Top Chef: Masters

Originally posted at Edible TV on June 12, 2009.

Wednesday night saw the premiere of a show I have been waiting for since I learned of it.  Top Chef: Masters (Bravo) is an all-star chef competition featuring 24 of the top chefs in North America.  This, hopefully, is the cooking show I have been waiting for since the finale of Next Iron Chef.

To put it in a musical parlance there are bands and there are musician’s bands.  The Canadian power trio Rush comes to mind.  If you aren’t a pot head or over the age of 30 you have probably never heard of Rush, unless you’re a musician that is.  Each of the three members are among the four or five best in the world on their respective instruments – virtuosi, if you will.  Though they have had a solid degree of commercial success, at this point in their career they mainly enjoy a strong cult following, mostly musicians.

That was my expectations for Top Chef:Masters, a cooking show for chefs.  A pure cooking contest free of goofy stunts and backstage drama – a true match of culinary skills. What I got was something in between.

Tonight’s contestants were Hubert Keller (Fleur de Lys, San Francisco), Christopher Lee (Aureole, New York City), Michael Schlow (Via Matta, Boston) and Tim Love (The Lonesome Dove Western Bistro, Fort Worth).  Those these men may not be familiar to Food Network fans they all are true super stars.

The chefs took part in two challenges, a quickfire challenge in which they had to prepare a dessert for a panel of judges made up of Girl Scouts and an elimination challenge where they had to prepare a three course using a dorm room kitchen.

Rant Alert: Seriously, cook a three course meal with just a microwave, toaster oven and a hot plate?  Stupid!  Why throw in this kind of stunt?  You have four of the world’s best chefs and you want them to cook on a hot plate?  It is junk like this that turns me off to shows like Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen.  You want an idea for a cooking contest?  Take four chefs, put them in a super stocked kitchen and get out of their way.  That’s entertainment.

As one might expect the Frenchman, Keller, clearly had a leg up on a dessert challenge.  One would be right.  Keller took the first challenge with a perfect score from the judges which gave him a one and a half star lead over Lee and Love and two and a half over Schlow who had two of his elements fall apart because of technical difficulties.

In the elimination challenge Love started off with a handicap when he realized he had placed all of his groceries in a freezer, not a refrigerator.  He rebounded well, but Lee and Keller really distanced themselves over the Texanand Schlow.  When all was said and done Keller came away with a one and a half star win over Lee.  Both chefs tied in the elimination challenge so Keller’s dessert victory in the quickfire was the difference.

All-in-all I was pleased with the show.  Although I was not happy with the childishness of the challenges I was impressed with the attitudes of the contestants.  There was no backbiting and no arguing, both traits of other cooking contests that distract from the art.  I was also pleased with the caliber of chefs in the contest.  One of the secrets about the other shows is that they deliberately choose substandard chefs because if they didn’t then hosts and judges would have nothing to scream about.

See you next week for round two.