Anthony Bourdain hosts “The Mind of a Chef”

Cooking shows sure can make us feel a lot of different ways.

Competitions such as "Chopped" or "Top Chef" can get our adrenalin pumping, making us stand up and cheer when our favorite contestants pull off a stunning dish or sit seething with anger when the show's villain (there's always a villain, isn't there?) says or does something especially nasty.

The more straight-up cooking shows can make us feel like we're back in school -- in a good way! -- as they teach us delicious new recipes and advanced techniques to make our dinner parties and family meals extra special.

Really, though, there aren't a lot of food-related shows out there that really get inside our brains and make us think. That's what makes PBS's "The Mind of a Chef" such a treat. The rest are all wonderful in their own myriad of ways, but "The Mind of a Chef" is something special indeed.

The third season of the James Beard Award-winning series premieres Saturday, Sept. 6 (check your local PBS station's listings), and if it lives up to the precedent set by the first two outings, it's bound to be a real pleasure to watch.

Executive produced and narrated by well-known chef Anthony Bourdain ("Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations"), "The Mind of a Chef" does exactly what its title suggests: it cracks open the brain of some of the world's most renowned chefs and tries to figure out just what it is that makes them tick. For this season, two of the world's most creative culinary masters, Edward Lee and Magnus Nilsson, will be the subjects of our curiosity.

Of course, there's no actual lobotomies being performed here. No, instead we get the privilege of tagging along with the specimens as they walk us through what motivates them -- their pasts, their interests, their inspirations -- a bit of everything, really.

It's this realness, I think, that makes "The Mind of a Chef" so great. With its combination of humor with history, cooking with art and travel with science, the whole experience of getting inside these chef's brains can be inspirational for aspiring chefs and just darned fascinating for the rest of us.

With the previous two seasons having featured chefs David Chang, Sean Brock and April Bloomfield, chefs Lee and Nilsson are in good company. Don't miss the third season of this flat out wonderful program premiering Saturday, Sept. 6, on PBS.