MTV's House of Food Chefs Dish Up Behind-the-Scenes Scoop

MTV's House of Food premieres tonight and pits a group of aspiring chefs against each other in cooking competitions, all while living together in a Real World-style setting. The highly-regarded culinary masters tasked with training the rag tag bunch are chefs Casey Lane, Brendan Collins and Brooke Williamson. OK! sat down with the chefs to find out more about the heated competition and how the contestants dramatic antics in the house affected their on-the-job skills.

Casey Lane: It uncovers that unromantic portion of it. A lot of people say that unromantic portion of it being just the hours or the stress or whatever it is, but that’s the romantic portion to be honest. That shows your dedication. That stress level you live with fuels your fire to make sure you’re going to succeed but the other part of it, the having to start your way up and not knowing anything and getting yelled at a lot, that’s the unromantic portion of it. You need to have a certain type of individual and have heart to get through that and this is the first thing that is really going to show that.

BC: I would even say that there were a couple of them that came in with the intention of wanting to be TV chefs and through the experience we gave them were more interested in becoming restaurant chefs than TV chefs.

OK!: Which was more difficult—teaching them the skills in the kitchen or dealing with their big personalities?

CL: I think that’s what was enjoyable. We’re big personalities.

BW: In very different ways.

CL: : You have to be someone who can control an environment. You can pick your method of control. It doesn’t mean you have to be a yeller, but you have to have the fortitude to control an environment. They’re 22 year old kids and kids these days are pampered, right? We were the last generation, and I’m young, but I was the last generation to ride bikes without helmets and still have my dad say, "I’m gonna get your ass if you do this again." Now they’re all so pampered that they think they can just mouth off. I think that ended very quickly once they met the three of us and it was like, "No, in this environment for what you want to achieve, it’s time to shut up. It’s time to actually apply knowledge and to do that, you’re going to have to listen."

BW: I think they all came into this situation with a certain amount of respect for what they were getting into. They respected us as mentors pretty much from the get-go. I think the personalities that perhaps they exhibited in the house were not necessarily what we got in the kitchen.

BC: I also think from the get-go they came to our restaurants and worked real services in a restaurant that’s open to the public working with professional cooks and seeing the hierarchy and seeing the way a kitchen is set up and run correctly.

BW: We all started our careers younger than this group and I had very low expectations, especially from the first challenge, very low expectations of what they would be capable of doing it. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of commitment some of them had and the level of performance they were able to get to in such a short period of time. It was honestly because some of them had an amazing passion for what they wanted to do and they worked at it.