What’s Up With Norman Van Aiken’s Wig?
June 21st, 2007 by Brian Ries in Chefs, Media, TVI haven’t really commented yet on Top Chef, mainly because I wanted to give it a little time. In the past, it has run second place in my summer reality show hit list, behind Hell’s Kitchen. Needless to say, considering the neanderthals Fox has recruited for the past two season’s of HK, Top Chef has easily managed to take center stage. Here’s a few reasons why:
- Pretty much all of the Top Chef contestants can cook, some of them extremely well. That has become surprisingly rare in TV food shows.
- The weekly competitions have morphed from the goofy scenarios of season 1 into interesting culinary challenges, where the framework is just a reason for some fine genre cooking.
- The judges are a heck of a lot better. Colicchio and Simmons are almost likable.
- Padme Lakshmi.
June 21st, 2007 at 10:11 am
Top Chef is the bar of excellence in cooking reality. If you want embarrassing, this season’s Hells Kitchen will fit that bill (I love me some Gordon Ramsay, but JESUS.) Hopefully the Fall season’s US version of the excellent “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” will be better…but it is Fox so it is suspect.
Food Network’s The Next Food Network Star is the America’s Next Top Model of reality chef-ery. It is sad but somehow fascinating to see how seriously these subpar cooks seem to take the contest–as if being the next Guy Fieri or Robert “Buffet King” Irvine is more meaningful than owning a catering company in LA (Psssst. It isn’t.)
June 21st, 2007 at 11:05 am
Totally correct, Irene. What’s more sad about Next FN Star isn’t even that most are inadequate cooks, it’s that they are inadequate TV hosts. They stammer through the simplest challenges with all the panache of a 13 year old spelling bee champ.
June 21st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I want to know how/where FN and HK shop for their “contestants.” Is there some sort of crap pool I’m not aware of?
June 24th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I don’t understand why FOX doesn’t try to take advantage of having Ramsay and up the ante just a tad…I always like him when I see him on the BBC shows but he loses my respect on HK. Vegas resorts? Days out on some LA boat with a slew of fake breasted “chefs” who just won a dubious challenge? Ugh.