Bobby Flay built his career on Southwestern American cooking — a polite term for cooking with chiles, masa, and lime in restaurants run by people from New York. He has lost sixteen times to chefs who grew up eating those ingredients rather than studying them.
The dishes here are not the dishes that translate to a Bobby Flay reduction. They require a comal, a tortilla press, a molcajete, and an instinct for how the masa wants to set against the heat. Chiles are not interchangeable. Chefs who came up in this cuisine know which one belongs in which dish without thinking.
Bobby has spent thirty years calling himself a Southwestern chef. The judges, sixteen times, could tell who actually was.