How Arkansas Extremist Tom Cotton Pissed Off Top Chef Tom Colicchio

With Steve Israel's policy of never targeting GOP leaders, policy makers and committee chairman keeping the DCCC out of the MN-02 race that pits progressive Mike Obermueller against reactionary incumbent John Kline-- chair of the powerful and destructive House Committee of Education and the Workforce-- Blue America was over the moon that Bill Maher has stepped into the breach. Maher is bashing Kline up but good and bringing his repulsive anti-family record to the attention of voters in southeast Minnesota. This was a Maher tweet from early Thursday morning:

Blue America is working the positive side of the street (for a change), talking about why Obermueller is a better candidate than Kline from a policy perspective and what a natural district MN-02 would be to flip, despite Steve Israel's intent on protecting Kline again. (Obama won the district against McCain by 10,000 votes and beat Romney in a squeaker by around 300 votes!) Al Franken is on the ballot this year and he's substantially ahead of disreputable bankster/GOP crackpot Mike McFadden who is struggling in the polls to get to 40%. (You can help Obermueller's grassroots campaign here.)

And, of course, Maher isn't the only celebrity out talking sense about midterm races this cycle. Up top is an excellent segment from Chris Hayes' Wednesday night show featuring Top Chef Tom Colicchio. TV viewers may know him as the positive, no-nonsense head judge on every season of Bravo's Top Chef, and foodies know him as the founder and executive chef of the Gramercy Tavern (NYC) and founder of Craft (NYC, L.A., Dallas, Las Vegas, San Francisco) and the winner of 5 James Beard awards. But he's also been one of the most stalwart political fighters for healthy and sustainable food policies in America. Wednesday night he was on with Hayes explaining why Tom Cotten is a terrible choice for the Arkansas Senate seat currently held by Mark Pryor. It made me wonder if other celebrity chefs are politically active.

I would bet that a dick like Robert Irvine is a Republican but he's a Brit so there's no way to be sure. He did make a bunch of bogus claims that you would generally expect from conservatives, not normal people-- being a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, receiving a Scottish castle from the Queen, being a White House chef and making Princess Di's wedding cake, all false-- and cheating investors out of their money, another very right-wing move. The one actual Republican among the celebrity chefs I could find was Texas meat cooker Tim Love. I wouldn't eat in a restaurant associated with him anyone-- nor with Irvine. Celebrity chefs who have been supportive of Democrats, besides Colicchio, include Alice Waters, Rachel Ray, Elizabeth Falkner, Bobby Flay, Marcus Samuelsson, Mario Batali, Jean-Georges Vongerichten (a major Obama bundler) and Daniel Boulud.

Remember, the best chance the Democrats have to keep conservative Mark Pryor in and neo-fascist closet case Tom Cotton out seems to rest with making Arkansas voters wonder why the rest of their congressional delegation-- 4 Republicans and Pryor-- voted for the Farm Bill while Cotton joined extreme right-wing ideologues from other states to oppose it. So who was right, voters are supposed to wonder, Senators Boozman and Pryor and Congressmen Womack, Griffin and Crawford… or a Tom Cotton who's happy to see taxpayer money flow into the coffers of his own family farm while voting no on a Farm Bill that everyone else in Arkansas sees as a reasonable compromise?

The most recent legitimate poll, from Suffolk University last week, shows Pryor leading 45-43%., even though 37.4% of respondents admitted their most trusted source of news is Fox. The polling analysis memo offered an interesting word association question for Cotton in which the top scoring words were "dishonest," "untrustworthy," "crook" and "dislike him." They didn't test for closet case or gay. Pryor's #1 word association, by far, was "like him."

This was Colicchio's OpEd for Food Policy Action:

The food that feeds our families and supports our agriculture industry is affected every day by the decisions that elected officials make in Washington. Members of Congress regularly vote on policies that affect the quality, availability, and sustainability of our food supply. And yet, there has been very little attention to bringing transparency and accountability to that discussion.

