f13.net

Begins tonight.

Not wild about it being in D.C., but ok. We will see. Hopefully quality level of chefs is where it was last season--I really do not want two or three quality chefs and a bunch of fuckwits, that's Gordon Ramsey's stock in trade.

Top Chef Masters was good this season, by the by.

The quality of last season will be very tough to match.  I'm not optimistic about this season, particularly with the early episodes.  I hope to god they don't try to drum up drama for the sake of ratings.  It really detracts from the cooking.  

Edit: I think I'm more interested in the Art show that airs after Top Chef.  It seems like a very interesting concept.  Top Chef, but looking for the best artist.  Subjective reality shows FTW!

I'm always good for a Top Chef. I thought at first the level was lower, but there's some people with significant recognition. We'll see how it goes. I'm definitely not missing Toby as a judge.

And yes, Top Chef Masters is great. It's Top Chef with nice people and no drama.

I'm liking the art show a lot, which for me is rather odd.

My biggest comment about the first episode was that none of the plates looked all that good. Their presentation skills as a whole were way below par.

Not liking Angelo. I really don't like excessive gamesmanship on this show--it slides it towards being just another shitty reality show, I prefer this to be at the classy end of things. There's enough tension just because these guys all stand to gain meaningful reputation capital by doing well--they don't need someone to play dickish games trying to sabotage others. I'd like to see the judges just come right out and tell the contestants, "If we think you're deliberately trying to sabotage others on your team while staying clean enough to go to the next round, you're done."

Giving immunity for a quickfire was always a terrible idea.  Give them a prize or an advantage, not immunity. 

Yeah, the immunity strategy thing is starting to rub me the wrong way too. Fuck it, JUST COOK. If your shit is good, you'll go on.

Totally called the banana pudding getting chick sent home, though. This seems a lot like last season - three or four pretty damn good chefs along with a lot of dross you know is going to get weeded out.

I thought sherry-chicken lady arguably deserved it more. Banana pudding lady might have been able to pull it off with a bit more money (so that it could be strawberry-intensive) but sherry-chicken lady was just in the grips of a bizarre obsession with that idea.

I was surprised nobody pulled the "hide the veggies in more appealing stuff" trick that's so big with the Rachel Ray crowd these days. Was really a lackluster response to the challenge overall. Which I suppose demonstrates partly why we have the problem that we do with school lunches.

I wouldn't have been surprised to see sherry-chicken lady go home for that, since it was essentially her fucking expensive choice of sherry that hamstrung banana pudding lady into less ingredients. Why her team didn't bitchslap her about sherry in a school lunch, I don't know. Yes, I know the alcohol burns off - but do you really think any school would purchase an ingredient like that for their lunches? The whole point of the exercise was how good a chef are you without the crutch of fine, expensive ingredients.

Either one deserved to go home for that. I think the choice they made had a little to do with her other crappy performances so far.

I think they bounced the banana lady simply because she replicated exactly the sugared up fake food sort of thing that the challenge was supposed to provide an alternative to.

The sherry was unappealing to kids and politically volatile, but at least was healthy.

The immunity thing reminded me of all the things I like about Top Chef Masters, but I'm sure the producers are orgasmic at having such a perfect reality tv villain on the show.

I kind of like the guy.  :awesome_for_real:

He certainly is a good chef. I just wish they'd not play up the bullshit, because some of that is editing and all that, and some of that is rule structure. I don't know why they didn't get the message that people liked the classy, more collegial set-up last season. They probably should be getting the message now: ratings are down by a goodly amount.

I'm thinking part of the problem this season is:

a) too many weak chefs
b) no middle-range people who have good days that you're rooting for because they're likeable (Ash, Eli)
c) obviously superior people are either totally lacking in charisma or are villainous in a show where much of the audience doesn't really want Richard Hatch-ish villains
d) it's in DC, a place most of us want nuked from orbit

What was Padma wearing?  It looked like a plastic gorilla chest. 

Heh, my wife made the exact same comment.

Maybe she raided Mr. Burns's closet.

I could not figure that out either--it was really weird looking. For a little while I thought it was a strange looking baby bjorn and that her kid was in there somewhere, but that obviously wasn't it.

Another badly designed elimination challenge, I thought. It let a team that completely fucked up their breakfast service escape unscathed because they made a decent lunch while the three teams that were fighting over dinner appeared to have made three really good dinners and to have done fairly well with every other meal. I feel for Kenny, because it's clear that he really is one of the more skilled people in the competition both technically and in terms of quality, and yet he keeps getting sandbagged by the structure of the competition.

