Chef Robert Irvine expects extreme challenges at Tropicana show

Sometimes, chef Robert Irvine feels like just another pretty face.

Most people are familiar with Irvine from his Food Network show “Restaurant: Impossible,” which ran from 2011 to 2016. But the live show he’ll do Thursday night at the Tropicana has more in common with his earlier “Dinner: Impossible.” Instead of challenging restaurant owners to (literally) clean up their acts, Irvine will have to meet a series of challenges issued by the audience and a computer.

“I’m just kind of the pawn in that show,” he said.

The challenges on “Robert Irvine: Live” change every time he does a show and he knows nothing about them, or the food he’ll prepare, until the show has begun.

“The audience picks the food, picks the challenges,” Irvine said. “I beg them to be on my side; it never works. They just pick the most outrageous thing.”

Like, for example, him hanging upside down in a sort of straitjacket. While cooking.

“We’ve done sumo wrestling. I’ve just got to be ready for anything. It’s really just two hours of escapism and having fun at somebody else’s expense. And usually that somebody is me,” he said.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, this is far from your average cooking show.

“You’ll learn a lot about how to fix things if they’re broken,” Irvine said, “but not how to dice an onion this way or dice an onion that way.”

About 30 audience members will be invited onstage to participate. After the show, Irvine will make a surprise announcement that’s expected to include details of his restaurant at the Tropicana, scheduled to open around July 22.

“We offer something different that the other folks don’t do,” he teased, regarding the new restaurant.

Irvine said it’s not clear whether the live shows will be a regular thing in Las Vegas, but he will be.

“I intend to make sure I’m the one training the staff in the restaurant,” he said. “I want the staff to know that I’m there, that they know about me, they know my likes and dislikes.”

He’ll have to fit that into a tight schedule; he spends about 150 days a year with the U.S. military (and has a restaurant in the Pentagon). On the day of a recent interview, he was leaving Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where he’d been assisting with a plan to re-engineer feeding the military, for a nine-day, nine-country visit to troops around the world to present the live show for them. Past trips, he said, have taken him to countries including Afghanistan, Italy and Spain.

Irvine said 100 members of the military will be in the audience for the Las Vegas show.

“I was in the military myself; I’ve had an affinity for that,” he said. “We do it to make sure we support the men and women and their families.

“They give us what we call freedom. We let them know we care.”

Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at Hrinella@reviewjournal.com. Follow @HKRinella on Twitter.