Among the promo videos for Top Chef: Seattle, Padma Lakshmi promised us something: that this season would be better than the last. Specifically, she described this season as “back to basics.” In I-can’t-explicitly-denounce-my-own-show speak, that basically means, “Guys, I am so, so sorry for what happened in Texas. We get it. The show is about cooking. We forgot, and we’re sorry.” At least that’s how I’m interpreting it, with great hope for these next few months. The show’s 10th season is an excellent, commemorative opportunity for the producers to right the ship—to step back and evaluate why the show became successful in the first place, and why its fans threw their collective remote at the screen last season.
Let’s be honest: Texas was mostly a disaster. It pushed the show well beyond its limits for ridiculousness and then poured tortured, Texas-themed puns and clichés all over it. The producers chipped away at the good graces the show had earned over the years by embarrassing the professional chefs they should have been promoting. (For the final blow, see “Culinary Games,” in which the contestants had to ski around and then shoot guns at their ingredients in a “culinary biathlon.”) Top Chef needed to renew its focus on what made the show work originally—clever challenges that showcased chefs’ talent and resourcefulness. The best episodes feature restrictions or constraints that force the chefs into surprising, creative territory.
This back-to-basics approach transformed the 10th-season première into an hour that will likely rival the best of this season—a feat since the debut is typically a snoozer episode before the actual competition begins. Instead, tonight’s compelling installment managed to showcase the talents of our would-be contestants, give us a preview of the judges’ temperaments and tastes, and highlight some of the challenges young chefs must overcome to succeed. The basic-skills game is a premise we’ve seen before during debut episodes of Top Chef, but here it’s polished and perfected. Instead of lining them up in a tag-team race to dice onions or butcher a chicken, tonight, the chefs were separated into four groups and dispatched to a judge’s restaurant across the country for their final test before landing a spot on the show. The tasks weren’t just arbitrarily chosen and performed devoid of context this time; the four groups competed in challenges specifically crafted by a judge according to that judge’s experience in the kitchen. Divvying them up like this did wonders for the show’s pacing—instead of a giant pack of 21 chefs all doing the same thing, the episode allowed us to jump between the four locations and to look at just a handful of new faces at a time. The challenge also tells us every bit as much about the judges as it does the competitors.
First up is Tom Colicchio, who alongside Gail Simmons has been around for all 10 seasons, claiming more than 150 challenges judged. He’s also the most hard-nosed of the judges, and his challenge for the chefs in this episode is no different. Tom’s interested in seeing how the contestants move around the kitchen and handle various tasks, but he’s also monitoring who performs well under pressure. (Specifically, pressure from him.) He throws them into his kitchen at Craft, before and during service, to see how they cope with being bossed around by him. And to their credit, most of the chefs handle it well, performing prep work (filleting and portioning salmon, butchering a duck or chicken) and firing dishes. He quickly gives away the first Top Chef coat to our fledgling supervillian, John Tesar, a known (talented) asshole from Dallas. Lizzie Binder and Micah Fields take the other two spots, riding on excellent technical skills and an ability to jump into Tom’s kitchen without fuss.