Out with the Masters, In with Season 6

Before I begin to discuss last night's Top Chef Episodes, I'd like to talk about professional integrity vs. "selling out to the man."

In February, at the SOBE Food Fest, I met Rocco DiSpirito. Now, he was already not one of my favorite celebrity chefs...because he's not even a restauranteur (I think I spelled that right) or a restaurant chef or even a TV show host. He had some "reality" TV show years ago where he threw his mom in a kitchen to cook and the restaurant failed. Then he became known as one of the "25 sexiest men alive" in People magazine. Basically, he's famous for being famous. So, I saw him at the BubbleQ dinner that we attended, and asked for him to sign my Top Chef book. He was mentioned as a guest judge. I also asked him if he liked doing Biggest Loser, another show I enjoy watching. As he's about to walk away, he says something to the effect of..."Go to my website, and download my demos." Ugh...can you be more of a walking advertisement for...yourself?!

Yesterday, as I was preparing for about 3 hrs of Top Chef, I watched TV much of the day. What'd I see? Not one, but TWO commercials with Tom Colicchio. Clearly this was to promote the new season of Top Chef. One commercial is for Diet Coke, the other for American Express. I rely on Tom Colicchio for his sincerity and genuine passion for food...how can he endorse Diet Coke? Couldn't he at least choose a commercial for, like, wild salmon like Ben Stein did? And I thought it was bad when Meatloaf endorsed A1 Steak Sauce...at least that's somewhat ironic.

If I ever see Bourdain in a commercial for Mac n Cheez, I'm done!

Okay, so on to the shows last night. I wasn't thoroughly impressed by anyone on the new season of Top Chef. In fact, I think the challenge was stupid, mostly because half the people could not properly define the word "vice." Perhaps they should've made it about "sin." And the guy who's like a Jewish version of Richard's brother...yeah, he needs to be cut immediately because I just can't deal with that.

The more touching of the two episodes last night was certainly Top Chef Masters. It was pretty awesome, actually. I like the challenges presented on Masters, but last night's was just amazing. For those of you who are actually reading this but did not watch it, it was down to three chefs: Hubert Keller (French cuisine), Michael Chiarello (Italian cuisine), and Rick Bayless (Mexican cuisine). The challenge was to create 4 dishes (I hope I remember these correctly):
1. a dish from your childhood
2. a dish that made you know you wanted to cook
3. a dish from your first restaurant opening
4. a dish that represents your future

The judges were the 5 previous top chef winners, along with the Masters and regular Top Chef judges. The stories were amazing, the comraderie was amazing, and I think the best charity got the $100,000 prize (Rick Bayless - charity to support small farms). You know how people will say "but they were all winners" to make sure no one's ego is crushed? With the three of them, that really is true. I appreciated what all 3 had to present to the judges. And in the way that Colicchio kinda lost some street cred with me, Chiarello definitely picked up the points! He went from some mediocre Food Network chef to someone who I think has a definite culinary point of view and executes dishes well. He was smart...created NapaStyle before becoming too famous, so it DIDN'T look like he was a "sell out."