‘Top Chef’ Without Padma

We only have a one-episode sample size on which to dine, but it’s time to begin assessing the era of ‘Top Chef’ without its longtime host Padma Lakshmi. No one on Earth could replace Padma’s mix of terrifyingly world-class beauty, arrogance, good humor, intelligence, and general knowledge of food. And, to the credit of Top Chef, they didn’t try. Instead, they went with a low-key host option: Former champion Kristin Kish, who, unlike a lot of other Top Chef winners, hasn’t overexposed herself doing stupid Food Network cooking competitions. Therefore, she seems like a fresh, authentic face for the show, familiar but not over-familiar.

In Kish’s debut episode, she presented herself as she truly is, or as close to a TV personality on a highly-produced reality show can: As a former champion who brings deep knowledge of the game, and maybe a little PTSD. While Kish is the nominal “host,” in reality the show is using her in a kind of hosting triumvirate with head judge Chef Tom Colicchio and food critic Gail Simmons, both of whom have been with the show since the beginning and therefore provide the kind of continuity Top Chef needs to survive without its biggest star. For the opening challenge, Kish, Colicchio, and Simmons all asked the contestants to make a simple dish, either soup, roast chicken, or stuffed pasta. Kish approached her duties with a simplicity to match the challenge, and she was neither wooden nor distracting. Transition successful.

Padma’s last season was an international challenge that took place in London, so it kind of had a post-COVID “return to glamour” vibe. Kish’s debut, on the other hand, takes place in Milwaukee, a perfectly nice city with access to lots of farm-fresh Wisconsin ingredients, but it’s not London. The whole season has a very back-to-basics vibe about it, which is why the first episode was so very satisfying.

I’ve come to appreciate that Top Chef contestants are not celebrities, at least not yet. Other televised cooking competitions are either sad displays of third-tier sous chefs cooking in an Arizona parking lot, or highly overproduced concepts featuring the same 25 cooks competing against one another in an increasingly baroque series of formats. Bobby Flay now presides over a “Triple Threat” of three former Top Chef winners or near-winners, who do his cooking for him, and former Top Chef contestants have to do things like host a game that takes place at “midnight” with “wild cards” or highly-artificial beach-boardwalk showdowns. It all has a very meet-the-devil-at-the-culinary-crossroads vibe.

That may be what awaits the winners or big personalities of this year’s Top Chefs, but at the moment, they are just high-level restaurant grunts. Our clear villain within the first five minutes is David Murphy, who owns a San Francisco restaurant that literally bills itself as selling “Trash Pie + Natural Wine.” He’s covered in tattoos and wears annoying tinted glasses and a cowboy hat.” He looks exactly like an Andy Samberg parody of a hipster chef. In his opening line, Murphy makes fun of Tom Colicchio’s fashion sense. This is an American culinary hero you’re talking about, bub. Watch it.

Murphy ends up having to cook a stuffed pasta, But he “doesn’t do pasta,” he says, and ends up making a disgusting gnocchi that he doesn’t stuff but does cover in chicken blood. Naturally, this lands him in the bottom three, where he literally has to cook for his life making a quick dish using kitchen scraps. The result is some bland shrimp bathed in two different but somehow identical sauces. Kish tells our villain to pack his knives, and he vanishes back to his Trash Pie kitchen, tears in his eyes. Meanwhile, our week’s winner is a relatively humble chef from Colorado by way of Monterrey, Mexico, who wins over the judges with a simple but delicious bowl of pozole.

It’s all very satisfying in a food TV world featuring the clownish antics of Gordon Ramsay and his ridiculous catchphrases and rotating kitchen platforms. Food Network carnivals come and go with the seasons, but there can only be one Top Chef. The show has one winner, and Top Chef  always wins, no matter who’s hosting.