{"id":5311,"date":"2009-08-26T11:57:04","date_gmt":"2009-08-26T16:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5311"},"modified":"2009-08-26T13:34:49","modified_gmt":"2009-08-26T18:34:49","slug":"pack-up-your-knives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5311","title":{"rendered":"Pack Up Your Knives"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sixth season of Top Chef<\/a> 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<\/a> 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!
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\nAnyway 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}