Top 5 Favorite Personalities on Food TV

1) Alton Brown (Good Eats)
2) Emeril Lagasse (Emeril Live and The Essence of Emeril)
3) Mario Batali (Molto Mario and Ciao America, with Mario Batali)
4) Tyler Florence (Food 911 and Tyler's Ultimate)
5) Ming Tsai (East Meets West, with Ming Tsai)

I must mention, however, that Ming Tsai's show is no longer airing on Food TV. Ming has a new show on PBS called Simply Ming. Personally, I like this show much better than East Meets West and I've only seen Simply Ming once!

Also, I want to present some honorable mentions regarding Food TV personalities:

1) Marc Summers (Unwrapped). Most people, especially those my age, will remember him as the host of Double Dare and Family Double Dare on Nickelodeon, the greatest kids channel in the world. I would take Nickelodeon over Disney any day, hands down. Anyway, after Double Dare's run ended, I forgot Marc Summers existed. It's great to see him on tv regularly again. Double Dare was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, and I still watch reruns of it on the Nickelodeon station, GAS (Games And Sports), whenever I happen to catch it.

2) Al Roker (Roker on the Road). I grew up watching Al on NBC out of New York City. He was the jolly weatherman who always had something witty to say. Most of the time his antics got annoying, and he is really a lot more famous than he deserves to be. It was hard for me to take him seriously back then. Oh yeah, Al was also very heavy-set. Now he's had that gastric bypass surgery and has lost a heck of a lot of weight and it's hard for me to believe that that is really him. It may sound weird, but I think that I was able to take him more seriously when he was fat.

3) The Iron Chef. This is absolutely one of my favorite shows, right next to Good Eats. I mean, watching two chefs try to make as many original dishes from the same main ingredient, each having one hour to complete the task - it's just a lot of fun to watch. But the reason I didn't list it in the Top 5 was because there are four main personalities (five, really, I suppose) in the show: "Chariman" Takeshi Kaga (a very good biography, by the way, so be sure to click the link for him), Iron Chef Chinese: Chen Kenichi, Iron Chef Japanese: Masaharu Morimoto, and Iron Chef French: Hiroyuki Sakai. I should also put in Iron Chef Italian: Masahiko Kobe. I'm not too big a fan of his, so he wouldn't have made it into my top list anyway, but I'm putting him here now just to round out the list of characters. I just didn't want to use up the entire list with all of the Iron Chef guys; that wouldn't have been fair to Ming.