New kind of dinner theater premieres as NBC reality series

NEW YORK-- Suspense! Romance! Mama's meatballs!

These are all on the menu at "The Restaurant," a tasty new "unscripted drama" series premiering 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC.

As it probes the inner workings of a real-life Manhattan dining spot called Rocco's, "The Restaurant" will surely bridge any remaining gap between the act of cooking or eating for its own sake, and performance art for an audience of millions.

Consider: For a couple of weeks after opening last month, Rocco's required every patron to sign a model release before gaining admittance.

And once inside, every diner, like every employee, was under constant surveillance by nine prowling camera crews and two dozen remote-controlled cameras and microphones plugged into the ceilings and walls.

"This is real life," declared Rocco DiSpirito, the 36-year-old culinary cutie-pie whose efforts to start this namesake eatery will give "The Restaurant" its dramatic arc.

"Real life plays itself out in restaurants every day," Rocco told a reporter, speaking above the diners' cumulative roar as he worked the room. "And we have the cameras to capture it: Both in the front of the house, with the illusion of the perfect environment, and the mechanics behind the scene, where it's chaotic, insane, intense, hot."

Hot, for sure. A grease fire erupted in the kitchen during the restaurant's calamitous opening night (seen in the second episode). This was before the dishwasher pegged out and Rocco got socked with a lawsuit. Such misadventures, and more, were vividly gathered by a filmmaking battalion under executive producer Mark Burnett ("Survivor").

A popular presence on the Food Network and NBC's "Today" show, Rocco meets the qualifications for a chef in the TV age: boyish charm befitting a kid raised in a close-knit Italian family in Queens; People magazine's approval as one of the "Sexiest Men Alive"; and, by the way, success in the restaurant field, particularly with his all-the-rage Manhattan establishment Union Pacific.

"But I wouldn't have invented a restaurant to do a TV show," said Rocco, noting that the show dovetailed with his vision of a restaurant paying -homage to his heritage.