Top Chef 13-09: Restaurant Wars, Part 1

Thirteen seasons and ten years in, Top Chef has lost quite a bit of its luster.  Like all competitive reality shows that last long enough, it seems resigned to an eternity of good-enough, cheap-enough television that is inoffensive but no one feels strongly enough.  There are certainly worse fates for TV shows and the people who create them, but it seems worth noting that smart TV-critic types no longer talk about the show, Bravo has stopped pumping out spin-offs, and among fans the feel is that the show peaked with season 6, or maybe 8.  But hey, they always have Restaurant Wars, right?

By this point Restaurant Wars has become the most hallowed part of the Top Chef season, with a reputation for conflict, controversy, and good-looking food -- all the things that cooking competitions promise.  At the same time, it often seems like the most reasonable challenge of the season, asking the chefs to do exactly what they do for a living, just on a much shorter timeframe.  In terms of structure, it marks the point in the season where the competition gets serious and we start to actually know who all of the chefs are.  This reputation has obviously influenced the chef-testants, who bust out a pre-composed song for the occasion[1].  People talk about having "make it to Restaurant Wars" as a goal, and great the challenge with a mixture of excitement and nervousness.  This is the benefit of self-mythology: for those within the show-universe it seems real.

Naturally, Top Chef has recently taken to exploiting the reputation of Restaurant Wars by stretching it out to two episodes.  This violates the near-Aristotlean formal unity of reality competition: every episode contains one challenge (plus usually a Quickfire), and at the end someone is eliminated, so there's a natural narrative arc leading to a one-on-one showdown.  The Amazing Race has pulled this trick for years now, generally resulting in anticlimax and the feeling that one episodes' worth of content has been stretched out into two.  This year's edition of the challenge deals with this problem by splitting not just the episode but the challenge into two parts, a lunch and a dinner course.  This gives the episode as a stand-alone narrative a kind of coherency.  No one is eliminated, but at the end it seems clear that one team has "won" the lunch portion of the challenge, with the other unable to complete their service do to poor time management.

Splitting the challenge in two actually proves to be a fairly ingenious move.  In previous editions of the challenge, the focus of both the episode and the judges was on the chefs who assumed the roles of head chef and front of the house.  Those that won usually got the individual award, while those that lost were usually eliminated.  In one instance, the head chef went home for what appeared to be clearly the mistakes of a subordinate.  The chefs that filled this role also became the focal points of the narrative, leaving other chefs marginalized in the challenge that was supposed to mark the point where everyone became a major character.  This change makes the challenge both a fairer competition and better drama, to say nothing of letting Top Chef stretch it out for two episodes.

The aforementioned drama, however, has been a bit lacking this season.  In part this is do to the problem that any long-running competition show faces: there are only so many great undiscovered chefs/singers/fashion designers/tattoo artists/whatever in America, and out of that group there are only so many willing to participate in an intense and invasive reality show, and out of that group there are only so many with big personalities who make for compelling television, and after several years you or some other show has probably got to them all.  Different shows react to this limitation in different ways.  For instance, Project Runway still fields casts with bold personalities by largely not caring if they can design non-hideous clothing.  Top Chef has taken a different approach by selecting talent over charisma -- the contestant pool featured a gaggle of James Beard nominees, which I gather is impressive.  The result is that its credibility as a competition is still in tact, but viewers generally find it hard to care about anyone besides maybe thinking that Philip is a bit of a tool.  Even when split into teams, there's little to pick between two restaurants with fairly generic names (District LA and Palette) and vaguely-defined new American cuisine.

A schoolyard pick'em fails to generate much drama, other than setting up a redemption arc for last-picked Isaac, but it does create two different group dynamics.  There's always sort of a Goofus-and-Gallant arc to Restaurant Wars, and this year is no exception, but there is a bit of editorial subversion as to who exactly is who.  At first glance, District LA appears to be cohesive, despite including two chefs (Philip and Kwame) who have butted heads throughout the competition, while the members of Palate disagree about the direction of their restaurant before finally delegating responsibility.  However, by the time lunch service starts, it becomes clear that Palate is the one doing everything right.

