Like Around the Horn, Top Chef is a show I've come to pretty late in the day. Now in its ninth season with a number of spin off shows, Top Chef is a competitive cooking show where chefs compete with one another through a number of challenges. One chef is eliminated every week until only three remain, then the final three fight it our for a big cash prize with other bennies.
It's kind of funny, because this season is the first I've seen from the very beginning and not just in reruns, and this is the season where they've changed things up. This season they've introduced the "Last Chance Kitchen" where the eliminated chef competes with a previous eliminated chef, with the winner getting to compete against the next eliminated chef and so on until the end when the final winner gets another chance at the main competition. The Last Chance Kitchen is available on the Bravo.com website.
The main show starts with a quick individual challenge where the winner often wins immunity from being eliminated in that episode. Then there's a team challenge where the member of the losing team who did the worst as decided by the judges is eliminated from the show.
This show is interesting because failure of your teammates can lead to your demise. The current Last Chance champion, Nyesha, got really screwed by the fact that they were doing a very rare Double Elimination, so she got eliminated because her partner Dakota screwed up.
They also focus more on other skills that a chef should have. For example, when they do the Restaurant Wars challenge, the teams have to decorate and run a restaurant in 24 hours. So things like decor and speed of service come up in a way that you don't see in most other cooking shows, though you can see some of that on Hell's Kitchen.
Overall, then, I find TopChef to be pretty fun and, even though it's probably my least favorite of the three cooking shows I'm covering for the Competitive TV series.
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