Yeah, they should go back to the drawing board on that challenge. You essentially only had to cook one really good meal out of three to be safe. I didn't like it at all. Angelo's rivalry with Kenny is really starting to grate on me. It reminds me way too much of Hosea's dickbag jealousy of Stefan in season 5 and we all know how bad that season was. This season is really reminding me of that. Lots of mediocre chefs with only 2 or 3 good ones, and even the good ones would probably have gotten raped on last season's cast.

I actually liked that format. I'm still not quite sure about both members going home, but I think it did remove some drama even if it isn't quite fair that you're relying on someone else to survive.

I looked at it that you had to screw up 3 meals to go home, not that you had to do one good one to be safe.

But it wasn't even that you screw up three meals as you don't cook 3 meals that are as good as someone else's one meal. It didn't work for me at all.

See, I don't think the teams that were forced into cooking dinner actually screwed up any of their meals. They just didn't cook a breakfast or lunch that were so stellar as to top everyone else's (which in the breakfast group meant beating a much larger contingent of teams). I'd almost rather they did it the opposite way: you got to move on to lunch if you were one of the top six teams at breakfast, and on to dinner if you were one of the top three at lunch, so that progression was a sign of quality. Then pick a dinner team as the winners of the round with a big prize; find a loser from the breakfast failures to send home. Think about it: the three dinner teams had good if not out-of-the-park offerings at all three services, but one of the winning lunch teams didn't even plate their breakfast stuff fully.

Just now saw this little disclaimer at the end of the last episode...

"Winning and elimination decisions were made by the Judges in consultation with producers"
"Some elimination decisions were discussed with Bravo"

and

"Contestants are informed of the rules and must meet eligibility requirements to receive announced prizes"

Never noticed those before. Are they new ? The first two seem to be pretty straigt forward, but what is the third one about ?

They've been on there for years and serve as a source of constant accusations of conspiracy and tampering.  Colichio has maintained a bunch of times that the producers don't meddle in the judging, but who knows.

I guess that shows how much attention I pay while watching TV.

Is this the only format with disclaimers like these ?

And of course do the producers meddle in the judging. They need to, to ensure an ongoing narration. Is there anyone left who thinks Reality TV is "real" ?

Pretty sure Runway has the same disclaimer.

Man, this season is already really grating on my nerves. Angelo's obsession with Kenny is giving me a real creepy/stalker vibe, the two couples that seem like there's possible romance angles also really fucking annoying, and the fact that most of the chefs just don't seem worth a shit is draining my interest.

I like how all the chicks are drooling over Kenny tho, and I think a couple of the guys too.  :O

Seriously I hope Angelo dies in a fire.  He's the most annoying person on there so far.

The show overall isn't the best this season, I don't mind them showing more of the chef's interactions tho.  I think the producers just want some fucking to go on so they can spice it up. 

Most of the time I'm just not thinking, 'wow, that's a really interesting plate' or 'great idea'. It's like, eh, ok, that's pretty good. And you have a bunch of chefs who whine about everything: I don't make pies! I don't use a grill! I don't work outdoors! I can't work with food if I don't know what's going to be there! If you read Collicchio's blog, I think that if anything the editing is downplaying the amount of whining from most of the contestants about the challenges.

I think they are whining cuz some of the challenges are more like Dinner: Impossible, then what Top Chef should really be about.

What, using a charcoal grill? Or coming up with some good ideas after seeing what you've got to work with rather than deciding on something in advance and getting it from Whole Foods? The latter is something a really good chef should be doing anyway--going to your vegetable supplier and butcher and seeing what's seasonal, what's good, what's unusual, and working with it.

I think that it would be a better show if they would tell the chefs about their cooking conditions in advance.  Then we could see if their culinary skills would shine under all conditions.  Similarly, the time constraints they put on the chefs are sometimes bordering on absurd.  The drama they create for the fans does detract from the actual cooking. 

I think if the Top Chef and Top Chef Masters challenges were closer in spirit that would be better, yes. But I don't have any problem with time constraints as long as the expectations and the ingredients are in line with those constraints. (e.g., don't hand people something that simply can't be good without hours of braising and give them 45 minutes). That's where the "bag of beans" complaint was strange: if you've got dried beans and you don't have a pressure cooker, you can't make beans in anything less than a day, really.

This annoys me as well. If you are going to pull timed shenannigans like that, you might as well be doing an episode of "Chopped," which is about the most hackneyed cooking competition on TV. Here's a Boston Butt, some dried farva beans, fish sauce, and some avacados! Make me some magic in an hour Chefs! Go!

