Get ready for more Good Eats! Alton Brown, who created and hosted the cooking show for 13 years starting in 1999, is gearing up to bring the hit Food Network program back with not one, but two separate shows.
Brown, who currently has a partnership with Colgate Optic White toothpaste, tells Us Weekly Good Eats: Reloaded, which is set to premiere on Monday, October 15, on the Cooking Channel, is a renovation of sorts. “I have decided to go back and take 13 of the early classic Good Eats episodes from the first few years of the show, when I was quite young and everyone was still figuring out what to do, and renovate them,” he explains. “They’re about 60 percent brand new material, as I’ve gone back in and adjusted things, made changes to recipes, put in new recipes.”
Speaking specifically about the changes viewers can expect to see, Brown adds some of the 13 episodes of Good Eats: Reloaded will be “completely new,” but others will just have some different components. “Sometimes you just come up with a procedure you think is better, you come up with flavors that you think are better,” he says. “It ranges from small nips and tucks to full-on redos.”
Part of the appeal of Good Eats, which went off the air in 2012, was Brown’s unique narrative approach, which ranged from classroom methods to wacky comedy sketches he used to explain food and cooking. Good Eats: Reloaded, he says, will have an “exciting format” that will be familiar to fans of the original show. “We’re doing things technically and a narrative that we haven’t done before, so hopefully the fans will enjoy it,” he explains. “It’s being built not only for the old fans, but also for people who were not even alive.”
As for why he chose to revisit Good Eats and make some tweaks, Brown, 56, says the idea came to him after watching old episodes and wishing he’d done certain things differently. “I’m more knowledgeable now, I’m mature, I have a better point of view,” he explains. “I look at some of those episodes and grimace at some of the things that I did, so this is me clearing that up.”
The Iron Chef America host also notes his wish to make changes to some early Good Eats episodes stems from his desire to make the series as good as possible, especially since Return of the Eats – a slate of entirely new Good Eats episodes – is scheduled to premiere in 2019. “Before I reboot the series next year, I wanted to kind of go back and make these repairs so that I could feel that I’ve done everything that I could to make the series all that it can be,” Brown notes.
Though the Cutthroat Kitchen host couldn’t reveal too much about Return of the Eats, he did tell Us fans can expect a “full reboot” in the near future. “We’re right now deciding on when we think we’re going to be able to release a new series of that.”
