The Top 15 Food Network Shows We Miss The Most

You can't talk about Food Network without mentioning "Emeril Live." Though it wasn't his first Food Network show, "Emeril Live" gave us the Emeril Lagasse we all came to know and love — loud, animated, seemingly unpredictable, and also a great chef. "Emeril Live" was filmed in front of a live studio audience and featured Lagasse's cooking, humor, and a band helmed by percussionist Leonard "Doc" Gibbs. Lagasse's signature "Bam!" was a staple, as well as running gags like pulling the knobs off his stove and adding more than a little garlic and booze to recipes to whoops and applause from the audience. It was peak entertainment for a decade, but eventually, viewers (network execs) wanted something different. 

While the network pivoted to reality television and wanted Lagasse along for the ride, Lagasse decided it wasn't for him. "I'm old-fashioned, and I want to teach people how to cook, how to eat, how to serve, how to shop, how to drink wine, how to mix a cocktail properly," he told GQ in 2016. "I didn't necessarily at the time want to get into this competition stuff." So in 2007, Food Network said goodbye to "Emeril Live," leaving a Lagasse-shaped hole in all our hearts.

"East Meets West" hit the air in 1998, hosted by Chinese-American Chef Ming Tsai, who was one of the few Asian chefs on television at the time. In each episode, Tsai taught viewers how to cook what some have called Asian-European fusion cuisine, but it's not a term Tsai particularly likes. He told FamilyFarmed (now The Good Food Catalyst), "I hate the term fusion cuisine, because food is a blending of technique and flavors. Fusion is forced atoms together to make nuclear energy. However, I would go out and say that everyone on this stage, and every top chef in the country is doing their own version of fusion ... But I would also say no one up here or anywhere is inventing a cuisine."

Whether he (or anyone else) created a new cuisine or not, Tsai's accessible recipes allowed people who had never cooked with Asian ingredients to develop comfort with the flavors and textures until 2003 when Tsai and Food Network parted ways. Tsai told FamilyFarmed that "Food Network became all about competition," but he still wanted to teach. Food Network's loss was public television's gain. Ming began hosting the long-running "Simply Ming" on WGBH-TV out of Boston, which is distributed throughout the United States on PBS. 

Cookbook author and chef Sandra Lee made a name for herself with her "semi-homemade" style of cooking, combining 70% store-bought ingredients with 30% fresh ingredients for something that tastes homemade but takes a fraction of the time. That's exactly what working moms everywhere were after when Lee's "Semi-Homemade Cooking" debuted on Food Network in 2003. Though not everyone was a fan of Lee's style of cooking — Anthony Bourdain famously said it would cause a "swath of destruction through the world" — Lee hit a high note with viewers who, like her, were looking for ways to frugally and quickly get dinner on the table. 

"Semi-Homemade Cooking" aired on Food Network for 15 seasons, but it was during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 that Lee's show and recipes came to the forefront of people's minds again, even those who had previously thought her a joke. Samin Nosrat, the author of "Salt Fat Acid Heat," told The New York Times in 2020, "I'm first to admit, I always denigrated that style of cooking. But I have to say, doing everything from scratch in these circumstances is bananas."

Sure, Food Network offered up some quarantine specials during lockdown, but we sure are missing "Semi-Homemade Cooking" on Food Network these days.

Lots of cooking shows on Food Network and elsewhere make copious claims about easy recipes you can make on your own in a short amount of time, but only "Cooking Live with Sara Moulton" actually showed someone cooking food on the fly while answering calls from viewers. There's something so genuine about watching someone cook while multitasking that resonates with everyone who has ever tried to cook a meal while juggling kids, pets, work obligations, and everything else life throws at us on a daily basis. Despite the fact that Moulton revealed in an interview with WGBH that she thought she was terrible in her screen test and that it was so stressful her hands "never stopped shaking," fans loved the show, which was one of Food Network's earliest, debuting in 1997 and running until 2002. 

At that time, Moulton began hosting "Sara's Secrets," which was also geared toward folks with busy lives and was great in its own right, but which never quite captured what "Cooking Live" had brought to the network.

While early programming on Food Network was all about cooking, the network's programming has branched out to be more all-encompassing about food in more recent years. Just look at the success of Guy Fieri's "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" and you'll see that Food Network fans not only want to know how to prepare food — they also want to know where to go to get the best food when they're going out to eat. "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" was the perfect combination of Food Network personalities and highlighting great food. In each episode, Food Network stars shared their absolute favorite dishes that, in theory, you could spend your hard-earned money on as well. Whether you planned to actually go out and get the same meal described on the show, there's something so great about hearing someone who has made food and cooking their life describe the best thing they've ever eaten. 

Lucky for all of us, after Food Network canceled "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" it was picked up by the Cooking Channel, but you'll need either cable or a Discovery+ subscription to see it. 

Taking it all the way back to the early days of Food Network, "How to Boil Water" was the quintessential cooking show for true beginners. It was Food Network's flagship show, originally hosted by Emeril Lagasse when it premiered in 1993. In each show, Lagasse taught viewers at home how to prepare dishes that would impress, even with little to no cooking experience. 

After Lagasse's popularity surged on the Food Network and he moved on to "Essence of Emeril" and "Emeril Live" the beginner-focused show went through a few more hosts and formats before settling in with host and chef Tyler Florence teaching kitchen novice Jack Hourigan how to cook in each episode. The show simply stopped airing shortly after Florence took the helm, likely another victim of Food Network's pivot to competition programming, leaving us with only the recipes linked on the show's Food Network page to console us. 

In 2001, every '90s kid's favorite game show host Marc Summers found a new gig hosting "Unwrapped" on the Food Network. Unlike much of Food Network's programming at the time, "Unwrapped" wasn't a cooking demonstration show, but instead a show about how different types of foods, especially packaged foods, are made. It was a fascinating look into the steps that go into creating and marketing food from the very first episode about bubble gum. Summers offered up historical tidbits while taking viewers behind the scenes at factories, fast food restaurants, and more. For many viewers, it was the first time they really stopped to consider where their food was coming from and how it was made. 

The original series wrapped in 2011 after 22 seasons, but the show was revived as "Unwrapped 2.0" with "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" star Alfonso Ribeiro in 2015. The revival show only lasted three seasons (one on Food Network and two on the Cooking Channel) before getting the ax, proving that it wasn't just the food facts fans missed, it was the host as well.

While Food Network began pivoting to competition shows in the early 2000s, one competition show in particular had an interesting prize: the winner of "Food Network Star" (originally called "The Next Food Network Star") received their own cooking show on the Food Network. Season 9 winner of "Food Network Star" was Damaris Phillips, whose resulting show was called "Southern at Heart." The show featured Phillips creating what she called modern Southern food and included recipes for everything ranging from game day favorites and movie snacks to holiday meals and a Southern take on Italian food. 

Phillips and her friends, who were often featured on the show, felt like the kind of people you could be friends with yourself and the recipes were approachable and looked delicious. After five seasons, however, the show ended, leaving Phillips to mostly serve as a guest judge on other Food Network competition shows, "Guy's Grocery Games" in particular. While Phillips leads a very different life these days since marrying a vegetarian and transitioning to a completely meat-free household, we certainly wouldn't mind seeing her take on vegetarian Southern food should her show ever get its well-deserved reboot.