Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is a geek. A geek in so many different ways it is hard to ennumerate them all here. But for the purposes of this post, he is a big food geek. He loves to cook. He loves to eat. (Remember one of our rotating tag lines here at Nakedvillainy.com is “Well Educated. Well Informed. Well Fed. Well hung.” Hey! Get that on a shrt! You’d be pimpin’ wearin’ it in your hood.)

(NB to Brian: Your Maximum Leader still owes you a soup review. He may give it a shot this weekend.)

When your Maximum Leader chooses to go out to dinner, he generally goes whole hog and finds a really haute cuisine place to which to go. This means he doesn’t go out often, but when he does it is memorable. (And alas, quite expensive normally…)

Anyho… Longtime readers may remember that your Maximum Leader is a great fan of the original “Iron Chef” TV show from Japan. He still finds himself watching it at 11pm on Food Network from time to time. He is beginning to warm to the new “Iron Chef America” show on Food Network.

Well… This Sunday at 9pm the two Chef’s duking it out on Iron Chef America are Masaharu Morimoto and Roberto Donna

This news has gotten your Maximum Leader positively giddy with anticipation. You see, your Maximum Leader has had meals prepared by both Chef Morimoto and Chef Donna. The meal he had at Morimoto’s in Philadelphia is still clear in his mind. He can still taste the Toro Tuna Tatare and the Kobe Beef with foie gras. (Your Maximum Leader has had to wipe the saliva off his keyboard.) That meal is still among the greatest he’s ever eaten.

But your Maximum Leader has also eaten a number of times at Roberto Donna’s Galileo restaurant. Including one trip to his Laboratorio del Galileo. And that meal, like the one at Morimoto’s, is memorable. At the meal in the Laboratorio, Chef Donna came in and chatted with your Maximum Leader (and his party) while we snacked on hors d’oerves and asked us about what we were in the mood for. He told us what he was working with that night. Then prepared at meal that was exactly what we were asking for.

So… From 9-10pm on Sunday your Maximum Leader will be glued to the TV watching the showdown between these two great chefs. Your Maximum Leader knows his personal preference is for Morimoto. Morimoto is more ingenious and a bit more global in his dishes. He fuses so many different styles and cuisines together that you never know what you’ll get with Morimoto. He pushes the envelope more. Now that sometimes results in some bad stuff. But you never find the great stuff if you don’t sometimes suffer through the bad.

Carry on.