Pack Up Your Knives

The sixth season of Top Chef continues tonight. I would have given warning a week ago, but I was caught off guard when the initial episode appeared last week. Good thing I had already prepared to watch the Top Chef Masters finale that night, otherwise I would have been stuck watching one of the twenty seven re-runs of the first episode between its initial broadcast and next week’s show. Nightmare scenario narrowly averted!

Anyway for those who’ve missed it so far, this season the producers chose a slightly more mature and accomplished field of cheftestants than they have in the past. The average age seems to have risen by five or six years – and when that’s the difference between 25 and 30, it makes a big difference in experience and confidence. Also there are no “culinary students” and only one “caterer” in the bunch. These are all chef owners, executive chefs, and sous chefs, some of whom have worked for some of the biggest names in the business.

My personal favorites at the moment (though admittedly it’s too early for it to mean much) are Jennifer Carroll, the hyper-competent and accomplished Philadelphia chef with very little tolerance for BS, and Kevin Gillespie, a jolly looking Atlanta chef with a beard like a rhododendron bush who aced the first elimination challenge in the hyper-competitive field. Michael Isabella, a Washington D. C. chef is looking very strong while thus far getting the Top Chef producers’ full-out villain edit (boo! hiss!). Could make for some good foodie drama in the coming weeks.

Lest I tempt the patience of the readership here, I’ll not go into much detail on the cheffy goings on from week to week. But I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one here tuning in, so it might get mentioned from time to time. For more detailed reviews, the best blog hands down is Dom Armato’s Skillet Doux.

10 thoughts on “Pack Up Your Knives

  1. I think that I’ve mentioned at least once in the SITD comments that my wife is a chef (semi-retired). She has worked in some of the best restaraunts in Kona — and Kona has some of the characteristics of Maui. It is a small town (about 20k people, 3-4 thousand of whom are tourists on any given day) with world class restaurants.
    So I’ve been close enough to the world of haute cuisine restaurants to make an informed judgment.
    If any of your kids ever decides to become a chef, slap them. Keep slapping them until they decide on a sensible career.
    The pay is low, the hours are long, the work is physically demanding and uncomfortable. It’s a business that burns people out. The goal of every ambitious chef is to own a restaurant or be partners in a restaurant. If their goal is achieved they will work longer hours and probably go bankrupt. Profit margins are slim and the business is very sensitive to economic downturns.
    A real executive chef spends more time managing inventory and managing people than they do cooking. The fact that you like to cook and can prepare tasty dishes doesn’t mean much if your F&B guy signed for a fifty pound case of beef tongues and you can’t prepare and sell them at a profit.
    So all the contestants you see on these cooking challenge shows are at least half crazy.
    But don’t take my word for it. Read the first half of Orwells essay Down and Out in Paris and London, where he describes life working as a plongeur in Paris restaraunts. Not much has changed in 80 years.
    You can find Orwell here:
    http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#letterO

  2. Hard to disagree with your assessment of the profession, Terry. Having dabbled around the edges of the restaurant world in my younger days, the insanely long hours for not very much pay was one of my lasting impressions.

  3. Excellent comment Terry.

    Finding a devoted group of foodies here has been an unexpected delight.

    I must confess to having discovered the joys of restaurant quality
    cookware; I’ll never go back from 1810 heavy duty stainless steel equipment in my kitchen. Quality cutlery….ahhhhhhhhhhh.

  4. That’s right DG. Through Top Chef I have discovered the glories of the Toyota Rav 4, GE Appliances and the Glad® Family of Products.

    Wait…what?

  5. Bogus Doug, SitD’s gay correspondent, wrote: “Lest I tempt the patience of the readership here, I’ll not go into much detail on the cheffy goings on from week to week.”

    Thank Ganesh for that. Angryclown doesn’t go in much for the foodie blah blah blah. Kind of elite and pansyish, dontcha think? The only chef Angryclown can name is the revered Mr. Boyardee.

    But there is something about your post that attracted Angryclown’s attention, Bogus. Who is that chick in the picture? Very nice. Angryclown would let her eat his meat anytime.

    Wocka wocka!

  6. LearnedFoot Says:
    Foote put his in his mouth when he wrote:
    August 26th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
    That’s right DG. Through Top Chef I have discovered the glories of the Toyota Rav 4, GE Appliances and the Glad® Family of Products.
    Wait…what? ”

    LF, you perhaps are mistaking a description of a quality of stainless steel for a brand name.

    18/10 refers to alloy and crystaline qualities of austenitic/300 type of steel sometimes used in surgical equipment as well as restaurant items. It is desirable in cooking both because of the way it distributes heat, and because it is non-reactive to acidity, among other reasons.

  7. LearnedFoot Says:

    August 27th, 2009 at 7:49 am
    DG,

    It was a joke dinging on Top Chef’s incessant product placement.

    Lighten up Francis. ”

    I figured it might be a mistake because I didn’t put the “/” between 18 and 10, so it made sense to explain further.

    I tivo through commercials, and tend to tune out product placement.

    While I defer to Terry’s spouse and her professional experience, one of the rare instances where I have found the reality to dramatically exceed promised performance was the difference in cooking with professional quality stainless compared to the pots and pans usually found in a family kitchen (even the expensive stuff). I expected some difference, but that it was SO much better was a very pleasant surprise. Having experienced how much of a difference there is changes a little bit what you see watching chefs work.

    Terry’s description of a professional kitchen describes it well; to do that grueling kind of work day in and day out (and night) the quality of the equipment the professional kitchens use, it makes sense that it has to make that kind of difference. There’s a good reason for the phrase ‘pack up your knives’.

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