“Top Chef,” my favorite cooking competition reality show, premiered this past Wednesday on Bravo, beginning its 10th season with a new and exciting way to weed out the weaker chefs.
Judges Tom Colicchio, Emeril Lagasse, Hugh Acheson and (my personal favorite) Wolfgang Puck took the 21 contestants and determined during the course of the episode who was talented enough to move onto the official competition, which takes place in Seattle this year.
Colicchio took his batch of chefs to his restaurant Craft in Los Angeles, and had them work the line for his customers for a night. As far as the challenges first faced by these Top Chef-hopefuls, Colicchio’s weeding-out process was the most intense. He had the chefs sweating bullets as they tried their best to make a decent risotto for table five while Colicchio stared at their knife-work with with unsettling concentration. Three of his group’s five chefs got their chef jackets for Seattle.
Emeril (probably the most well-known celebrity-chef judge on the panel — BAM!) asked his five chefs for a soup, the one dish he believed shows the true skill level of a chef. While it may sound easy, Emeril proved to be a tough judge for the liquid meals, and ended up sending two chefs packing their knives for sub-par soups.
Unibrow chef extrodinaire Acheson demanded an even duller meal from his chefs — a salad. But if that dead-behind-the-eyes stare Acheson gave to his chefs while they prepared the dish was any indication, a simple salad just would not do the trick. One chef fried kale for her salad, a practice I didn’t know existed and now desperately want to try. She, along with three others of the five chefs, was given the go-ahead for the Seattle competition.
And now on to loveable Wolfgang Puck. This thick-accented, hugely funny chef put his chefs through the ringer with a request for an omelet from each of them, claiming that when he first started as a big-headed chef at 18 years old, he tried to prove himself with an omelet and failed spectacularly. While watching his chefs work over the course of 45 minutes, he sprouted funny one-liners like:
“A stove is like a woman; it never does what it’s supposed to do.”
“If you’re missing something, I probably ate it.”
“When it comes to judging, I’m a pretty easy guy, as long as they do it exactly the way I want it.”
Puck sent one of his six chefs home, proving that he might be an easy judge after all.
All in all, it was probably the best premiere episode “Top Chef” has had so far, and it leaves me looking forward to the rest of the season.