The episode's narrative focuses on one decision made by District LA's head chef Jeremy, specifically to hold everyone else's orders while focusing on the judges.  Framing the chef's errors as personality flaws or at least strategic errors makes a much better narrative for Top Chef than the minute differences in cooking techniques, and here the episode pounces, having everyone and their mother comment on either the decision or how behind schedule District LA ends up as a result.  We are naturally repulsed by this decision, as despite our love of bourgeois cooking shows we desire equal treatment and would not like to have our own dinners delayed for any hoity-toity judges [2].  As strategy, this is uncertain -- there's no tallying of comment cards from diners or any other way for ordinary customers to have an impact on the decision, so the judges (who often act as the most petulant diners imaginable) are in fact the only one that matters.  Then again, given the always uncertain criteria for Top Chef challenges, it's hard to say that neglecting the other diners won't hurt either.

The actual food for this episode is largely unspectacular.  The cinema-of-attractions side of Top Chef is seeing fancy dishes with foams and reductions presented in cinematic close-up, looking positively sensuous.  The food in this episode fills that role, but the judges are unimpressed, describing it as somewhat safe.  After lunch, they declare that honours are even, conveniently setting up next week's dinner course as the deciding round.

This leaves us with something of a split ending.  We're told by the judges that the two teams came away from the first round just about even.  Visually, however, we're presented with District LA scrambling to fill their tickets before eventually realizing that due to their previous decisions they can't finish service -- a first, as far as I can recall.  Meanwhile, Palate is firmly in the Gallant role, calmly cleaning up their kitchen as the other team panics.  Regardless of the results of the competition, the individual episode's narrative concludes with a decisive winner and a decisive loser.  And yet, in next week's decisive episode, the judges never bring up District L. A.'s failure to complete lunch service, making the drama of the first episode ultimately inconsequential.

Some have argued that this is the flaw of recent Top Chef, that the stories it tells via editing no longer make sense.  The argument goes that the show is so intent on surprising and misderecting us that the results of the competition seem divorced from the story we've been told throughout the episode, leaving the audience confused and sometimes upset.  This culminated in the season 11 finale, where fans were largely outraged about the winner.  I'm more inclined to believe that the narratives are more uninteresting than nonsensical, that even the best editing would strain to get us invested in a clash between bland chefs temporarily creating bland restaurants.  Whatever the fault is, Restaurant Wars still seems capable of creating the contemporary definition of drama, namely conflict.  The difficulty is creating classically-defined drama -- a logical and compelling story.

[1] Notably, they burst into song before the challenge is announced.  This means that they know the challenge is coming just by how many contestants are left, which suggests both that the contestants are aware of the larger narrative structure of the season and how formulaic Top Chef has become.

[2] Although I'm pretty sure that the "diners" here eat for free, so we probably wouldn't complain.

Top Chef 10-03: Tom vs. Emeril: Turkeypocalypse

In the previous entry I wrote about how sports broadcasts do their best to take emerging, sometimes dissonant facts and pull them into a traditional narrative. Reality television does a similar thing, with the main difference being that the editor-writers of a reality TV show (even one that's entirely on the up-and-up) know how everything ends up before they start shaping events into a narrative. Because of this, reality TV creates a narrative not by using commentators or video packages to overlay a story on an unfolding event but by selectively presenting footage than suggests whatever narrative the show wants to present. It is a more convincing form of storytelling than sports, but perhaps a less intriguing one, as it offers less immediate ruptures and potential for viewer judgment [1].

Competition shows are a bit more restrained in what they can do than, say, Real Housewives or its ilk. At bottom they hinge on actual events whose results are mostly not predetermined – the editors can change how you feel about a contestant's elimination, but they can't go back and change who is eliminated. Top Chef is more interested than most in establishing its legitimacy, and all of the culinary experts that appear on the show are not about to compromise themselves by praising an obviously inferior dish. So while the writer-editors do their best to contort narratives around results while still keeping these narratives satisfying (and this is no small feat), there are still moments of rupture, where the events belie the narrative.

