The Decadent Endgame of Food Competition TV

With the advent of Top Chef Season 22. prime season for food TV is upon us. Top Chef is like The White Lotus of food competition. There’s a decadent, dark underbelly. But it’s also so glamorous that it remains aspirational, for both chefs and viewers, who know very well that despite cooking-show glory, food careers can go very sour, very fast. Even without longtime host Padma Lakshmi, Top Chef remains a premium watch, one of the great American TV products of all time. But like produce spending too long in transit, it barely conceals the rot at the core of food television.

Top Chef is really just the luxury feeder pageant of a vast web of cooking competition. Currently in season is the Gordon Ramsay Inc.-produced Next Level Chef, a supremely gimmicky but vaguely entertaining show that features some professional chefs, some home chefs, and some dubious Tik Tok personalities grabbing food items off an ascending and descending platform and preparing dishes in kitchens that range in quality from gourmet to fake-grimy. It’s stupid, but fun on its own terms.

Meanwhile, over on Food Network, Guy Fieri is hosting Season 6 of Tournament Of Champions, an NCAA bracket-style battle royale that pits TV chefs and restaurant chefs who are either occasionally on TV or aspire to be on TV against one another until someone walks away with an UFC-style championship belt. There is a “randomizer” in this show that determines exactly what these chefs will be cooking, and in what style. This show is also quite watchable, if a little too full of itself.

Those are the entreés on the current food competition menu. But there are also at least a dozen of apps and side dishes currently airing, from Chopped, which is so TV ubiquitous at this point it might as well be The Price Is Right, and a variety of other Food Network shows that range from anodyne to extremely terrible.

Once, food TV existed to be entertaining, but also to teach people how to cook. But, as Alton Brown recently pointed out in an insightful interview on Nick Gillespie’s Reason podcast, no one is learning anything about food anymore from food TV. Even America’s Test Kitchen, as instruction-y a cooking show as remains on TV, has a competition on Amazon Prime, turning its longtime cooking-show instructors into gimmicky judge characters. It’s a sport and a spectacle, as prepackaged and fake as the Real Housewives. If you watch a lot of food competition shows–and I obviously do watch far too many–you start to see the patterns grind themselves into place.

Next Chef Standing

For instance, one of the contestants on this season’s Top Chef, which, ironically, filmed in Canada last year before Donald Trump declared a Cold War on our neighbors to the north, is Kat Turner, a perfectly capable indie-rock style chef from Los Angeles. Turner first came to the attention of food-competition viewers as a super champion on Chopped.

Meanwhile, on Tournament of Champions, we got to watch Pyet Despain, a stunningly beautiful Instagram influencer of Native American heritage who made it into our living rooms by winning a season of Next Level Chef, and then immediately descended into the Food Network meat grinder. Despain went down in round one against Jet Tila, a perennial Food Network contractee who competes on some shows, judges on others, but is always competing on TV.

There’s a ridiculous amount of incestuous cross-pollination among the shows. Ramsay’s empire, which includes Master Chef and Hell’s Kitchen, rarely releases one of its characters into competition orbit, since his brand focuses largely on mentoring and elevating amateur cooks or low-end regional line cooks, most of whom would lose badly in the big leagues. Instead, Top Chef serves as the main sellout feeder for a series of lousy Food Network shows.

You’ve seen the pattern again and again. Brooke Williamson, one of the greatest Top Chefs ever, has gradually faded into the Food Network wallpaper as a bored judge on Chopped, the host of such nonsense as Beachside Brawl, and one of Bobby Flay’s hired hands on the execrable show Bobby’s Triple Threat, where Williamson and former Top Chefs Tiffany Derry and Michael Voltaggio compete against other former Top Chefs, Iron Chefs, or people who aspire to be something like that. Chef Alex Guarnaschelli, who is admittedly a very entertaining TV personality, was once an Iron Chef but now finds herself hosting a Food Network show that takes place in a suburban Phoenix grocery-store parking lot. She’s on TV about as often as Jake Tapper.

