Review: Incredible Edible America “Austin’s Craziest Cuisine”

‘ello Austin!

Food Network has a new restaurant travel show, and the one thing that separates this one from all its other restaurant travel shows is puppets. That makes it pretty interesting that it’s subtitled Incredible Edible America “with the Dunhams”, not Incredible Edible America “with Jeff Dunham’s puppets”. As it turns out, the puppets are hardly in the show, anyway. This is just another regular restaurant travel show.

In this episode, Jeff Dunham and his wife Audrey travel to Austin, Texas. Audrey Dunham is a food blogger, although I don’t think that was mentioned on the show. She’s vivid in her food descriptions and has a fun and welcoming personality. She’d go far on Food Network Star! Jeff seems knowledgeable, too. They both put in their input but then defer to the experts on their creations, which is nice to see. Although we don’t see all that much of any one thing. Incredible Edible America is very fast paced – just like all Food Network shows these days.

As for the food, I think they picked some good contenders for Austin’s craziest options. I’m a little skeptical that it’s the absolute weirdest food in the city. The King Burger comes closest. It’s a burger stuffed with a whole peanut butter cup, topped with fried mac and cheese bars, bacon, grape jelly, and banana bread.

The ice cream cone (the “southern charm snacker”) is loaded up soft serve in a donut cone. The donut cone is cool, but have you seen food trends lately? A donut cone is actually something that makes sense. But the segment is interesting, and a good addition to a travel show. It’s probably not often that a shop has a full kitchen dedicated solely to ice cream cones. I wish we got to see more of this place.

The last item is a chicken fried fish head. That’s not really weird, just kind of gimmicky. Jeff does take the opportunity to puppeteer the raw, chopped redfish head. That’s the best part of the show. When the server brings the finished product to the table he breaks the fish open and it’s not intimidating anymore. It’s just fried fish. The Dunhams enjoy it., while the eyeball does cause some squeals.

Each food segment gets about 30 seconds of puppet, so that’s three puppets this episode, with a bonus talking redfish head. They’re a fun break from everything else going on. The show operates at such a fast pace that any more puppet screen time could get old pretty quickly.                              

If you’ve ever seen a Food Network show, you know what to expect here. It’s a comfortable format. The Dunhams come across as very authentic and loving people, and they do well as hosts. If your main draw to the show is puppet comedy, be warned that there isn’t much of it, but what exists of it is a good fit.