Also like sports, one of the main challenges for competition reality shows is making us give a damn about the success or failure of people we don't know. Making us care about eighteen unknown chefs is not too different from a Bellator broadcast or a boxing prelim trying to make us care about an irrelevant battle between journeymen. Traditional sports' response to this problem has always been to tap into city pride and regional rivalry. Top Chef and other reality competition shows take an approach more akin to fight sports, focusing on outsized personalities and feuds (like pro wrestling, presented as a sport even if it isn't really) and personal sob stories (like Bellator and a lot of sports journalism). Hence the maxim that if you suddenly start hearing a reality contestant's backstory, they're probably about to go.

We're still in the early goings of this season of Top Chef, and the question is how to differentiate between the mass of people in blue coats. Some people stand out for their personalities, their success in challenges, or their funny accent. Others fade into the background (did you know there was someone named Brooke on this show?). The previous episode added even more contestants, ones you might recognize from past seasons if you think hard enough. Season 10 of Top Chef has thus far used team challenges as a way to make the competition a bit more approachable. Not only does it result in fewer dishes and stories to keep track of, forcing competitors together generates some of the interpersonal drama that reality TV runs on.

“Turkeypocalypse” adds to this by aligning the two competing teams with personalities the viewer is already familiar with, that of head judge Tom Colicchio and post-“Bam!”-era Emeril Lagasse. They both have large personalities and distinct culinary styles, and their rapport in the kitchen is a highlight of the episode. The addition of the judges adds an overarching narrative to this week's competition. Instead of being a clash between two randomly-chosen teams, it's a battle between two different visions of Thanksgiving embodied by two masters of their craft engaging in a friendly rivalry. The invocation of Thanksgiving also adds to the episode's narrative. It carries with it connotations of tradition, family bonding, American culture, and screaming fights with relatives [2]. The chefs are competing to recreate Thanksgiving, or at least the food of Thanksgiving, in a sterile professional environment. Their dishes are loaded with an extra level of meaning because they are linked to a holiday tradition – both the specific childhood memories that Tom and Emeril narrate and the ones that the presumed American audience holds. This might suggest why the holiday special has such a hallowed place in TV programming.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The episode begins (after the customary recap and credits [3]) with a Quickfire challenge that's mostly disconnected from the meat of the episode. There's something impressive in how the episode, like most Top Chef episodes, is pared down to nothing but challenges. Most competition shows would include a few minutes of the contestants hanging out in the house (they always have to share a house in these things), talking about how they feel after the last elimination, and so on. This appears only briefly on Top Chef, with many episodes dispensing with it altogether, further suggesting the show's desire to put itself forward as a legitimate competition.

The parade of guest judges for the challenges also helps to add to that legitimacy. This week's Quickfire, for instance, is judged by Dana Cowen, editor of Food & Wine Magazine. Here we can see something of a mutual reinforcement of legitimacy. Top Chef legitimates Food & Wine by presenting it as everything it claims to be: an impartial authority which watches over the artistic and entirely unproblematic world of high cuisine. Top Chef also exposes Food & Wine to a broader, Bravo-watching audience who has no reason not to take its claims at face value. On the other hand, Food & Wine legitimates Top Chef by bestowing whatever prestige it has on it[4] and by authenticating it as a culinary competition and not just one of those trashy reality shows. The same process happens with every chef or food critic that appears on the show.

(There's also some Kindle Fire product placement in here, if you think I'm being too cynical.)

The actual challenge involves each contestant cooking a different type of dumpling, having been presented with a choice of 17 dumplings (using the term loosely) from around the world. There's an undeniable educational aspect to this challenge, as the audience (and the chefs) learn about how each culture puts its own spin on a simple concept. At the same time, there's a fair bit of exoticism here, as the obscurity of these dumplings is played for humour. The idea of Kazakh cuisine, for instance, is treated as impossibly wacky. Sheldon remarks “I didn't know that was a real country”, probably thinking of Borat. Carla just takes a wild guess at what her dumpling, fufu, is supposed to be.

Top Chef often uses Quickfires as ways to foreshadow the elimination challenge, and “Turkeypocalypse” follows this formula. Kuniko's problem with time, which will ultimately send her home, is first displayed in the Quickfire. Making a Japanese dumpling she knows very well, Kuniko is unable to get her food on the plate before the timer goes off. 