As someone who has spent his life in the food business, I firmly believe that when citizens enter the voting booth, they need to be as informed about food policy as they are about a candidate’s views on job creation, foreign policy, and social issues. Unfortunately, in Arkansas right now, we have a classic example of what’s wrong with the political discourse around food in this country.

U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, who is running for Senate, released a campaign ad that misleads voters and misconstrues the facts about the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is a critically important law that shapes food production, determines nutrition assistance, and supports farmers, among other things. Sadly, Rep. Cotton’s ad wrongfully accuses President Obama of “hijacking the farm bill and turning it into a food stamp bill,” which simply isn’t true.

But don’t take my word for it. the Washington Post called the ad’s claims “invented history,” and the non-partisan fact-checker Politifact gave the dubious ad its “Pants On Fire” rating, which is the equivalent of an “F” on a high school report card. The truth is, SNAP (a.k.a. food stamps) first became a part of the Farm Bill during the Great Depression, and has been included in every Farm Bill that has become law since 1973. It has been supported by Members from both sides of the aisle for decades.

Today’s voters deserve better. We’ll never be able to improve food policies in this country if our leaders distort and distract instead of discuss and debate. Voters need information, which is why I co-founded Food Policy Action, a non-partisan organization dedicated to bringing light and accountability to the food debate.

Every year, Food Policy Action puts together a Legislative Scorecard to help voters get the information they need to know exactly how their elected officials vote on these important issues. You can find more information about the scorecard at www.foodpolicyaction.org.

Last year, Rep. Tom Cotton scored a 0% on the Legislative Scorecard. In other words, on every single vote that touched upon sensible food policy, Rep. Cotton voted the wrong way. In light of this score and his blatantly false ad, I know this much to be true: the public deserves better. It’s up to voters to make sure Rep. Cotton gets the message.

On the trail of Batman at home in Long Island City (Queens)

Top Chef Duels -- surprisingly not-terrible! --
is on Bravo tonight (we'll talk about it soon)


Any sign of Batman? (photo by Mitch Waxman; click to enlarge)

by Ken

I was thinking I might write about Bravo's Top Chef Duels this evening, in time for tonight's new episode, having finally looked at a couple of episodes and discovered that it's surprisingly not-terrible. We got to watch how a couple of chefs, going head to head, approach the given challenges -- starting with a pair set by the episode's contenders -- and execute them, which is kind of fun as long as we don't pretend it adds up to anything more.

Meanwhile, though, there's this blogost of Mitch Waxman's, from his Newtown Pentacle blog, that I really wanted to share. Mitch has been the subject of a number of posts here (here, for example; and most recently here, photographing Astoria at twilight). On the blog Mitch chronicles his wanderings, camera gear at the ready, around (most often) his Queens home base of Astoria and related territories plus the Brooklyn and Queens basin of his beloved befouled Newtown Creek (he's the official historian of the Newtown Creek Alliance), in and around which he does frequent tours for Brooklyn Brainery and Atlas Obscura, among others.

One reason for keeping up with Mitch's blog is information about his tours as they upcome. But a larger reason is the gloomy charm of his urban wanderings, always accompanied by those spectacular pictures of his.

This story of Mitch's, from a suitable-for-Halloween-season blogpost called "conscious or subconscious," found our narrator doing some night shooting in the Court Square area of Long Island City, which he notes he has learned from the new TV series Gotham is the Gotham City home base of -- you guessed it, Batman! While "popping off a few exposures" in Bat-territory, he writes, "one suddenly experienced a tap on the shoulder."

A fellow was standing next to me, just a little too close for comfort, and watching as I played around with camera settings and assumed the series of odd postures which have proven themselves efficacious when attempting to gather low light shots without deploying a tripod. He said “Can I ask you a question?” as he slipped his hand into his knapsack. A child of New York in the 1980’s, and a Batman fan, I immediately began working out defensive solutions in my mind. There were five. Two would just put space between me and him, one would have busted his pelvis, and the other two would have put me in front of a judge for attempted homicide. The sixth solution was to wait, and find out what the question was.

He slowly pulled his hand out of the carry all, and there was something large – and heavy – held in his grasp. “Here we go again” I thought.

