Italian food is what the Beat Bobby Flay challengers reach for when they want to win on the technique itself. Twenty-four of them, across the run of the show, have been right.
The Italian round is rarely a cuisine round. It is a pasta round, a risotto round, or a meatball round — and each of those is a measurable technique problem with a measurable answer. Italian American cooking does not reward improvisation; it rewards the chef who has done the same dish ten thousand times.
Twenty-four times, that chef was not Bobby Flay.