In some ways Kuniko's failure here is simply part of the artifice of the challenge. Time is obviously important in a real restaurant kitchen, but not at the point where taking two extra minutes is as bad as not cooking anything at all. The fact that Kuniko has a Michelin star in real life suggests to me that problems with sticking to the time limit hasn't hindered her outside of the artificial environment of Top Chef. Still, she gets a fairer deal than Brooke, who doesn't get a share of the pantry's flour and is unable to make a wrapper for her dumplings due to no fault of her own. Maybe she should have tried convincing Carla that fufu didn't use flour.

Fair or unfair, the challenge ends with Josie standing on top, which actually proves to be critical to the episode's final outcome. We then head into the Thanksgiving cook-off. There's no attempt to create drama via the division of teams – it's a simple division based on who is standing where. Other reality shows would look to add an interpersonal element by doing, say, a gym class style pick'em. But as much as it loves its interpersonal drama, usually playing out via endless stew room arguments, Top Chef is still questing for the mythic beast of legitimacy, and maybe the producers figure letting cast members' personal relationships shape the challenge to such a great extent is a bridge too far.

As much as the episode previews and title tease a Tom vs. Emeril showdown, the two don't really compete. Mainly Tom and Emeril just get feted, as all the cheftestants stand around reverently and listen to them talk about how Thanksgiving Should Be, then talk in confessionals about how amazing it is to learn Emeril's gumbo recipes. Even the blocking of these scenes imbues the judges with a kind of higher power. They set the menu and do a bit of early cooking, but ultimately it's up to the two teams to do the real work, as it should be. This is really a variation on a fairly standard challenge for Top Chef where the chefs have to make a special dinner (wedding/birthday/bar mitzvah/random party) for someone and appeal directly to that person's tastes. Usually these people are celebrities, but sometimes they're just randoms who are probably related to a Bravo producer. “Turkeypocalypse” bridges the gap by having the guests of honour be “Bravo-lebrities”.

These challenges are really all about the power of recall, and how a taste can become associated with a memory or emotion. This might seem like a trivial subject but hey, Proust wrote a 4000-page novel about it. As I mentioned above, holiday food is an especially rich ground for recall. As such, the chefs are behind the eight ball here, as they have to create food which outdoes the glorified memories of Tom and Emeril. They also have to add the sheen of fine dining and perhaps some innovation to traditional comfort food without undoing its status as comfort food. It's perhaps inevitable that they mostly fail.

The failures are fairly evenly distributed amongst the teams, which makes evaluating the challenge as a team competition difficult. Since this is ultimately an individual competition it's not a problem, but it does render the framework of the episode ever so slightly askew. Each dish is associated with a kind of procedural narrative, where proper actions in the beginning ensue proper results, and small mistakes in the early going spiral into catastrophe. Of course, some of these narratives are small to the point of nonexistent, but one can imagine a two-hour version of the show in which, say, Brooke gets a full plotline. The ones that we have here are edited together in a cacophonous kitchen sequence. The effect of cutting rapidly between different individuals and dishes, as well as between different camera angles and head-on interviews, is that very simple stories (Kristen cooks a good dish!) don't grow repetitive. The stories compete spatially as well as temporally, with there being ever-present wrangling for and complaining about

As the chef who is about to be eliminated, Kuniko's story should theoretically be front and centre, but most reality shows try to be a little shrewder about showcasing the soon-to-be-departed contestant. Kuniko's story here is a bit akin to the newspaper storyline in the fifth season of The Wire, as what's most important here is what's not shown. We see her running around the kitchen and helping other chefs with their dishes. When Kristen asks about Kuniko's dish she bluntly responds “Haven't touched”.

