'Recipe for Deception,' a Cooking Competition for Liars, Hits Bravo January 21

Bravo, the network home to a seemingly never-ending lineup of Real Housewives installations as well as Top Chef, has a premiere date for its newest cooking competition series: Recipe for Deception — which basically sounds like Chopped for compulsive liars — will debut Thursday, January 21 at 10 p.m. EST/PST. The show will be hosted by none other than comedian Max Silvestri, Eater's former Top Chef recapper (and one-time Top Chef: The Cruise attendee).

The show has a somewhat confusing premise: Each episode, four new chefs will go head-to-head for three rounds of competition in which they must utilize a secret ingredient to compose an original dish. In just the sort of sadistic twist that reality TV fans live for, the chefs won't actually know which secret ingredient their dish must include, but their competitors will.

Each chef will be tasked with figuring out the identity of the secret ingredient while there's still time to incorporate it into the dish; to do this, the show will fall back on the old game "Two Truths and a Lie," which is probably a thing kids used to play back before there were smartphones and cable TV. As a Bravo press release explains, "competing chefs ask each other three 'yes or no' questions to determine what their mystery component is, and their opponent answers strategically with two truthful answers and one outright lie."

Confused? Great, so is everyone else. To further complicate matters, eliminated competitors will potentially be able to claw their way back "by trading potentially valuable information about the undisclosed ingredient for a chance at the $10,000 prize."

If watching people deceive one another isn't enough to get you to tune in, perhaps a couple star-studded special episodes will be: A special episode featuring Top Chef Masters alums Lorena Garcia, Rick Moonen, Art Smith, and Bryan Voltaggio is set to air January 28, and a "celebrity chef" episode airing February 25 will include Coolio and Lou Diamond Phillips, among others.

Watch a completely over-the-top sneak preview of Recipe for Deception, below: