<p>Another show I love to watch! Seems like it’s been forever since we’ve had a regular TC season. Enjoyed “watching” Paul’s season with you all so thought I’d start a thread for the season that starts tonight - and as a heads up that it IS starting - I just happened to come across the info!</p>
<p>Oh, I LOVE Top Chef! Thanks for the heads up so I can set the DVR!</p>
<p>Agreed. thanks :)</p>
<p>I was pleasantly surprised by the first episode, where it looked like they picked a group of talented chefs and were judging them on their cooking creativity and kitchen skills. Then I saw the preview - oy. Tricks and manufactured drama ahead.</p>
<p>Finally watched last night. I love this show! So good to have it back.</p>
<p>So happy that Wolfgang Puck will be more involved - love that guy!</p>
<p>Tom is always so TOUGH on the contestants it seems. Sometimes I just want to see him have a little fun! </p>
<p>Interested to get to know some of the contestants better. Interesting the tasks each judge chose to test them on. Very true what Emeril said about soup - a truly good bowl of soup has much depth and interest to it. Not just broth and noodles!!</p>
<p>Top Chef has its ups and downs for me… but I always watch. Having said that, I wish they would have more episodes like last night - where the chefs’ skills are really tested rather than episodes where they cook with one hand, on a candle instead of a stove while blindfolded and using canned ingredients.</p>
<p>I’m with you scualum. Sometimes I miss the early episodes. It seems more gimmicky at the beginning and more about your cooking skills later. I can still remember the one where they went to Target in the middle of the night. Strange.</p>
<p>Liked the episode last night also. Liked that each chef had a different way of determining how they rate skills.</p>
<p>I’m sure the producers were thrilled the former model made the cut.</p>
<p>Thinking about this first episode, I was surprised - should I be? - that not a single chef seemed to know the omelet method demonstrated by Puck. That’s the traditional way you make an omelet in a French professional kitchen, down to the tapping of the arm that holds the pan. You can find videos of the technique on line, including an old one of Jacques Pepin doing it with his typical technical perfection. I saw the omelets made were with one exception brown things that seemed to have been cooked like a fritatta and then inelegantly flipped with the aid of a spatula. Made little sense to me.</p>
<p>I also noted the one guy who came through at Craft didn’t exactly have technique boning fish. </p>
<p>I’m not criticising the chefs, just noting some at least seem lacking in what I would consider basic culinary arts school or line chef skills.</p>
<p>Ahha! Stefan returns! He can be such an a_s but I love him!</p>
<p>Felt like the episode was too much for an hour - seemed rushed. </p>
<p>The Asian woman is rocking it!</p>
<p>Thing I noticed is that as these competition cooking shows have become popular - not just Top Chef of course - there is now a standard set of preparations and presentations which essentially all “quality” chefs use. The dishes served looked basically the same and were largely variations on the same theme, both in how the mains were cooked and the sides and quantity and arrangement. </p>
<p>Good? Well maybe this helps build a better food culture in the US. You can still walk into most restaurants in the US and get a thing of meat next to a starch next to a vegetable with the only thing uniting them being the cultural expectation that this is what you get when you order food. Another good? People understanding that seasoning is important. Not long ago even on Top Chef the contestants seemed to treat seasoning as just salting and not as what the food is cooked in, served with and under, etc.</p>
<p>The bad? I’m not sure but creativity seems pushed to the margins. They all know how to use dollops of Asian seasoning. So this one makes x sauce and this one adds this bit of fruit. Tinkering around the edges. BUT, when you have 45 minutes to make a dish working with 2 people you don’t know it’s not fair to expect more.</p>
<p>I would love to see Top Chef do more with vegetables and grains. Most of the show remains “cook some protein well”. Most of the world’s cuisine takes the protein out of the middle of plate and integrates it into a dish of grains and/or vegetables. I don’t see that on the show. I see these chefs as taking shrimp and adding an Asian sauce to them instead of making a dish that incorporates shrimp as an ingredient.</p>
<p>Checking in. Thanks for the heads up, abasket. Is there also a Next Iron Chef thread?</p>
<p>Kind of embarrassing that the 3 veterans were at the bottom. It seems that as the years progress the chef-testants get more and more “seasoned”. Do the vets really have an advantage having been on the show before or has the competition substantially improved? At the end of the episode one of the chefs was complaining about the vets having an advantage, as another chef pointed out how much of an advantage could they have when they are at the bottom. Should be interesting to see how long the veterans last!</p>