There's a lot of value to what Kuniko does in the kitchen in this episode, and it arguably makes sense in a team of eight people for some to take subordinate roles. But Top Chef is a show that's all about the auteurs of cooking, the ones who are perceived to be the real creators behind the food at a restaurant. In a previous season a contestant was eliminated for not putting his own dish first, with the rationale that “This is Top Chef, not Top Sous-Chef”. Despite the prevalence of team challenges the order of the day is creative selfishness. All creative art requires some self-centeredness, or at least a willingness to leave the rest of the world to its own devices for 10000 hours, but in the culinary world in particular the cult of the auteur chef erases the underpaid and overworked people that are usually responsible for actually cooking the food you eat at that five-star restaurant. Top Chef plays into that absolutely with its image of the kitchen as a place of solitary creation. It is Kuniko's failure to fill the role of the auteur, along with her inability to cook a potato, that gets her the boot in “Turkeypocalypse”.

Even though she has immunity, Josie gets the real “loser's edit” in this episode with her disastrous attempt to cook a turkey. From the beginning we can sense that this is sort of a lost cause: she agrees to take on this job because she has immunity, suggesting that she's already aware that there's a strong possibility of failure. In the accompanying interviews she chuckles about her failures, standing in contrast to the stern craftsmanship which CJ brings to his turkey. What unfolds is a comedy of errors, with Josie putting the turkey on the wrong shelf of the oven, burning the outside, and then overcompensating for this mistake and undercooking the meat. This narrative is more strictly functional and procedural: Josie fails to go through the proper procedures with the right attitude, and as such is responsible for her team's failure.

These are fairly simple narratives, but because there are so many of them, your average episode of Top Chef reiterates its central points multiple times. We see a mistake happen before us, see some talking-head interviews talking about the mistake, have Tom breeze through the kitchen and comment on the mistake, have the judges talk about the mistake while they eat the food, and finally have the contestant confronted with their mistake at Judge's Table. (This is not even including the “coming up next” commercial bumpers which are endemic to reality programs). Somehow Top Chef usually keeps this all from being too repetitive, probably because there are so many mini-narratives up in the air that they never linger for long, and because the judges have enough personality and charisma that their reiteration of the plot is still entertaining. This repetition also adds a smooth structure to the episode.

Overall the quality of the dishes ends up mixed (or so we're told), but Emeril's team is declared the losers based largely off Josie's badly-cooked turkey. We hear the judges' comments twice, once as they eat the food at first and once as they formally judge the contestants, but the two settings are drastically different. When the judges are served this distaff Thanksgiving dinner in a buzzing restaurant, it has the air of an actual dinnertime conversation, albeit a particularly judgmental one. They riff off each other, talk in kind of gossipy tones, and don't sound like they're about to hang whoever cooked this beef.

Spatially, the official Judge's Table set almost mimics the dining experience. The chefs are on their feet, isolated, while the judges are sitting down and operate as a group. But visually the setting is entirely different – a dark room with hazy overhead lighting instead of a well-lit restaurant filled with warm conversation. The judge's comments operate according to a more obviously formal system, with each contestant being ripped apart in turn before a final decision is ultimately made. The whole thing has the air of a Kafkaesque trial in which anything the defendants say can and will be used against them, and any lack of response will be taken for criminal apathy. Instead of the tender, exploratory music of the dinner scene, we have background music that sounds like a sinister wind. The loser's end of Judge's Table opens with sliding smash cuts of the four imperiled contestants, combined with the sound of a screen door shutting an inch away from your ear. That part is actually kind of painful.

(There's also a Judge's Table to determine the winner, but it's much less striking and carries less narrative weight. Competition shows always privilege failure over success in their structure.)

Josie gets beat up a lot verbally in this sequence, and it's made clear that if she didn't have immunity she would be gone. Reality TV thrives on its clowns, the people who are simultaneously exciting and aggravating to watch, and Josie fits into this archetype well. When a clown does well, they're a fan favourite, but when they do poorly they're humiliated with a particular relish, especially if said clown is a woman. Josie tastes both sides of this dichotomy in this episode. The challenge's winner, batty Italian stereotype Carla, is also a clown character and is successful here only to be cut down shortly. These are the characters that stick out the most in the early episodes, but at the cost of their own credibility, and they almost never win.

