Top Chef: Masters
May. 4th, 2011 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanThis has been a singularly bad season of Top Chef. Some of the challenges have been less "difficult" and more "mean" ("oh, and by the way, you're going to have five less minutes than we told you, and no wait staff, and no running water"—that's not some weird exaggerated paraphrase, that's one of their actual challenges). This week they had to run the lunch rush in a fast food restaurant, and they clearly did a terrible job of it, because, duh, you can't just drop untrained people into a restaurant and drive-through and expect them to do fine with it, regardless of how good they are at making food.
Then there was last week's episode, which consisted of cooking favorite dishes of "Biggest Loser" contestants but kept to around 500 calories each. So you've got all these chefs talking about what a great thing this is, how terrific it feels to be part of these people's life changes...but at the same time, there's the occasional comment about how, well, counting calories just isn't something chefs do, and they're not used to limiting themselves in this way. They claimed this was all about "health", and yet they have nutritionists standing there telling them how many calories are in, say, a slice of bacon, as if the only health concern with bacon is calories. And this week we had one of the judges saying that one of the dishes felt like a kid's portion—that is to say, a week later, the show was right back to saying "more food rather than less".
Plus you have the fact that they advertised the show as having Ruth Reichl as one of the judges (I loved her book Garlic and Sapphires), by which they seem to have meant "one of the judges for the first two episodes". I can't tell if that's misleading advertising or some sort of deep disorganization on their part.
Alas. Well, eventually there will be another real season.
Then there was last week's episode, which consisted of cooking favorite dishes of "Biggest Loser" contestants but kept to around 500 calories each. So you've got all these chefs talking about what a great thing this is, how terrific it feels to be part of these people's life changes...but at the same time, there's the occasional comment about how, well, counting calories just isn't something chefs do, and they're not used to limiting themselves in this way. They claimed this was all about "health", and yet they have nutritionists standing there telling them how many calories are in, say, a slice of bacon, as if the only health concern with bacon is calories. And this week we had one of the judges saying that one of the dishes felt like a kid's portion—that is to say, a week later, the show was right back to saying "more food rather than less".
Plus you have the fact that they advertised the show as having Ruth Reichl as one of the judges (I loved her book Garlic and Sapphires), by which they seem to have meant "one of the judges for the first two episodes". I can't tell if that's misleading advertising or some sort of deep disorganization on their part.
Alas. Well, eventually there will be another real season.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-05 03:42 am (UTC)My favorite challenges are those that impose a restriction on what the chef can do (low-calorie, or $1 in ingredients, or must contain certain ingredients, etc.), and then we see what the chef is capable of within those boundaries. Whenever there's an unexpected twist, or something else affecting the results (like, say, performance as a fast-food cashier), it makes it harder for me to care. It should be about the food, period.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-05 03:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-05 04:11 am (UTC)The low-calorie challenge didn't feel like a very good restriction to me, in part because they were also being told what dish to make, and in part because it seemed to be actively antithetical to what they do as chefs.
UConn
Date: 2011-05-19 02:29 pm (UTC)