As his hand, grasping a large object which was black in coloration and clearly metallic, exited the bag – one was prepared to grab his wrist with my right hand and pull his arm and a probable weapon down toward the sidewalk and away from me. My left arm was primed to deliver a sharp elbow to his throat while I was simultaneously preparing to deliver a hip check that any NHL player would have approved of (this is one of the two solutions in which I end up in front of a judge). That’s when the fellow asked his question – “can you help me learn how to take better shots at night” as his hand finally emerged from the knap sack and produced a consumer level Nikon with an f3.5 zoom lens on it. Thereupon, a short lesson in aperture, ISO, and shutter speed ensued.

Gotham, indeed.

Ah, the surprises of the night here in Gotham City. (On the Newtown Pentacle site, watch for the link to sign up for an e-mail subscription, which gets you an e-notification of each post that goes up. I almost always click through, and am almost always delighted.)



Long Island City at night (photo by Mitch Waxman; click to enlarge)

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Food Watch: Tell the truth, couldn't you do with some nice crisp and lacy onion rings right now? Kitchen Daily's got 'em

"Some of the laciest, crunchiest onion rings you’ll ever taste"

by Ken

It just so happens that Kitchen Daily's got just the recipe for you, and son of a gun, it turns out to come from our old Top Chef pal Richard Blais!

There are all sorts of tricks for making deep-fry batters both delicate and crisp. Sometimes, recipes call for beating in beer or club soda (the little air bubbles lighten the mixture), or adding vodka (alcohol boils off more quickly than water, enhancing a batter’s texture). For these onion rings, Richard Blais uses both strategies and amplifies their effect by aerating the batter in a siphon. The results are some of the laciest, crunchiest onion rings you’ll ever taste. This batter is equally good on all kinds of fried foods, like chicken, pork cutlets, fish and other vegetables.

Now don't give up. Just because you don't happen to have a siphon for battery-aerating doesn't mean you couldn't have one. At the same time, in the event that you do have the vodka, I don't want to rule out the possibility that you may be able to find a better use for it.

Hey, don't look at me! It's summer now and I certainly don't have the energy. Besides, I pretty much don't deep-fry -- anything, ever. Which makes Richard's onion rings look even that much less likely chez moi. They do look nice, though, don't they? All crispy, and lacy.

If you're inspired to make them, let us know how it turns out.


NOW IF YOU'RE FEELING AMBITIOUS . . .

. . . and looking for something to go with those crisp and lacy onion rings, you might check out Food Network's offer of Tyler Florence's ultimate "Barbecue Ribs Without a Barbecue."


What's more, with this link, you'll get right to the recipe rather than having to run the gantlet of roughly 6 million clicks usually required on the Food Network website to get to that recipe you thought was a mere click away.

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Food Watch: So you think you're a "celebrity chef"?

"A good rule of thumb: If you feel the need to call yourself a celebrity chef, you aren’t one."

-- Dan Myers, in "Sorry, But You're Not a Celebrity Chef"

by Ken

And in support of the above thesis, "Daily Meal" Eat/Dine Editor Dan Myers leads off his post "Sorry, But You're Not a Celebrity Chef" with a picture of Mario Batali captioned: "Mario Batali is allowed to call himself a celebrity chef, but we'll bet that he doesn't."

"A couple weeks ago," Dan begins, "I was browsing Twitter when I encountered a profile belonging to a chef who hailed himself (via his profile blurb) as a 'world renowned celebrity chef.' "

I ran a quick Google search on the guy, who had just under 100 followers, and discovered — via a Wikipedia page that seemed suspiciously detailed — that he’s the chef at a restaurant in Tokyo that is “a favorite among celebrities,” and that he’d previously ran the kitchen at a couple restaurants in Los Angeles that are also noted as “celebrities’ favorites.” He appeared on an episode of the original Iron Chef 17 years ago (which “rocketed him to even higher celebrity status,” according to the entry), and logged hours in some prestigious kitchens. While he very well might be a great chef, there’s one thing he isn’t: a celebrity.

