme ingredients, Kitchen Stadium gives the Iron Chefs and challengers access to a whole host of additional ingredients and tools with little concern to costs. On the original Japanese version, challenger Yasuhiko Habuchi claimed to have used $1000 worth of lobster to ''flavor'' asparagus (asparagus being his battle's theme).

*** This happens every so often when an Iron Chef or challenger is making a broth or wanting to imbue one ingredient with the taste/scent of another, and is almost always accompanied by the guest commentators sulking about them not serving what is thrown away (and/or Fukui and/or Hattori jokingly complaining about not even getting to taste the leftovers).

** The theme ingredient on one Japanese episode was ''swallow's nest''. It's [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin exactly what it sounds like]], and is extremely costly to harvest. The only food ingredient on the ''planet'' that costs more per ounce than this stuff is saffron.

* HurricaneOfPuns: Frequently. ICJ Battle Turkey in particular was a hurricane of baseball-related wordplay in the dub (probably reflecting the Japanese, as the challenger was the official road chef for the Yakult Swallows and was supported by their coach and players).

** Interestingly enough, the Sakai/Chen highlight episode produced for the American audience claims that Sakai is the ''first'' Iron Chef French. None of Iron Chef Ishinabe's battles were broadcast on Food Network/Fine Living, either (except for the 2000/2001th dish battle, where he was a member of Sakai's team).

* ChefOfIron: Occasionally, chefs that have had some martial arts training come in. A notable example would be Lin Kunbi (subject to SpellMyNameWithAnS), who was a six-degree black belt in karate, and challenged both Michiba (initiating the first overtime battle) and Nakamura.

** Frequent guest Mayuko Takata got it especially bad. Despite being quite young through the series' run (she was only about 23 when she first appeared on the show), she is actually quite intelligent, being a UsefulNotes/TokyoUniversity grad (for which Fukui, the self-described "regular guy", endlessly teased her). She also showed that she was very knowledgeable about cooking, getting into quite close guessing contests with Hattori and generally demonstrating a discerning palate in her judging comments. Despite all this, it seemed at times that the voice actors tried to make it as hard as possible to pay close enough attention to her actual words to take her seriously.

** Sakai: The Delacroix of French Cuisine

** On the English dub, Kobe's introduction music is taken from ''Anime/TheBigO''.
* SpellMyNameWithAnS:
** Usually happens to the Chinese chefs, especially between how the Japanese render it, how the original subtitlers of the West Coast broadcasts spell it, how the Food Network dubbers spell it, and how the translator of the book spells it. Even Chen was subject to this: Sometimes his last name was rendered as 'Chin', which, to be fair, is how the Japanese pronounce it.
** Kobe's a victim of this trope: in the English translation of the official book, his first name is given as ''Katsu''hiko. Granted, it ''is'' an alternate reading of the kanji that make up his name (note that Google Translating Japanese articles about him usually give him the name Katsuhiko as well), but it's still a perplexing error that reeks of Critical Research Failure, especially since the final paragraph of Kobe's section of the book explains why he named his restaurant Massa-it's a nickname he picked up in Italy derived from ''Masa''hiko.
** Nakamura: Technically, his first name is Kōmei, note the macron over the 'o'. This can alternately be translated as Koumei or Komei. West Coast broadcasts went with Koumei, Food Network went with Komei.

* EstablishingCharacterMoment: Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba's first battle has foie gras (duck or goose liver more known in French cuisine) as the ingredient against a chef whose specialty is French cuisine. Michiba gets the win and shows that he can be victorious with foreign ingredients, serving as a precursor to how much he's willing to push the boundaries for traditional Japanese cuisine.