The first day at All-Star Academy begins as nine home cooks enter the kitchen and meet their mentors: Alex Guarnaschelli, Robert Irvine, Curtis Stone and Andrew Zimmern. The cooks are put to the test preparing a dish using the contents of a lunch box, which the mentors taste and rank in order. While the lowest-ranked cook is eliminated, the remaining eight choose their mentors. Then, the mentors must cook to impress guest judge Carla Hall and win a Save Card, which they can use later to keep one of their cooks from elimination.
Four more returning champs battle for their chance to go head-to-head against Chef Bobby Flay in the Chopped: Beat Bobby Flay tournament. A seafood that needs tenderizing and a canned product that needs to be creatively incorporated are two of the ingredients found in the appetizer basket. A king of the sea and a cake of the ice box are found in the entree basket. In the dessert round, an ingredient that Bobby loves ends up in one chef's ice cream recipe, but trouble with the machine has everyone wondering how it will turn out.
The four remaining chefs board an American Airlines flight and travel to Tokyo, Japan. The chefs begin a culinary adventure into the world of umami (a Japanese term for 'delicious' that is used to describe the fifth taste). First the chefs arrive at a traditional Japanese yakitori grill restaurant where they are asked to use Kikkoman soy sauce to infuse umami into their dishes and enhance the flavor profiles of a variety of ingredients. Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto arrives as a surprise judge for this test. Then the chefs travel through Tokyo to the most renowned culinary academy in the city where they meet Dr. Yukio Hattori, the original Iron Chef Japanese culinary commentator. Dr. Hattori opens the doors to his academy where the chefs are challenged to use different cooking styles in a test that highlights the five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. The next chef is eliminated.