This isn’t an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination; I’m beset on a near-daily basis with press releases touting the newest achievements of one “celebrity chef” or another. Forty-nine out of 50 times I’ve never heard of them, and their resume is as thin as any other chef, with possibly a regular stint on a local morning show thrown in. It feels good to be on television, but it doesn’t automatically make you a celebrity.

Now regular readers will know that I'm already kind of persnickety about the widespread warrantless use of the word "chef," which nowadays seems to be applied to anyone who has spent more than an hour in a kitchen. As I've noted all too frequently, a lot of people are calling themselves chefs who probably don't even merit the designation "cook."

But "celebrity" chef or anything else ought to require at least that the claimant is, you know, famous. It isn't even a mark of quality, celebrityhood; all that it really does mean is that you're well-known.

As Dan writes,

I know that being a chef is a grueling, oftentimes anonymous job where many dream of stardom along the lines of Mario Batali or Tom Colicchio to elevate them from the daily grind and low pay. There are plenty of chefs that may have earned a bit of local renown, either by talent, a good publicist, or some combination of the two. But I think there’s a good rule of thumb in here: if you feel the need to call yourself a celebrity chef, you aren’t one.

Dan makes a claim with which one might wish to quibble: "The vast majority of chefs choose the profession because they love to cook, and love to see the happy faces of those who are enjoying their culinary handiwork." Not that one doesn't wish it true; one merely wonders whether it still is true for "the vast majority of chefs" opting into the field. Fortunately Dan is about to enter a "but."

But in the Era of the Celebrity Chef, some become chefs thinking that it’s a one-way ticket to a life of hosting their own travel show and making lauded guest-judging appearances on Top Chef. It’s obviously tempting to imagine yourself in Anthony Bourdain’s shoes, but it’s the equivalent of a community theater player in Sheboygan dreaming of becoming the next Robert De Niro: it’s very likely just not going to happen.

"So what exactly do you need to accomplish
before you can call yourself a celebrity chef?"

Dan asks this obviously relevant question, suggesting, "I think it's about time we laid down some criteria." He proposes ten criteria, and argues "that any combination of three or more of these should do it."

1) You host/have hosted a nationally televised cooking/food-related show, preferably on Food Network, Cooking Channel, or the Travel Channel.


2) You made it to the finale of a season of Top Chef.


3) You’re the chef–owner of two or more popular (possibly eponymous) restaurants in big cities.


4) You’re occasionally recognized on the street (even if it’s just “Do I know you from somewhere?”).


5) You’re a paid spokesperson for a major company.


6) You’ve ever wondered if you’re “selling out.”


7) You’ve been featured/profiled in a major national food magazine.


8) You’re the star attraction at an event at either the New York, Aspen, or South Beach Wine and Food Festival.


9) You appear regularly as a guest on national morning or late-night talk shows.


10) You don’t refer to yourself as a celebrity chef.

This all seems reasonable to me, except for maybe the "even if it's just 'Do I know you from somewhere?' " watering-down of no. 4 (if this is going to count as one of your "magic three") -- with the proviso, always, that even if you manage to qualify, by Dan's or any other reasonable standard, as a celebrity chef, that still doesn't mean you're necessarily a good chef.

As Dan himself concludes:

It’s tempting to think that becoming a chef will lead to fame, fortune, and celebrity, but unless you satisfy the criteria, please don’t call yourself a celebrity chef. Nobody will believe you, it’s kind of sad, and anyway, it’s a lame term to begin with.

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Life after "Life After Top Chef"

Yes, this is a dumb clip, but at least you get to see the four chefs together, and you also get a swell commercial! As for the official "content," well, when I looked at the Life After Top Chef clips offered by Bravo, this was the one I noticed that featured all four chefs -- Fabio, Jen, Spike, and Richard -- which didn't have them answering some pointless and offensive as well as stupid question about sex.

by Ken

I see that the Bravo webpage for Life After Top Chef is already referring to the season we just witnessed as "Season 1." I guess we've seen the final episode of the season, since the end of this past week's episode featured those on-screen updates for our four chefs. I also see that the webpage contains potentially interesting stuff like cast blogs, and one of these days I definitely plan to read them. For now, though, let me just say that I thoroughly enjoyed "Season 1."

