Watch What We Say: Top Chef Masters

By Jason Lee

June 12, 2009

He's here to plump *clap* you up.

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I don't want to bore you too much with what actually took place in the episode - keep in mind, this is a review and not a recap. Suffice to say that for the rest of this season, each Quickfire will revisit a favorite Quickfire Challenge from a past season of Top Chef and this one required our four Masters to cook a scrumptious dessert in 60 minutes for a group of Girl Scouts (yeah, not their best challenge). The Elimination Challenge was better, sending the Masters back to college where they had to cook a three-course meal in a dorm room with nothing more than a microwave, toaster oven and hot plate (GREAT challenge).

As a self-professed fan of Top Chef, I really enjoyed three things about this new series and didn't enjoy two things. In the good pile, I gotta say, the caliber of chefs and critics are really high. These people know what they're doing. At one point, one of the chefs accidentally leaves all of his food in a freezer instead of a refrigerator overnight. As opposed to some of the self-pitying complaints that we might get from a typical Top Chef competitor, the Master sucked it up and put out a great set of dishes.

Likewise, the critics are well-spoken and highly articulate – after all, this is what they do for a living. It's a big contrast to our typical judging panel on Top Chef. While fantastic at what they do, Tom Colicchio is a chef and Gail Simmons is an editor at Food and Wine Magazine. The only real critic they've ever had on their judging panel was Toby in Season 5. The scrutinizing panel of critics in Top Chef: Masters is truly intimidating.




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Additionally, I appreciated the camaraderie and sense of fun that the chefs brought to the table. They're playing for charity and don't seem the least bit inclined to allow their performance on Top Chef: Masters influence how they think about themselves as chefs. They're established and respected and they know it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the disappointments, which must first and foremost start with the new host, Kelly Choi. I'm not sure why she's hosting this show – beyond some hosting duties of other food-related television programming, she doesn't seem like that big of a food expert. She certainly pales in comparison to the level of chefs and critics on the show. But beyond her expertise, she just seems wooden. Akin to the detested host of Season 1, Katie Lee Joel, Kelly feels uncomfortably scripted. You simply do not get any of the charisma or sense of improvisation that you do from Padma. Kelly is pretty much just a hotter version of Julie Chen.

And while I've acknowledged that the increased camaraderie led to a decreased level of adolescent immaturity (in which every perceived affront or criticism from the judges was taken as a personal attack), it also, confoundingly, reduced the overall drama of the challenges. In your typical Top Chef episode, each chef is 100% aiming to win the title and knows that the smallest mistake on any given day could lead to their dismissal. The challenges are tense intersections between skill, ingenuity and luck.


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