Thanks for bringing over your post-party shallots. Does everyone have to bring something to Showdown?

 In general I tell everyone to bring what they have lying around, and then the week before I make a grocery list and email everyone to bring certain things. The first year we put this on we dropped a ton of money. Then it occurred to me that we could split it up. Day of, I was running around and cleaning the house, and our friends were texting me, ”What can I bring?” I kept forgetting that I had already told people to bring shallots.

 Will you describe the set-up of Showdown?

 Three people came up with the system: me, my friend Eva, and my friend Bayley who does camera stuff professionally. The initial problem we had when we first started doing Showdown was that people can’t just stare into the kitchen. Bayley’s already super geared out, so he brings his camcorders over. Eva has two monitors that she brings over. The competitors are in the kitchen and the monitors are in a huge open room right off of the kitchen, where the audience is watching. There’s no audio from the live cameras, but we have the MC bring the mic into the kitchen to interview contestants .

We get volunteers to run the cameras around, and we have three new judges every year. Usually everyone’s pretty professional about it now. But early on there was a dude who was a little bit tired and hadn’t really used a camera before and he was pointing it at the ceiling for five minutes. Bayley just came in and was like, “What are you doing? You need to focus on something or get out.” [laughs]