In large part, of course, this had to do with the selection of the four Top Chef alumni chosen -- all former contestants I was not only happy but almost eager to see in more recent action than their most recent Top Chef season, which for all four was the Season 8 Top Chef All-Stars shown in 2010-11. In fact, for me -- and I suspect for many other compulsive Top Chef watchers -- it would be hard to imagine anyone I would rather have seen. They have rather different relationships to the food they cook but those relationships are all passionate, and they're all enormously engaging, again in intriguingly different ways. What's more, they had already developed relationships with each other which were intensified in the course of the filming of Life After.

Of course what we saw was a highly edited-for-TV product, so we can't claim to have met the "real" Richard Blais (runner-up from Season 4, and winner of All-Stars), Spike Mendelsohn (also from Season 4), Fabio Viviani (the all-but-universal "Fan Favorite" from Season 5), or Jen Carroll (from the amazing Season 6, which was dominated by the Voltaggio brothers, Michael and Bryan, and also introduced us to Mike Isabella, the eventual All-Stars runner-up). Still, we got to see a whole lot more of all of them, in a fascinatingly diverse range of situations, personal as well as public.

Given the relentless pressures of the Top Chef format, it's hardly unprecedented for even the most relentless competitors to suffer surprising lapses. But Fabio, who produced so much food that appeared to be sensational, and clearly the work of an outstanding cook, had lapses that suggested a something less than consuming passion for consistency. And while I've forgotten vast quantities of detail about the Top Chef seasons, but I have pretty fresh recall of Fabio being eliminated for being unable to produce a decent burger. The meatball- or meatloaf-like thing he produced not only wasn't a burger but apparently, according to the judges, just wasn't very good. How uncool was that?

But what was never in question was Fabio's extraordinary "people skills." There's nothing accidental or coincidental about his just about literally irresistible charm. Now having seen so many more examples of it, and having seen from the inside how he marshalls it as needed for professional situations that demand it, we've also seen that those skills are not only massive but legit. Sure, he's totally aware of his ability to connect with people and depends heavily on them, but there's no getting around, and no faking, the intense curiosity about and empathy with people which underlie those skills. Those amazing people skills are clearly invaluable to the already formidable L.A.-based food empire he has built, but Life After also made clear how hard he works while harnessing them. None of what he has built has come to him by chance.

The same is true, albeit in a very different style, of Spike. In truth, I wasn't crazy about him in his Top Chef seasons. He's clearly a less good cook than many of the contestants who've passed through the show, and he seemed to enjoy himself a lot more than I was comfortable with. Of course I'm jealous, but it didn't make me like the fellow any more. All of this was still in evidence in Life After, but so -- viewed closer up -- was what appeared to be a genuinely good nature and remarkable generosity. It was most evident in the considerable amount of support he lent to Jen in her period of troubles (being still unable to get the restaurant she has imagined, Concrete Blonde, off the ground, with the special trauma of the rupture with the investors she thought would enable her to make it happen. But it wasn't just Jen; Spike seemed prepared to drop everything for any friend in need -- or even friends not in need. His enormous enjoyment of life seems never to come at anyone else's expense but to include as many of his friends as possible.

Jen and Richard seem pretty clearly to represent the more purely food-obsessed focus of an aspiring chef. I found both fascinating contestants. Richard seemed pretty obviously, in both his Top Chef seasons, a genuinely outstanding cook. You get the impression that if he was cooking for you, you would come away not only highly satisfyingly but also fascinatingly well-fed. And by the All-Stars season he seemed to have grown behind his fascination with purely technical wizardry to a more general concern for producing yummy food -- the sort of thing I associate in its purest form with Season 5 runner-up Carla Hall. Richard's deep anxieties, about his own performance, about his being sufficiently there for his wife and two young children, about pretty much everything in life, make him a great TV character, and also one it's incredibly easy to like and want to watch. Of course he should have won All-Stars, and I was really happy when he did, especially after what he himself seemed to regard as a choke in the finale of his original season.

