Two South Pasadena Chefs to Appear on NBC's 'America's Next Great Restaurant'

A batch of culinary dreamers will be on display to the world when NBC’s America’s Next Great Restaurant premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday, and two of those dreamers will be getting a helping hand from a pair of South Pasadena chefs.

Paul Rosenbluh and Monique King, the husband-and-wife co-owners of South Pasadena’s own , will be featured as the experienced mentors to two people who hope to pitch their concept for a new restaurant chain and see it come to fruition.  They will have to impress a panel of food industry heavy hitters: chefs Bobby Flay and Curtis Stone, along with restaurateur Lorena Garcia and Chipotle founder Steve Ells.

This isn’t really the couple’s first dance with reality TV. King tried out for the show Top Chef and faced a battery of on-camera interviews and psychological testing. While she wasn’t ultimately featured on the show (she was cast as an alternate), Rosenbluh said she made enough of an impression to stick in the minds of the Top Chef producers, who also assembled America’s Next Great Restaurant.

“When [Top Chef] ended, they reached out to some of the people who weren’t picked, and asked if she knew anyone, … so she said, ‘Well, Paul, you should try this, too,’” he said. “I said, 'What the hell, why not?'”

The pair was brought in for some on-camera interviewing, with both getting selected to take part in the show. King said her previous experience helped Rosenbluh, who was making his maiden voyage into reality TV waters.

“We did the interviews in the same room, but not at the same time, and I went first,” she said. “I think my confidence rubbed off on him. He was able to see what did and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I can do that.’”

Most of the contestants for America’s Next Great Restaurant have little to no experience in the machinations of the food industry, and both Firefly Bistro owners said their role is to not only help their contestants understand as much as possible, but also give them fine-tune their ideas.

“Our job was to flesh out the flood, flesh out the menus, take part in cooking-competition type of things, where you’re given a ridiculous amount of time to cook for like, 1000 people,” Rosenbluh said. “But it’s about making their dreams come true.”

But it’s that dream-like sense of wanting to create a restaurant that catches many people, not just those on a TV show, off guard very quickly when they take the food industry plunge.

“No one realizes how much work it actually is,” said Rosenbluh. “They get caught up in the glamour of it. They think it’s meeting and greeting people, shaking hands and kissing babies … it’s a tremendous amount of work. It takes a really long time for a restaurant to eventually operate under its own inertia. Thirty percent of what you do is actually cooking. I always tell people, if you don’t love it, God, don’t do it. It’ll chew you up and spit you out.”

Some of those potential struggles crept in during the filming process, which happened in June of 2010.  Both chefs mentioned some bumps working with their respective pseudo-students, but they also praised how hard the contestants were willing to work to make up for their lack of experience.

“My guy in some capacity did sell food for money,” King said. “He wasn’t a professional, but he was a very hard worker. But he needed a lot of direction of the specifics to make it happen.”

Rosenbluh called his contestant “the nicest person in the universe,” and someone who was very receptive to being coached on a dream.

“My person had worked in a restaurant before and had an idea,” he said. “This person totally got it and never took credit for anything I did.”

Both chefs also noted that the oft-cited reality TV tale of competitors becoming like family is at its most real when they face the same challenges.

“Even though you’re competitors, you’re also a group of people in a unique experience together,” King said.  “It’s me and my competitor against the challenge, not each other. When you’re given four hours to cook for 1000 people, that’s real. They don’t lie about what the challenges are. I was hired to help my guy, and I became his number one fan. I’m not the one who’d be winning a restaurant … he would.”