Posted By Mary Scott Hardaway on Fri, May 7, 2021 at 3:56 PM “At first I thought it was a scam,” laughs The Mantu chef Hamid Noori. “Even when they flew me to New York and the car pulled up, I wasn’t sure if it was real.” Within the first few months of opening his modern Afghan cuisine restaurant in 2019, Noori was asked to be a guest chef on the Food Network’s cooking competition, “Beat Bobby Flay.” The premise of the show is simple: Two talented chefs compete against each other using a secret ingredient – in Noori’s case, snow peas – and the winner of the first round takes on the celebrity chef and cookbook author, Mr. Bobby Flay.