There was all kinds of drama in Richard's main plot line for Life After: opening the Spence, his second attempt at a "fine dining" restaurant in his hometown of Atlanta. Totally understandably, the commercial failure of his first attempt seems always present. At the same time, it would have been impossible not to be engrossed by the domestic drama -- his constant awareness of the difficulty of "being there" as much as he should be for his wife Yazmin and their wildly adorable daughter Riley and new addition, Embry.

One of the charming plot lines of the final episode was the life-or-death urgency of his quest to have First Lady Michelle Obama sign a first-birthday card for Embry during the Quickfire-like event in Dallas, orchestrated by Spike (whose Washington eatery includes the First Lady as one of its customers), at which all four Life After chefs participated along with Season 9 winner Paul Qui and contestant Grayson Schmitz. Of course when he finally had a chance to ask her, she was thrilled to do it. But for Richard everything is a challenge -- including that Dallas event, in which the six chefs were asked to showcase healthy meals illustrative of the First Lady's promotion of good nutrition. As Fabio understood going in, Richard would be the one of them who would feel the need to compete all-out in the demonstration event.

Richard with First Lady Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass at the Dallas event -- did he really think the First Lady, who after all has two daughters of her own, wouldn't sign the card for his younger daughter's first birthday?

One fascination of the final countdown to the opening of Richard's restaurant was the frantic effort he had to make, in what he realized was way too little time, to train the staff that had been assembled to reliably cook his food. This is a subject that's obviously crucial for chefs who are serious about their food as well as their businesses, but we don't get to see much of it up close

In some ways Jen has been one of Top Chef's most intriguing competitors. In her original season, after appearing for a bunch of weeks as one of the field's most talented and also most focused chefs -- yes, even on the level of the Voltaggios -- she just seemed to fade, and then in All-Stars she never developed any rhythm, and performed the famous meltdown following her unexpedtedly early elimination which is probably most people's enduring image of her. I suppose it doesn't hurt that when she pulls her hair back in ponytail, which she seems to do only when she's cooking, she's smoking hot. But there doesn't seem any doubt that she's someone it would be fun to know and especially someone you'd be delighted to have cooking for you.

And Jen's family situation is irresistibly poignant, as she, her father, and her two sisters help her mother in the all too evidently grueling recovery from a major stroke. When Jen did her pop-up version of Concrete Blonde in Philadelphia (with Spike in attendance, bringing along two investors of his to introduce them to her and her cooking), how moving was it to see her whole family there in the packed house? The note at the end of last week's episode indicated that Jen hopes to open Concrete Blonde in New York in 2013, and hopes that her mother will be able to walk into the opening. It's hard to remain dry-eyed.

Spike's family was also a fascinating presence on Life After, since all of his restaurants are family businesses with his parents, Henry and Cathy, and his sister, Michelle. For that matter, it was fascinating to see the complexities of Fabio's worshipful but, well, complex relationship with his mother, who paid a dramatic visit from Italy, and also the close relationship with his close friend and professional associate Jacopo, and even the support, clearly important to his high-stress life, he gets from his "life coach."

There are lots of Top Chef alumni for Bravo to draw on for future seasons of Life After, but for uniformity as well as diversity and balance of interest, this season's foursome is going to be a tough act to follow. I've been grateful for their company these many weeks.

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Seeing Gale Gand's "Sweet Dreams" series again was almost enough to offset the horror of "Top Chef Desserts"

I don't know what Gale Gand plans to put in those ramekins,
but whatever it is, please, please save one for me.

by Ken

One nice thing about the long weekend was being home on the two weekdays, and discovering that Cooking Channel is rerunning, on weekday mornings, the old Food Network series Sweet Dreams with that wonderful pastry chef Gale Gand. The two episodes I got to watch, even though they didn't contain anything I plan to make anytime soon, reminded me why I remembered the show so fondly.

As far as I know, Gale is still going strong as pastry chef at Chicago's Tru, the restaurant she and then-husband Rick Tramonto started in 1999 (if I'm reading her blog blog bio correctly), and in which they have remained partners post-divorce. Sweet Dreams, I see in the blog bio, was "the first all-dessert show produced by the Food Network."

