TNFNS, Season 6, Finale

The Next Food Network Star

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Well the winner has been crowned and it’s the Aarti Paarti! She takes her place along such illustrious former winners as Guy Fieri, that blonde lady, the bald dude, and I think a couple of others.

The secret ingredient this week was cheese. In that the whole episode was cheesy, especially with the final three sitting on couches while they waxed poetic about their hopes and dreams and the struggle to get to this point in the competition.

Did I see Herb and Tom go and wake up Aarti in the morning? Doesn’t she have an alarm? How did they get in her room? Hopefully she was wearing pajamas.

Again all of the finalists seemed shocked to see a food network personality appear (this time Rachel Ray of Dunkin’ Donuts fame). Aarti said she was “geeked out”. Get a grip people; you’ve met everyone on the network at this point so there is no reason to be star struck.

Herb struggled a bit at the beginning of his pilot. He was probably thinking about being a fat kid or something. I threw up a little in my mouth when Herb then taped a picture of his family to the camera. And then during the pilot viewing he said that he would watch a show with him on it. Well, that makes one of us.

I thought it was funny that Aarti seemed genuinely scared of Tom winning after they watched his pilot. She obviously didn’t realize she was the preordained winner since around week 3. And then Aarti looked like she was going to break down right before they announced the winner. At least we got some crying from her in the finale to bring the show full circle.

And how about Tom? The Big Chef gave Aarti a run for her money. The focus group seemed to love him, and he even used “big chef” as a verb. He was just a haircut and a bath away from big cheffing his way to a show on the food network. I have a feeling we might see him again on the network before all is said and done.

So congratulations to Aarti. Hopefully her show will last longer than Amy Finley's did.