If you watch enough food competition, you can see the sellout happen in real time, as chefs like Antonia Lofaso or Stephanie Izard go from being elite Top Chef competitors to simulacrums of themselves watching people fake-grill proteins in a fake grocery store while Guy Fieri gives them wacky nicknames. They’re not really to blame; I can only imagine how much money Gordon Ramsay is offering Richard Blais or Aaron Sanchez to be his shuck-and-jive second banana on various shows. A Food Network contract must also be incredibly lucrative. Why else would people take them? Sure, the chefs have to sweat occasionally for a couple of hours. But it beats the financial pressure of trying to run a restaurant, much less a restaurant empire.

Cooking for Dollars

Yet it all feels kind of pointless, like a hamster wheel where chefs cook literally almost every protein on Earth except for actual hamsters. Of late the Food Network has really bottomed out with a couple of shows that absolutely must be the endgame, the bottom of the pot. One is called Wildcard Kitchen, hosted by the appealing Eric Adjepong, a American chef of African descent who didn’t win Top Chef when he was on it, but has definitely won the Q-rating war. The premise of this show is that Adjepong is hosting a decadent after-hours game that combines poker, hard alcohol, and three rounds of cooking where chefs bet their own money. And then some other poor sucker from the Food Network roster has to judge the dishes. And probably competes later in the season.

I have series doubts as to whether or not someone like Jet Tila is really laying $5,000 on the table betting that he can make the best Breakfast For Dinner. It seems like Monopoly money. But if not, if this really is the high-stakes poker of cooking, then that’s a further Hunger Games slap in the face for the regular shmo who gets to be on Chopped one time, finishes third, and wins nothing, going back to his failing food truck in North Carolina, or the regional sous chef with bad taste buds whose claim to fame is that Gordon Ramsay dumped a milkshake on their head during season 11 of Hell’s Kitchen. Playing food cards for big bucks is smug, elitist, and borderline offensive.

Knives Out

But now Food Network has truly struck bottom with ‘House of Knives,’ a show that it clearly meant to piggyback off Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, but completely missed the zeitgeist. In this show, host Scott Conant, who is dashing enough as a Chopped judge but seems incredibly stiff and uncomfortable in this role, welcomes in six chefs, including former Top Chefs John Tesar, Shirley Chung, and Kelsey Barnard Clark, as well as Anne Burrell, who has fallen very far from her pinnacle of the Food Network mountain, as they compete to be the chef who gets to sit on a “throne,” which looks suspiciously like a repurposed airport lounge massage chair. The set is cheap. The food is cheap. Judges Marcus Samuelsson and Judy Joo should be ashamed of themselves. This show is gross and stupid and borderline exploitative.

The winner does get $100,000, which is a decent amount of money, but it’s also the amount of money that Mr. Beast gives away on a daily basis for people willing to press the red button or whatever. And it’s still nothing compared to the $250,000 you get for winning Top Chef, whose prize package this season includes a whole bunch of other goodies as well.

But be careful what you wish for by winning Top Chef. One could say Kristin Kish, the winner of perhaps Top Chef’s best season ever, has won the ultimate prize. She now gets to be the host of Top Chef. Would you rather host a TV show or run a barely-profitable luxury kitchen? I know what my answer would be.

But like the Highlander, there can be only one Top Chef host. One of Top Chef’s early winners, in Season 5, was Hosea Rosenberg, a smart, competent, not-particularly-TV interested guy from Colorado. Rosenberg showed up again last year on “Chopped Legends”, playing in a big tournament, needing the money and exposure because his daughter has a rare genetic disorder.  I mean, god bless him. Donate to his foundation. He ended up in the final three of the tournament, playing against Kat Turner, who is on Top Chef this season, and Sara Bradley, who nearly won Top Chef twice and is currently on the grind in Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions. Nice work if you can almost get it. So now what?

Let’s just hope that Rosenberg’s appearance generated enough money and publicity for his cause that he never has to go on House of Knives if it gets an unfortunate second season. Food competition TV has been around long enough to show us that the hamster wheel never stops turning.  Like the dishes that always need doing, food TV never gives audiences, or chefs, a break.