LOS ANGELES -- Set a convenience store veteran loose on the set of a Food Network competition show with his two sons, and what will they do?
Win, of course.
C-store foodservice consultant and former 7-Eleven and Circle K executive Joe Chiovera and his sons Giuseppe and Xavier competed on the season premiere of Guy Fieri's "Guy's Grocery Games," which aired last January 4. They defeated three other families to advance to the final challenge, where they took home a $14,000 cash prize.
The episode pitted four teams of three family members against each other in challenges that had them shopping a grocery store and cooking a thematic dish for a panel of judges. The last family standing then went on a shopping-spree challenge for up to $20,000 in cash prizes.
Chiovera and his sons' dishes included an Italian fried egg with soppressata, smoked gouda and toast (challenge: create breakfast using ingredients that weight less than five pounds), an open-faced rib-eye sandwich on rye with romaine, grilled radicchio and ricotta sauce (challenge: create a hot lunch using only ingredients that start with the letter "R") and a bacon-wrapped hot dog with Mexican-style red beans and a tomato, basil and red onion salsa (challenge: create a Sunday supper using hot dogs and the color red—and only the kids can shop for ingredients).
"What's amazing about this dish is that a hot dog is just messy, but there's this weird sense of refinement. … There's a beautiful freshness," said Richard Blais, celebrity chef and judge, of Team Chiovera's hot dog.
Once the Chiovera family advanced to the finals, they had two minutes to find 10 items on a shopping list—obscure products from yolk-free noodles to lard. Each item would bring them $2,000. In the end, they gathered seven of the items to take home $14,000.
"I am so overwhelmed with pride right now," Chiovera said at the end of the episode. "I have the best boys in the world. This has to be one of the best times that we've ever had; something that we'll remember forever.
CSP Daily News caught up with Chiovera to capture a few more sentiments on his big Food Network debut.
CSP: How did this come to be?
Chiovera: When I got let go from Circle K, I found myself seeing my kids off to school every day, seeing them when they came home and eating dinner every night, and we got into the habit of watching a ball game on TV or the Food Network while we were in the kitchen sitting down.
My youngest son said to me, "Dad, you'd be really good on 'Chopped.' I said, "I don't know, that's a different type of chef. I know I can cook anything they give me, but there are certain ingredients I've never even worked with before that these guys are challenged with."
Then my oldest son said, "Dad, you'd be good on 'Guy's Grocery Games'."
I'm kind of a freak: When I know we have a holiday or we're doing some entertaining, I'll go to Central Market and spend three, four hours shopping all over town for the right stuff. I'm a supermarket junkie. And I thought, I could do well on that show.
So unbeknownst to me, my oldest boy Xavier wrote a letter [to Food Network]. It was really heartwarming, what he wrote, and I got contacted. That's how it all started.
At first I thought I was going to be the one competing, and then they asked me whether or not I'd cook with my kids. I said, "We eat more together than we cook together, but yeah." … The rest is history.
CSP: Any one challenge that threw you off the most?
Chiovera: The one challenge where the only thing that we were able to utilize were ingredients starting with the letter "R." We were trying to make a sauce for the rib eye and I was looking for sour cream, and my son said, "Dad there's no 'R' in sour cream; let's use ricotta cheese instead." Then it kind of floated from there. We saw horseradish root, raw sauerkraut and rice vinegar, and we used the juice from the sauerkraut and the rice vinegar to make the sauce. It was pretty cool and it turned out really well—the horseradish really popped on the ricotta cheese.
CSP: What did your kids take away from the experience?
Chiovera: They're really proud that we did it together. A lot of it's about the kids, and we incorporated them into the actual workflow—that's where a couple of the families got a little dinged. From the very start, I was including the kids, and I think that's what got us a few extra points.
The other hardest challenge was that I wasn't allowed to talk for 15 minutes (during the Sunday supper challenge), and I couldn't do anything but stand outside the kitchen and use a white board. … I was jumping up and down and slamming my hands on the table. That was probably equally as tough as the ingredients. But the kids took over the kitchen and all I could do was guide them.
The boys feel really confident now about being in the kitchen, and they just love the fact they we did it together.
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