This show is supposed to be better than the drek reality on the Food Network.

Angelo is the shit, some of you don't like fun.

He also has absolutely zero competition and it was obvious before the first quickfire even happened. If they give the title to someone else this year they may as well just bring Ilan on the show again and give him the award.

No. He can cook. He and Kenny seem to be the only really good chefs on this season. But goddamnit, he is becoming more irritating than Marcel, as grating as Spike. He's like dry ice in the jockstrap.

He's not even fun to watch cook.  He has no personality except for being a douche.  I think Kenny is just as good as Angelo, but he tends to do too much in his dishes.

Prediction: Neither Kenny nor Angelo wins this season.

That seems very possible. Kenny is clearly technically skilled but he honestly does seem to think that the more shit he puts on the plate, the better it is. It's like a kid who is told to write a 8-pg. paper and thinks that if it's 20 pages, it's automatically better.

Even before the "peagate" episode, I was pretty much done with the season. It's a talentless and listless group of people. None of them actually seems to even like food: I have no sense of what they like or why they like it. Most of them bitch about every little thing: they don't like to make cold food, they don't like grilling, they don't like toothpicks, they don't like swordfish, they can't make a pie. I've scarcely seen anything in the competition that I'd really want to eat or anything I'd want to cook, which even the weaker seasons have had. Most of the competition set-ups have been actively stupid or jury-rigged (switching people in the middle of the exotic foods quickfire was just stupid).

And then the pea thing. Seriously, assholes? You're going to pretend that the producers don't know full well what happened, with cameras up the ass of every contestant? If that guy made a puree himself, he didn't do it automagically in ten minutes during the second cooking session: if you just stick peas in a blender with some broth, you don't get a yummy pea puree, I guarantee you. So either there's footage of him doing the prep or there isn't. If there isn't, he took it. If he took it, kick his ass off the show. Otherwise, let's just go full douchebag and have some of the chefs walk around naked and fight for the immunity idol and urinate in each other's food and so on. At which point I might as well be watching Gordon Ramsey scream at some fuckwit line cook who doesn't know how to burn toast. Colicchio is nattering on at his blog about how they'll never know the truth and it didn't really hurt the competition that week and Alex will just have to feel the horrible secret shame of it if he did it and in the meantime the cockbag producers are all capering about saying how 'peagate' makes the show so exciting and controversial and fun. Over and out for me this season.

Very true. I tried this once with some  :ye_gods: results. The reality was you have to puree the peas, pass the whole thing through a strainer to dump the skins that make the whole thing gross, and then add a bunch of seasonings, cream or butter.

Yeah, the peagate thing was ultra retarded. I'm not sure why the producers don't allow the cameras to shitcan anyone for out and out cheating. Hell, they kicked a guy off for trying to shave Marcel's head in season 2, why the fuck shouldn't outright cheating be penalized in the same fashion?

Because the producers this season seem to think they need bullshit Hell's Kitchen style drama editing to get viewers. I'm sure they're in ecstacy about how many people are pissed off about that episode--that was probably what they were trying for. This week they'll either reveal that they knew about it and were waiting to drop the boom or that Ed left his shit in the cooler. If it's the latter, though, it'll be the first time they *didn't* show that during the episode, presumably to manufacture more drama. I think they'd better watch it: this is the kind of shit that drives people away from a show. Not all publicity is good publicity, no matter what the cuntweasels in the culture industry think.

This.  They must know whether the guy cheated or not.  They film fucking everything and have video evidence. 

If Top Chef becomes Drama Chef, I'm out.  Just cook, damnit. 

Happened in Season 2. You still seem to be watching.

I didn't watch Season 2, actually. But also, this is coming after Season 6, featuring a mostly talented and likeable cast, some attractive food, and a relative minimum of over-the-top drama. What was so wrong with that to the point that the producers decided to switch to a different approach?  If it had gotten poor ratings, that would be one thing, but it was one of their most successful series in terms of popularity.

What can I say?  I'm a slut.

Last season was so much better.  Maybe I am just remembering the main personalities but it seemed last year that if you had given them toothpicks they would have been all, "Fuck yeah!  I'm going to mkae the best goddamn toothpick appetizer you ever had even if I've never served shit on a toothpick in my life.  Also, I'm going to do it better than those other schmucks."

This years it's a lot of emo and there is what?  Two competitors and those competitors are going to compete themselves right out of the competition.

