Why food TV keeps going undercover

While perusing Food Network’s summer lineup — a familiar parade of seasonal returns like “The Great Food Truck Race” and brand extensions like “Guy’s Grocery Games: Global Games” — I found myself lingering over one new arrival in particular: “Kitchen Undercover.”

The series, according to press materials, is “a high-stakes, sneak-attack restaurant rescue” led by chef Antonia Lofaso and sous-chef Nestor Milian, who will “go full undercover, slipping into failing restaurants that are one more bad review away from total collapse.” Milian, we are told, will serve as the man on the inside, embedding himself with the staff, while Lofaso monitors the operation from an off-site command center — a phrase that suggests, thrillingly, less sauté station than Situation Room.

Eventually, once the real reason customers aren’t returning has been revealed, Lofaso will “storm in to shake things up, call out the chaos and whip these teams into shape.”

If the premise sounds familiar, it is because food television has long cherished the notion that the truth of a restaurant can only be accessed by subterfuge. Chefs, it seems, yearn for disguises. Or, at the very least, the people who produce shows about chefs do.

I’ll admit: I have a soft spot for the whole enterprise.

In part, that is because, if you squint, you can see its lineage in old-school food criticism. I think of Ruth Reichl’s “Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise,” her account of her tenure as restaurant critic for the New York Times in the nineteen-nineties.

Because Reichl’s face had become familiar within the restaurant industry — kitchens were known to post her photograph in hopes of ensuring the critic received suitably royal treatment — she began dining undercover, developing a full repertory of alternate selves. There was Molly Hollis, a middle-aged, Midwestern former schoolteacher whose creation required body padding and a wig; a flamboyant redhead; a nearly invisible elderly woman; and, most uncannily, Reichl’s own mother.

In our current everyone-with-a-phone-is-a-critic culture, this may sound like a particular flavor of zany. But Reichl’s disguises were not merely bits. They were a way of asking whether hospitality could survive anonymity — or whether the quality of a restaurant changed the moment power entered the dining room. (Le Cirque, infamously, lost its fourth star after Reichl dined there in disguise and found that, without the glow of recognition, the room dimmed considerably.)

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Still, the idea of using light spycraft to more honestly assess a plate of pasta has such obvious dramatic pull that it makes sense it eventually migrated to food television. Consider Gordon Ramsay’s “24 Hours to Hell and Back,” in which the chef donned full prosthetics and makeup to trick restaurant staff into treating him like an ordinary customer. Across the show’s two-season run, Ramsay appeared as, among other things, a Philadelphia Flyers fan, a “Mrs. Doubtfire”-style grandmother and a ghastly, melted-looking pilot — images that have since enjoyed a second life online as exactly the sort of meme you would expect.

“Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service,” a follow-up series that debuted in 2025, pushed the premise further still: undercover helpers, surveillance, insiders and Ramsay comparing the operation to going “full on MI6” with restaurants.

It is all a bit schlocky — which can be fun, depending on your bent — but the increasingly elaborate machinations reveal something useful. The disguise has changed purpose. For Reichl, the costume helped the critic disappear. For modern food television, the costume is part of the spectacle. The audience knows there will eventually be a reveal. The pleasure is not anonymity itself; it is waiting for the mask to come off.

That is when the episode really begins.

Of course, there is something absurd about celebrity chefs needing fake mustaches, prosthetics or entire undercover personas to determine that a restaurant is poorly run. A walk-in full of expired chicken (why is it always chicken?) and a dining room drained of morale do not usually require MI6. But the costume gives the format permission to become playful, campy and theatrical, which may be why it feels so at home in restaurant television. A restaurant, after all, is already a kind of immersive theater.

There is a front of house and a back of house. There are costumes, in the form of uniforms, and choreography, in the navigation of a packed dining room. There are performances of warmth, competence, abundance and ease. And, beneath all of it, there is the natural suspicion that those performances may change depending on the audience. Is there one version of the restaurant that appears when a V.I.P. walks in, and another when nobody important seems to be watching?

The disguise, then, offers television a clean dramatic promise:

We are going to find out what this place is really like.

It remains to be seen whether “Kitchen Undercover” will rely on prosthetics, fake mustaches or merely the subtler costume of the unrecognized employee. But the title alone places it within a deliciously strange lineage of food television that keeps searching for ways to make the invisible visible: service, ego, passion, resentment and, most of all, the tiny, damning distance between what a restaurant believes it is offering and what a customer actually receives.