Karina’s Capsule: Dinner with the Band

Attention, all foodie girls who harbor crushes on tattooed indie rock boys: you now have a new favorite web show.

Dinner with the Band, a hybrid cooking show/indie rock showcase, is the brainchild of Darin Bresnitz, a food blogger and video producer working in partnership with Austin-based OnNetworks. The pilot episode, featuring three songs performed live by indie poppers The Cloud Room, debuted on Brightcove last month to coincide with the show’s launch party at SXSW. Future episodes, which are set to include appearances by the likes of Brooklyn rapper El-P and garage rockers the Harlem Shakes, should debut in the coming weeks.

Food Network hasn’t yet had to worry about defending its virtual monopoly on cooking programming from competition on the web, but Dinner with the Band might pose a formidable threat, thanks in large part to host Sam Mason. The former WD-50 pastry chef, creative force behind the soon-to-open Soho dessert palace Tailor, and heir apparent to Anthony Bourdain’s punk rock celebrity chef throne is the perfect fit for Bresnitz’ James Beard-meets-Johnny Rotten ethos.

Mason has his on-camera patter down – even working alongside guests who obviously don’t know a thing about food, Mason manages to explain fairly arcane recipes and ingredients in everyday language. His job is made easier by the show’s super slick design; I particularly liked seeing the name of each ingredient appear on screen in huge, hand-scratched letters as it entered the game.

One assumes that a partial goal of the Dinner with the Band gang is to get culinary obsessives hooked on new bands whilst simultaneously introducing indie rock kids to gourmet food. They certainly have the food half of the hybrid worked out–I can’t imagine any Cloud Room fan watching the pilot and *not* salivating over the Lemon Gruyere Gnocchi — but they’ve got a few kinks to work out on the indie rock end. In the pilot episode, the audio quality of the live performances (which are shot, like the cooking segments, in Mason’s apartment) is not great.

There’s also a natural disconnect between the food and music sections, made worse by the fact that the 26-minute show is presented in five chunks. A half hour is an eternity on the web, and it’s hard to imagine a casual viewer clicking through all five parts of an episode in succession. It might be nice to see a shorter version of the show, with live performance inter-cut with the making of the meal. Still, as food porn for hipsters, Dinner with the Band rocks.

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