Sweet Dreams isn't that old. As best I can tell it dates back only to 2003-07, but that was another epoch in desserts, and in food generally. Back then desserts were still a treat made to top off a meal providing satisfaction and gastronomic pleasure. Somewhere culinary satisfaction and pleasure gave way to what I can only describe as fetishizing, eventually leading to such entertainments as Food Network's useless Challenge and -- now two seasons old -- Bravo's Top Chef Desserts.

I'm not sure why I kept watching TCD, considering how it regularly infuriated me, with its overwhelming focus on the repulsive fetish aspects of desserts, What they're doing, essentially, seems to me masturbating in public, turning a healthy and vital activity when practiced into a shocking, gross, embarrassing spectacle, especially watching the practitioners so desperately craving public adulation and career-building. The grossness is surely epitomized by those now-required-for-pastry-chefs "showpieces," which had a lot to do with this TCD seaons's no-doubt-deserved triumph of that human zero Chris. "Deserved" because the pastry chef's profession has been redefined to place a premium on something that, for all its hellacious difficulty, is even more useless. There ought to be a place here for the word "travesty."

I remembering first seeing what might be described as showpieces while watching chocolate genius Jacques Torres in his early years on American TV. There was undeniable fascination in seeing what Jacques could do with chocolate, even as you knew that the result was a waste of time, energy, and chocolate product. Now these "showpieces" have metastasized to the point where they're a crucial component of pastry-chef competence, even though they have nothing to do with pastry, cheffing, or anything related to the satisfaction or pleasure of dessert or food generally.

It's my assumption that if you asked the Chris, or any of these dessert fetishists, "Could you please put a really nice slice of chocolate cake on a plate for me?," they would be insulted. How beneath them! At the same time, I wonder if any of them could do it.

I bet if you put that question to Gale Gand, she would beam. She would understand, totally. And my gosh, would I love to eat the cake she'd put on that plate.

I'm not sure I would be as happy with the black-and-whites Gale made on a Sweet Dreams show I haven't seen since it aired originally. Her "secret" ingredient, she explained, was lemon, and I don't want any stinking lemon in my black-and-whites. Sheesh! Lemon is great in specifically lemon desserts, but in black-and-whites?

Still, Gale had gone to the trouble to devise and show us how to make her version of black-and-whites, and by and large the stuff she presented on the show looked both lusciously worth making and within the pastry-making skills of most any home cook. There was a lot of camaraderie, dare I say love, being shared on that show -- a quality I associate with the cooking and baking I most enjoy. (UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I've set my DVR to record Sweet Dreams episodes.)

Maybe it's just coincidence, but contestants on Top Chef Desserts who appear to have found their way into the pastry-making profession with that kind of love and desire to share, even some with clearly high skill levels, don't seem to fare very well. I really, really love and respect expertise, but my love and respect shrink when the expertise is directed to useless purposes. I realize this is entirely subjective, but for me producing -- no, sharing -- that slice of lovely chocolate cake registers easily in the "winner" zone on the usefulness meter.

With all the hoopla Food Network devoted to its (gasp) live two-hour Thanksgiving-cooking show the Sunday before the holiday, featuring a battery of network celebrity cooks, you might forget that once upon a time -- and again, we're not talking about prehistoric times -- the network put out a fine hourlong cooking show, Cooking Live, hosted by Sarah Moulton, five nights a week. And unlike the much-hyped Thanksgiving special, which was on the whole a snoozefest, Cooking Live was almost always stimulating, entertaining, and informative, with a deft combination of Sarah's planned live demonstrations, usually with interesting guests, and fielding live phone calls from viewers.

A special guest who proved so special that for a while he filled the Friday-night slot by himself, was the great baker and baking teacher Nick Malgieri. From Nick I always got that special combination of expertise and love, with a compulsion to share what he knows. He made rolling out pie dough, a task dreaded by many home bakers, look easy (and for a while I could actually do it!). He always ended his segments or shows with one of the less catchy but most inspirational of catch phrases, "Bake something," and I learned so much from watching him, and from working with his great book How to Bake, that I always tried to do so.

