Advocate’s own, Chef Blythe Beck last night hosted a “housewarming” and menu launch at her new home, Central 214 at the Hotel Palomar. The company and the food was, in a word, “fun”. Party fare including deviled eggs, fried cheese and chilidogs (shrimp and cayanne deviled eggs, crispy fried prosciutto-wrapped cheddar cheese and cute-as-a-button mini chili dogs to be exact) lent a comfy feel to the evening — as if I were attending a get-together at Grandma’s house, that is, if my grandma was an outside-the-box thinking, charismatic super chef living in a fancy hotel and getting ready to star in her own reality television show.
That’s right, Beck just finalized a deal with the Oxygen channel for her own reality TV show, "The Naughty Chef", which will begin filming in mid-May. It’s tough times, Beck says, and she feels she has something to offer an audience. She says she “wants to change the face of television”.
The Oxygen network, by the by, is home to such fascinating studies in human behavior as “The Bad Girls Club” and “Frenemies for Life”, which I swear I only know about from watching “The Soup”. But you can bet I’ll be watching Chef Beck — I’ve seen how she energizes a room full of folks so I’m pretty sure she’ll have no problem captivating TV audiences too. (Maybe the Luschers of LH will be next).
Side note: Beck was a huge fan of the Advocate’s September cover story about chefs at home, so much so that her family surprised her last Christmas with a handbag imprinted with the photo of her that we ran with the article in our East Dallas issue.
Reality TV cameras aside, the menu at Central 214 features multiple must-try items (well worth a trip ever so slightly outside our Lake HIghlands border). One thing I hope to try soon — her chicken fried Kobe steak. And there’s this sticky bun with nuts and maple bourbon ice cream on the dessert menu, the mere thought of which gives me a full-blown sugar high. Yipee.