I shouldn't make it out to sound like Top Chef draws entirely on personality conflicts, as there's a lot of attention paid to cooking technique and the science of food. Tyler is interrogated at Judge's Table as to whether he tempered his gumbo. I have no idea what that means, and Top Chef is okay with that. Its strength is its ability to turn these technical questions into narratives, so that Kuniko's undercooked potato is not just an undercooked potato but a sign of her overly-passive personality. But the technical elements, including jargon that is sometimes hard to understand for culinary neophytes like myself, help ground the series and prevent it from being a drama-fest.

A drama-fest is exactly what erupts after Kuniko's departure. John Tesar, who boasts about being the “Most Hated Chef in Dallas”, remarks that “as a chef, you can do potatoes in your sleep”. Other people read a lot into his statements, seeing them as disrespectful, and a noisy argument erupts. This scene is included after Kuniko's good-byes and exit interview, and seems like almost an unnatural appendage to the episode – like the monster crawling out of the lake at the end of a horror movie.

There's something to be said for the way reality TV shoots arguments. In a scripted drama series, an argument would be carefully constructed, with clear stakes and probably a choice one-liner or two. But in reality TV arguments are tangled, chaotic, sometimes repetitive and generally pointless. This scene is not really artistically coherent – several characters jump in only for one line, and what John says isn't really bad enough to make him an out-and-out villain – but it directly conveys the sense that tensions are spiraling out of control in unexpected directions. The form of the argument, and its visceral unpleasantness, replace the role content would play in a scripted scene. We don't come away from this scene thinking in terms of heroes and villains: Josh jumps in to defend Kuniko, but he still comes across as an ass. We also don't come away thinking that both sides had a point, because really nobody has a point. Instead, it is the argument itself that is the villain, the unpleasantness lingering on the idyllic design of the competition.

Of course, all of this article ignores one of the primary draws of Top Chef, which is the images of the food. The show frequently includes pictures and quick cuts that are pure food porn with no narrative purpose. My training is mainly in words and not images, so I've mostly left the signification of these shots alone. It is interesting, however, that we get to see the food in various forms throughout the challenge. We see the raw meat being sliced, and then eventually it winds up as a perfectly-composed high cuisine dish by the end. This is the same sense of process that informs the show's narrative. One wonders if it can also be seen as a metaphor for the creation of Top Chef: taking a big bunch of raw footage, chopping it up into little pieces, covering it in narratives and received ideas, and finally presenting it to a discerning audience.

[1]One interesting exception occurred recently on Big Brother, where a number of contestants' racist remarks and otherwise offensive behaviour was not included in the TV broadcast but were available to viewers of the 24/7 online stream. Viewers objected to this and as a result of the controversy CBS began including the offensive behaviour in the actual Big Brother episodes. I don't watch the show, but it would be interesting to know how the racists in question were being presented. Did someone who was edited to be a hero become a villain because of what happened outside of the main episodes? Either way, it would seem to be a prime example of viewers finding ruptures in non-scripted programming that lead to oppositional readings, as well as one of the most clear-cut instances of audiences forcing a show to change the plot.

[2]Being Canadian, I'm a bit out of the Thanksgiving loop. We have a version of it in October (who has a harvest festival in late November?) but there are no parades or apocalyptic sales – my family usually has a large but quiet dinner. Thanksgiving is really a relic of agrarian society, when harvest season was automatically a carnivalesque event. I guess in America the harvesting of vegetables has been replaced by the capitalist harvesting of commercial goods – but that's an essay for another time.

[3]The credits sequence for season 10 are mostly the same as those of previous seasons, including the weird “ooh yeah” song, but the usual run-down of contestants is replaced by a couple of goofy group shots. This may signal this season's focus on group challenges and team dynamics, at least in the early going.

[4]I'm not much of a foodie, so I really have no idea whether Food & Wine is taken seriously or is considered a joke by people in the know. I have a hard time imagining anyone taking a magazine seriously nowadays.