Last season had 4 legit competitors, two or three decent chefs and more also rans. This whole season seems like also-rans other than Kenny and Angelo, and I don't think either of them are in the class of last year's top 4. They are just like season 5, only there aren't any compelling, interesting people like Stefan and Fabio to watch, so it just seems like a bunch of whiny douches.

One down, one to go (they try to make it look like Angelo is next to go in the preview but that is almost always a fake-out). Alex or Amanda go down in some order the next two weeks.  I actually think Ed has the inside track right now.

Kevin Kenny is out ? Had no time to watch since "peagate".

Squeee!

edit: I am bad with names.

If by Kevin, you mean Kenny, then yes. If you mean Kevin, as in Kevin, then no.

A true laywer's answer.  :grin:

:heart:


Can't wait to see him getting kicked from the show, though. Was there much drama ?

Some. Kevin went sorta bonkers in the "let them get drunk while we talk shit about them room".

Never liked him, I am rooting for Angelo  :awesome_for_real:


edit:splleing

Alex is like an embarrassment to Top Chef.

I'm done. I'm completely uninterested in the rest of this season's contestants. They cook boring food, are annoying to watch and really don't interest me in the slightest. I might pick it back up if there's a next season, but it better not suck like this one.

Yup. Also hated Gordon Ramsey's new amateur-cook competition, which just to me seemed to completely miss the point. (Ramsey continues to talk to the contestants like they're people trying to save their business or get ahead in their profession: these are people who like to cook for their families and friends. Different narrative.)

Colicchio is being a total douche in defending this season at his Bravo Network blog for the show, too, which surprises me--just shows you that people only stay classy as long as the prevailing conditions allow them to, I guess.

Yeah, this season is a pretty big let down.

I start to get the feeling that all is staged and rehearsed... no one is such a dick in real life (while being filmed for TV)


"What are you laughing at ?"  :awesome_for_real:

This is a great program i have seen all the shows of it.

That is surprising - I have not been reading his blog (tuned out this season after three or four epsiodes, but I did catch Restaurant Wars), but in the past Tom would call out the bullshit.  He is probably in coasting mode now though, after so many seasons. 

The post from him that stands out was the one he wrote after season five, in which he all but admitted that Hosea was shit, but he won because someone else always fucked up challenges just a little bit more than he did (like Stephan in the finale).  I think during that season he also called all the chefs together on air and told them to get their shit together since they were cooking so poorly.  Bummer that he isn't doing that anymore.

Reminding you all that I called Angelo the winner before the first quickfire ended.

Colicchio's most recent blog pretty much acknowledges all the hate the season has gotten and doesn't really try to disagree any longer--but he does promise that the finale will have some good food in it.

Ed's restaurant Plein Sud recently gotten staggeringly raped by both the New York Times and the Village Voice--one of the most negative restaurant reviews I've ever seen from either of them.

I skipped the last few episodes but my wife and kid made me watch the last week's (with Tiffany's elimination). Food looked marginally better, but only just, and the cheftestants are as blech as ever. Angelo is a seriously weird motherfucker though. The spouse told me that he had a whole freakout thing going about his Russian mail-order bride or something like that, she couldn't tell if it was some kind of gay-hiding thing or if he was talking about some woman he had in a pit who gets the lotion or the hose or what.

From the NYT review. Ouch.

That's actually how Ed makes me feel. He's like a sad puppy that you don't want to take home, but rather, take out of his misery.

He's just pitiful.

That kind of describes this entire season.

The editing this season has been terrible. You have to read Colicchio's blog, watch the extended judges tables to get real answers.

fuck this show

Winning by not failing.

Yet another Top Chef show, this one is All Stars (http://eater.com/archives/2010/09/22/top-chef-allstars-announced-premieres-december-1st.php) with people from past seasons.

Muppets on a cooking show.  I don't care if it is for a quickfire, I think I'll pass on this one.  

That actually doesn't bother me. I don't care who the walkons are for the quickfire's as long as the challenges are interesting and sane. I'd rather have 2 minutes with the cookie monster introducing a cookie challenge than something silly like the DC yacht voyage where the yacht had, well, absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Stephen the Sommelier!

I could have been mean and made a Gail Simmons/Miss Piggy reference. 

I notice that most of the real-world successful past contestants are giving this one a pass. It's more like "Top Chef: People Who Didn't Lose in the First Two Rounds, Provoked a Lot of Twittering, and Whose Careers Are Primarily About Having Been Top Chef Contestants".