Nonthreateningly flirtatious, sweet and earnest, Tyler Florence of "Food 911" and "Tyler's Ultimate" travels around the world to both teach and learn in others' kitchens. Infinitely patient, Tyler is practical, a problem-solver and a realist, giving even the most hapless of failed home-chefs hope and graciously allowing them to claim credit for the fruits of his labor.

And then there's Bobby Flay. Host of the long-running programs "Hot off the Grill with Bobby Flay" and "FoodNation," Flay is the successful chef-owner of Manhattan hotspots Bolo and Mesa Grill, and a core member of the Food Network's stable of talent.

He is also a total dick.

Bobby Flay is arrogant and unpleasant, cocky and dismissive. He isn't just the biggest dick on the Food Network, he is the only dick on the Food Network, and the absence of others makes his offenses seem all the more egregious.

Flay's dicketry is never more evident than on "FoodNation," a series in which, according to FoodTV.com, he "explore[s] cities and regions across the U.S., examining local culinary history and character."

Impatient and bored, desultory and mocking, Flay hosts "FoodNation" like an eighth grader who is too cool for his choir concert. He fulfills his duties, but makes it clear that he is just going through the motions, as if the hosting gig is some sort of court-mandated community service or the result of a bitterly lost bet.

Flay doesn't fawn. On "FoodNation," when he visits someone's home or restaurant and tastes their carefully prepared, region-specific offerings, he doesn't roll his eyes in quasi-orgasmic pleasure ala Rachael Ray. He tastes one dish and quickly moves on to the next. If he really likes something, he may nod in subtle appreciation or even say, with low-grade enthusiasm, "that's good," and tersely explain why ("Adding butter rounds out the flavor"), but he does not gush, he does not flirt and he never kisses ass. He asks the questions he is supposed to ask, but interrupts and talks over people as they try to answer. He is the king of the unenthusiastic "OK."

In the superlative-rich world of the Food Network, Flay's lack of excitement is jarring. It isn't that he outwardly dislikes any of the food or drink his hopeful hosts share, just that he doesn't like it enough. His yawning reactions to all he samples are impolite and ungrateful, and he comes off as arrogant and magnanimous, as if he is doing us all a big favor by just being there.

At the end of each episode of "FoodNation," Flay entreats viewers to "get out there and eat America!" After watching him for an hour, viewers may have their own ideas about what Flay can eat.

Flay's other long-running Food Network program, "Hot off the Grill with Bobby Flay," is a boring, subpar, instructional cooking show. Rightly relegated to the Food Network's late-latenight wastelands, "Hot off the Grill" is a mere hour removed from Sleep Number Bed and Ionic Breeze infomercials. The chatty, bantering and superfluous presence of co-host Jacqui Malouf gives the show a distinctly local-morning-news-cooking-segment feel. The unwaveringly smiling Malouf asks Flay leading, open-ended, and often inane questions about what he's doing and why, laughing heartily all the while. She is cheerily patronizing, as if she already knows the answers and is trying to tease more information out of Flay for the benefit of the ignorant audience.

"Oooh, saffron! Hey Bobby, isn't saffron really expensive? Why is that?" she recently asked, a huge smile frozen on her face.

"Well, yeah," a bored Flay replied. "Saffron is expensive. In fact, it is the most expensive spice in the entire world. It is worth more than its weight in gold."

The presence of a small studio audience, whose members are called on to participate in the food preparation, affords Flay ample opportunity to be a dick. On a recently aired episode, after instructing a volunteer to julienne some vegetables, Flay jeers at her inferior knife-work, inciting the rest of the room to laugh at her expense.

Flay honed this type of social brutality during his storied appearances on "Iron Chef." At the end of his first battle against Japanese Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto, a smack-talking, posturing Flay jumped triumphantly onto the counter. Standing on his cuttingboard and doing that dorky "raise the roof" hand gesture, Flay lead the crowd in chanting "U.S.A! U.S.A!" All of this, but primarily the standing on the cutting board part, grievously offended Morimoto and the rest of the Japanese contingent.

Hilariously, Flay lost the battle, and afterwards took every opportunity to complain to the press that it was unfair, that his equipment was inferior to his challenger's and that the odds were stacked against him. A year later, he was afforded a rematch, which he ended up winning. As the final buzzer sounded, Flay jumped up and stood on the counter once again. In typically obnoxious fashion, he pointed out that this time he wasn't standing on the cutting board cause he didn't want to offend anybody. "He's so American!" the young Japanese actress on the panel of judges tittered nervously. Morimoto just shook his head in disbelief.

Unmoved by the mediocrity and unpleasantness of his past work, the Food Network gave Flay a new show, the recently premiered "Boy Meets Grill." Named after his bestselling 1999 cookbook, it is an instructional cooking show that is rather self-conciously stripped of conventions. Handheld cameras follow a smirky, low-key, wisecracking Bobby to his favorite Manhattan butchers, bodegas and farmers' markets as he shops for fresh ingredients. He then takes his purchases to a lushly gardened rooftop prep and grill area where he uses them to create, as the Food Network's website calls it, "an al fresco feast."

Staying true to the show's title and theme, the vast majority of the meal is prepared on the grill, including side dishes and sauces. Flay repeatedly stresses how simple it is to cook like this, but it is unlikely that the average viewer has the option of using a second, smaller grill to char corn for the guacamole while a (prohibitively expensive) boneless leg of lamb spins for hours in their larger grill's automatic rotisserie. Sure, for a professional chef with top-of-the-line equipment, this is a piece of cake, but it is disengenous to imply that a regular person could easily achieve similar results with the rusty Weber on the patio.

"Boy Meets Grill" is very similar to British chef Jamie Oliver's series "The Naked Chef." Both chronicle the starring chefs' pre-cooking shopping trips and conciously cultivate the vibe throughout that the star is cooking for his friends. Unlike "The Naked Chef," Flay's show stops short of actually showing his hip, fabulous, urban pals enjoying the food he prepares, but he mentions them several times throughout the episode nevertheless.

Unsurprisingly, Flay is markedly more effusive in his praise of his own food than he is with the food of others. "That is so good!" he exclaims after tasting a pineapple juice-based mixed drink that he made moments earlier. "Oh my goodness! This is so good!" he cries, taking another sip, smacking his lips and refilling his glass.

Flay seems happy and in his element on "Boy Meets Grill," and he is surprisingly fun to watch when he's alone with no one to belittle or dismiss. There is one instance in the first episode in which the show's editing seems to encourage a little fun at Flay's expense for once. Suggesting that viewers measure how long to leave tortillas on the grill "by counting to ten in Spanish twice," Flay procedes to demonstrate. "Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, ocho, nueve, dies," leaving out good old siete. Although the mistake was obvious and easy to catch, and could have been quietly taken care of with another take, the editors left it in, even replaying the footage a second time for our continued viewing pleasure.

"Boy Meets Grill" proves Flay can be palatable if served up correctly: all by himself, garnished with a bit of post-production ribbing.

� Alissa Rowinsky Wright ([email protected])