The Bobby Flay touch

The Virginian-Pilot - Norfolk, VA, USA - Bobby Flay cooked for a crowd in Norfolk Saturday, his welcome from the Scope audience was as warm as the poblano peppers in the pot and the chipotle puree in the blender.

“I’m hyperventilating,” said Cheryl Pickel of Chesapeake. “I’ve followed him for 14 years, and everything I know about cooking I’ve learned from him.” Pickel had paid extra for a table a few feet from the temporary kitchen set up on the floor that’s usually covered with ice for the Admirals  hockey team.

Backstage, another improvised kitchen bustled as culinary school students chopped parsley and trimmed cilantro for Flay, the  Food Network celebrity, cookbook author and owner of wildly successful “big flavor” restaurants in New York, Atlantic City, the Bahamas and Las Vegas. “As soon as I heard about this, I volunteered,” said Gilbert Dawes of Portsmouth. Dawes, who will graduate from the Culinary Institute of Virginia in two months, said he likes Flay’s style. “He has his own way of doing things,” Dawes said, “regardless of what everyone else does.”

Flay himself was low-key and focused. He apologized that Tidewater cuisine was not represented in the demonstration. “These are Chesapeake lobsters, right?” he joked, peering into the giant pot cooling on the counter. “It should be crab.” He said crab meat would be a perfect substitute for the lobster in the lobster-avocado cocktail he was scheduled to prepare onstage.

“You have a wonderful food culture here. I’m looking forward to sampling it tonight.” Soft-shell crabs are a favorite at his restaurants, he said: almost a cult. “When they’re in season, I can’t keep enough in the house.”

Norfolk chef Frank Lang,  chef at Shula’s 347 Grill at the Norfolk Waterside Marriott Hotel, had won a spot in the stage kitchen next to Flay, and he was in for some good-natured ribbing. “You need to get rid of that hat,” Flay said of the traditional toque of pleated linen that added another eight inches to Lang’s towering presence. “We never wear them until the evening.” Later, when Flay forgot the steaks for a few minutes in the on-stage oven, he pretended to blame Lang. “Hey, don’t you run a steakhouse, Frank?” he said. “How come you didn’t take them out?”

Before he went in front of the crowd to grill the rib-eye steaks with green and red chili sauce, he spoke backstage about grilling the finny harvest of the Chesapeake and Atlantic. “The grill should be blazing hot,” he said. “Sprinkle the fish with a little oil, salt and pepper, and grill it quickly.” Flay doesn’t oil the grill when he cooks fish. “As the flames burn the oil, it turns the fish kind of gray. I don’t like that color.” Most important: “Don’t fiddle with the fish. Let it be. Walk away. Have a drink.”  Flay said the fish will release itself from the grill at the exact moment the skin is firm and flavorful, making it easy to turn