Top Chef 3-05: Latin Lunch

Food television is one of the stranger genres that emerged out of the great cable TV explosion.  Shows like Top Chef or Food Network programming seem completely unsuited to the medium, as food interacts primarily with the senses completely removed from TV.  On Top Chef the judges pay lip service to food needing to appeal to all five senses, hence their favouring of elaborate plate setups, but in reality taste is what's really important, with smell and touch also playing key roles.  This means that, unlike a show like American Idol (or Top Chef's unofficial sister show, Project Runway) the audience has to be told, not shown, whether contestants are succeeding or failing.  From the soft-porn shots of each contestant's dish, it's really impossible to tell whether it tastes good or bad.  This would seem to violate some of the most important rules of storytelling, and completely estrange the audience.

From a different perspective, it seems only natural that art and popular media would deal with food -- after all, it's a critical part of daily lives, and something that appeals to us on a visceral level.  A cooking show can be educational, offering a direct intervention into our lives, or sympathetic, providing us with something we can relate to our own cooking experiences.  However, Top Chef does neither.  It's hard for the ordinary mom making a tuna casserole to relate to the stainless-steel kitchens and haute cuisine of this show, and as far as the educational aspect goes I've watched several seasons without figuring out what the heck emulsification means.  (Imagine my shock when I finally looked up foie gras on Wikipedia).  Moreover, the type of food that gets cooked on Top Chef is not exactly something that appeals to a mass audience.  Before this started airing, if you asked me to draw a Venn diagram of fine dining connoisseurs and reality TV fanatics, I probably would have given you two circles several metres apart.

But despite this all, Top Chef works, both commercially and aesthetically.  It's currently in its ninth season with several successful spin-offs and is widely recognized as one of the best reality TV shows around (although this may be damning with faint praise).  Even though I'm a fast-food junkie who would probably hate most of the dishes on the show, I love it anyway.  And this is because, although Top Chef certainly doesn't elide the topic of food and the pleasures of food porn, it's not fundamentally about food.  It's a story about competition, and a perennially well-executed one.

After the previously-ons and opening credits, "Latin Lunch" starts off as most Top Chef episodes do, with a rare moment or two of the chefs hanging around their home apartment.  The whole "having to share a house" part of the competition is a vestigial element of previous competitive reality shows, as it rarely seems to be more than a producing convenience here.  Every once in a while they'll be some trivial drama when someone is using all the burners to cook breakfast or something, but it mainly seems like an odd addition to try and add cheap drama to a series that is at least ostensibly focused on competition.

I say "ostensibly focused" for a reason, and not just because I like using big words.  Format-wise, Top Chef appears to be all a battle about culinary skills -- there's only a minute or so of hanging around the house before we jump into the first challenge, and the competitions are loudly announced by jarring smash-cuts to super-serious bumpers.


But this appearance is somewhat deceiving.  While the vast majority of its runtime is spent in competition, the bedrock of Top Chef is the kind of interpersonal relations, carefully edited narratives, and sudsy drama which propelled Survivor to the top a decade ago.  The key to Top Chef's success is how it weaves these stories primarily through the cook-off segments[1], allowing it to eschew the aesthetic of trashy reality TV (wannabe actors screaming at each other in a McMansion) in favour of high-culture sheen, while delivering all of the pleasures of those trashy shows.  In other words, it's a guilty pleasure without the guilt (and this may be what lead to its critical success more than anything else).  On a second look this becomes clear even in the one-minute prologue to this week's challenges, which quietly lays the groundwork for all of the episode's major storylines: the increasing difficulty of the competition, Joey's redemption for previous poor performances, and Hung's arrogance and growing insanity.

This brings us to the show's major strength, editing which is among the best on TV (at the very least, it's among the most editing on TV).  In this episode there are eleven chefs still in the running, which means that on top of any interpersonal stories there are eleven narratives to weave together into a short amount of time.  Some of these narratives are simple -- the basic conception, construction and cooking of a dish -- and these tend to be the ones that are lost in the shuffle, the quiet contestants you don't really notice until they make it really far.  Dishes that succeed or fail, or cooking narratives that display the contestants' personal traits -- like Hung's arrogance over his later-pilloried rice -- get more time.  And all this is not counting the Quickfire Challenge, which is the same thing in even less time.

