Food Network junkies, asseeeemmmmbllle! 24 Hour Restaurant Battle, a new reality-competition series that pits amateur restaurant owners against each other, premieres tonight at 10 p.m. ET. Kind of like a well-beaten mixture of Top Chef‘s perennial Restaurant Wars episode and Chopped, 24 Hour Restaurant Battle gives two teams exactly 24 hours and $4,000 to prepare a menu, choose a coherent theme, paint and furnish, and open their restaurant for service. One team member runs the kitchen and handles the cooking, while the other handles the “front of the house,” taking care of decorating, greeting, and creating tension with their teammate. At the end of the day, judges and patrons come inside to test how well each team did, and the winning team receives $10,000. Accomplished chef and restaurateur Scott Conant heads up the tough judging panel and also serves as host for the program. He took some time to chat with EW about the new show, the difficulties of opening a restaurant, and how he’s “much nicer” than he looks on TV.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What do you think the toughest part of opening a restaurant is?
SCOTT CONANT: I think the toughest thing is always being able to take your vision and really make it more compact and hone it and make it smoother and make it better and constantly work on that. I always tell the contestants on the show that when you walk into a restaurant — from the menu to the décor, there needs to be a common thread and a theme, and if there’s a disconnect, it automatically doesn’t resonate with people. It has to have a lot of soul, and if it doesn’t, it just ultimately won’t work. I think that’s the little element of a restaurant that people are like, “You know it has that something…” I always tell my staff, with my restaurants, “You know, it’s got to have soul.”

This show is focusing on amateur chefs. What was the reasoning behind that?
Well, the thing is, it’s not even necessarily amateur chefs. It’s really about people whose dream it is to open a restaurant. READ FULL STORY »