by Tim Peters

Created on: June 23, 2008

I grew up in a family of chefs. My father went to a culinary school, then started in a nursing home, and now is part of a major food-service company's think tank. My mother has spent decades studying every cookbook she could get her hands on and watched Julia Child's "The French Chef" religiously. My sister learned everything she could about Japanese cuisine and loves making sushi rolls. I always felt like I was the weakest of the four of us, but I seem to have a knack for grilling, baking, and frozen desserts. So after waiting three seasons, I finally decided to give Top Chef a chance.

Top Chef's Season 4 was based in Chicago. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 were based in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, respectively. As you might expect from the title, it's a reality game show where the goal is to cook better than your competition. The winner gets $100,000 in cash, a feature in Food & Wine Magazine, a trip to the Food & Wine Classic (a culinary convention hosted by Food & Wine Magazine) in Aspen Colorado, and the title of Top Chef. The competition is fierce, the challenges are tough, and the show is incredibly entertaining.

Padme Lakshmi, host of Top Chef since Season 2, gives the missions to the chefs and also judges, but her most notorious role has to be her delivery of the eliminations near the end of each episode. She stares down the contestants in the judging area, lets them sweat for a few moments, and announces to one of the chefs, "Please pack your knives and go." As far as catchphrases go, this one perfectly sums up the tone of the show. I learned early on that chefs are among the most bluntly honest people in the world. The contestants on Top Chef are no different. I don't know how much swearing there was in the first three seasons, but this past season had chefs swearing left and right almost non-stop. And they've got good reason to swear: The judges are candid in their evaluations and the challenges constantly put the contestants under extreme pressure. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who didn't unleash an F-bomb or two after a chef the caliber of Ming Tsai or Ted Allen goes into excruciating detail about the fatal flaws in a dish they spent hours preparing and cooking.

Even if you could find such a person, I'm glad none of them made it to Season 4. For it is this brutally honest assessment of things that made the contestants' interviews throughout the show so entertaining. None of them were shy about what they thought of themselves, other contestants,

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>