The visual style of Top Chef is, then, often chaotic, filled with many second-long cuts of people running around the kitchen or chopping vegetables.  This style not only allows the show to fit in all of the different contestants and their narratives, but creates an undeniable sense of tension and conveys the stress the chefs are going through.  The panic of the kitchen gets taken to another level this episode when Hung starts running around with a knife, almost stabbing another contestant.  That there are still coherent narratives through this is a minor narrative, and the skill of the creators of Top Chef should not be underestimated just because it's a reality show.

Of course, reality TV conventions are still here in force.  For instance, "Latin Lunch" features a prime example of the "loser edit", where a contestant who's previously been in the background is suddenly developed and focused upon, only for them to get eliminated at episode's end.  So in this episode we have Lia suddenly being all over the place, with the episode focusing on her anxiety about the competition, her growing friendship with Casey, and the flaw that leads to her downfall -- her unfamiliarity with Latin cuisine.  All that was missing was her calling a loved one or revealing that she had cancer.

This is a shame, as Lia was one of the more likable people on the show this season.  The perpetual front-runners thus far are arrogant Tre and Hung and obnoxious Howie and Joey, without anyone really worth rooting for.  On the one level, this is oddly reassuring: if the most successful chefs happen to be unlikeable (and this doesn't seem like a stretch in such a competitive profession), then they should win, and the plucky underdogs should go home.  But reality TV is all about manipulating reality into a narrative, and it's a curious narrative that the Top Chef producers have chosen here.  Given that you can edit someone to have just about any personality you please, it's hard to see how they're going to pull this into a satisfying narrative.  Or maybe I'm just an oddball and we're supposed to find Joey endearing or something.

The challenges for this episode are fairly standard, the sort of mid-season treading-water stuff that makes for a fine but not especially memorable story.  The Quickfire involves the chefs attempting to make dishes out of frozen pie crusts, one of many challenges that involve salvaging low-culture food products and reworking them into haute cuisine.  There's a comparison to be made here between the show's own aspirations, attempting to class up the reality format (at least on the surface) and its fondness for this type of challenge.  If that comparison is accurate, it bodes well for the show, because the chefs never fail at converting the kind of cheap food that us lesser mortals gorge ourselves on into something that at least looks and sounds like it would fit into any pretentious French restaurant.


The elimination challenge, which takes up the bulk of the episode, challenges the contestants to cook a Latin cuisine dish for the cast of a telenovela.  This challenge embodies a lot of the ethos of Top Chef.  First off, no celebrity is too obscure or too unrelated to cuisine to work an episode around.  Secondly, there's a commitment to mass appeal that at least tempers the show's high-culture pretensions.  No matter how much these meals may appeal to someone with "developed palates", they also need to succeed with less knowledgeable audiences like the actors of this episode.  In the past, contestants have had to cook for children and the TGI Friday's audience, and people have gone home for failing to appeal to the people they dismiss.  In that sense there's an unexpected egalitarian streak to Top Chef.  Finally, the show argues that being a good chef means being well-rounded, able to cook any style and any type of food.  In the actual culinary world, Lia's unfamiliarity with Latin cuisine might not hold her back this much [2], but here it makes her an incomplete chef and ultimately dooms her.  There's an expectation of universal mastery which is reasonable if you want to call someone the best, although perhaps not quite practical.

So we have here the essential contradiction (or perhaps just contradiction) that keeps Top Chef going: the clash between the trashy and the refined, the feels-good and the good-for-you.  It's compulsively watchable due to the skill of its execution, and it placates both the elitists who wouldn't normally deign to watch reality TV and the reverse elitists who spit on your foie gras.  And maybe that goes a bit towards explaining why I can't stop watching it.

Next week: "If it ain't Bjork, don't fix it."

[1]If I was feeling provocative, I might make a comparison between this and pro wrestling, which similarly weaves a fabricated narrative through the natural emotional beats of a competition.  Or at least pro wrestling does that when it's done right, which it rarely is.  Top Chef is, of course, moderately less fixed.

[2]The dish she's sent home for does look genuinely bad -- a bunch of trout on a soggy polenta cake -- so the lack of flexibility isn't the only reason for Lia's dismissal.  And it's rare to see food that looks genuine unappetizing on this show, where I frequently suspect that all of the food is actually pretty good despite the disgusted faces of the judges.