REVIEW: The Pressure’s Just Right In ‘Pressure Cooker’

Pressure Cooker is a unique cooking competition show where the competitors aren’t being judged by a panel of judges like in every other cooking show. Instead, they’re living in one house together and judging each other’s work. There’s a whole host of personalities in this Netflix Original series and the competitors have to account for not only their skills as chefs but their relationships with one another in the house and kitchen alike.

I’m obviously a lover of cooking competition shows, I’ve reviewed a lot of them. But Pressure Cooker is definitely a different breed. It’s Big Brother meets Top Chef and for people who like drama in their competition, you’ll dig the pressure here. If you’re not, well, you still might get yourself into this one. I came into Pressure Cooker feeling skeptical. The first few episodes were full of intensity, lies, and backstabbing. I worried that the competition would be too steep and it would suck the joy out of watching great chefs make great food.

Fortunately, as the contest simmers on, the personalities settle in a bit, friendships are forged, moods brighten, and you’re able to enjoy the cooking and the interpersonal dynamics alike. The cooking side of things is high octane. You’ve got some individual challenges, some team, some paired, and always hot temperatures. Especially in the team affairs, you get folks at the top of their fields who are used to being the bosses at this point trying to navigate around each others’ leadership styles and cooking styles just as much as one another. And as the episodes carry on, you get the same competitors in each others’ corners over and over where if you’re like me and care a lot for the comradery aspect of competition shows, then you’ll be gratified, just not instantly.

There’s no host on Pressure Cooker, just the competitors. That means the only narration is coming from the contestants themselves through interviews and voiceovers. I occasionally felt the absence of a host, there almost needed to be a central personality to keep the personalities of the competitors at bay, for my taste. The focus, of course, is on the competitors and their bickering, but it’s just jarring in a cooking show to be so bombarded by chef jargon and arguing on the line. It takes getting used to, especially as somebody who is more interested in teamwork than cutthroat content. There are also some interview moments where it’s very obvious that different audio clips were mashed together in post, which isn’t bad in and of itself, it’s just a bit sloppy.

You also absolutely cannot tell how long they’ve been in this house together. At one point midway through a comment is made about being in the house for 3 weeks, which was surprising, because I had assumed to that point that every new challenge was basically the next day after the last. It actually made me wish we spent more time watching the chefs in the house between challenges, which was not what I expected to feel going into the show.

As far as the cooking itself, it’s fine. It’s not the most interesting set of challenges or ingredients, with a few standouts here and there. There are no challenges that really force the chefs to exit their comfort zones or use different ingredients than their typical wheelhouse until the end. Most of the dishes feel either too basic or too fancy to really have much interest in. The kitchen doesn’t really have much personality either and we don’t get to see enough of the house to get a feel for it. You get glimpses, so you know it’s a cool set on the inside, we just don’t see it enough.

The fact that each elimination is based on judgment by one another turns the pressure up quite high. They never know exactly how elimination will be determined or even who specifically will be judging them and how in advance, so when it does come down to judgment time, things can get really emotional. Plus, voting doesn’t need to rely on how you actually perform as much as how you’re playing the game, throwing people under the bus and lying to each other. They do largely become friends, so every time you have to send a friend home hurts. There are a lot of tears shed on Pressure Cooker, and for the most part, they’re from real emotion, not your classic reality show in-fighting.

Pressure Cooker is true to its word: a unique cooking competition show experience. Putting some really heavy personalities in one house to cook against each other inherently breeds high pressure and high heat among the contestants, and making them judge each other? It’s a wonder nothing like this show has been done before.

Pressure Cooker is streaming now on Netflix.