One thing that fascinated me in the book was Nick's explanation of how the bread section came into being. Growing up in an Italian neighborhood in New Jersey, he explained, he had the benefit of watching a large roster of skilled bakers in his extended family, but one thing they didn't bake much was bread, because they had such ready access to great bread in their neighborhood bakeries. As a result, he had to really work up his bread-baking chops for the book, and the result of that, at least for me, was that his instructions and recipes were unusually well suited to a novice baker. For a while there I was turning out some really nice, crusty, tasty round loaves.

I wasn't looking forward to writing about Top Chef Desserts, which I've been meaning to do for a while now, but it was awfully easy to write about Gale Gand and Nick Malgieri. And what I assumed I would be writing about today was the curious case of Buddy Valastro and Cake Boss, trying to explain why I love at least certain aspects of the show. With the second season of Next Great Baker bowing tomorrow night on TLC, I'm going to try to get to it in tomorrow night's post.

Yes, an awful lot of stuff produced on both Cake Boss and Next Great Baker falls into much the same category of uselessness as the Top Chef Desserts dreck. But Buddy and his associates produce humongous quantities of at least honorable-looking baked goods, and Buddy himself -- as I put it recently to a friend -- isn't nearly as dopey as he seems. In this regard, a fair amount of the appeal of Cake Boss for me is similar to what I was just talking about this afternoon in my Sunday Classics post in connection with those good early seasons of MTV's The Real World, which on an elementary level that still exceeds most of our sensibilities taught the lesson of how different people can be from what we first assume based on superficial impressions.

But with Buddy, there's a special hunger for knowledge and mastery of baking skills. The single image I retain is from the first season of Next Great Baker, when he introduced the next challenge by taking two already-baked cake layers and assembling, frosting, and decorating a layer cake, which he did effortlessly, flawlessly, and beautifully in what seemed like a matter of seconds. I suppose it was showing off in a way, but it was showing off skills that deserved to be shown off.

There's more to the story, but that will have to wait for another occasion.

Buddy Valastro's manifest goofiness can easily obscure his extremely high skill level, not to mention his obsessive passion for broader and deeper knowledge of the baking art.

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"Top Chef All-Stars" comes to a rousing close

In this "Any Regrets?" clip from Bravo's Watch What's Happening Now live post-Top Chef-finale show, featuring finalists Richard Blais and Mike Isabella, runner-up Mike talks to host Andy Cohen exceptionally graciously about winner Richard's contribution to the show.

by Ken

Over the long season Top Chef All-Stars (about which I wrote way back when, "To my surprise, I'm really psyched for tonight's 'Top Chef All-Stars premiere'") predictably had its ups and downs but came on strong down the stretch. The fates willed the show a pair of really strong and viewer-friendly competitors for the finale, and this season's format, another "Restaurant Wars" outing in which the finalists had a chance to show off not just menu-planning and cooking skills but their ability to manage sous chefs and kitchen staff and service. (This was all the more impressive in that the chefs didn't get to choose their sous chefs directly. Rather they chose their favorites from anonymously plated amuse-bouches prepared by all 15 previously eliminated Top Chefs All-Stars contestants. Luckily all around, Mike didn't have to find out how he would have worked with Marcel, with whom he had that angry head-to-head in the season's actual "Restaurant Wars" challenge.)

Both Richard and Mike talked a lot in their on-camera interviews in the later episode with striking insight, notably the ways in which their growth as chefs and people -- not just since their original seasons but over the course of All-Stars. Both were clearly more poised in the kitchen, both as cooks and as competitors. Richard hasn't yet gotten control of the self-hypercritical habit, but he's less apt to let it disable him, and he definitely has learned to subordinate the compulsion to "innovate" to an understanding that the proof is in the eating; he's got to satisfy his customers. And Mike, who in his original season tended to be overshadowed by the amazing Voltaggio brothers, really has broadened his culinary skills, and also seemed by the finale to have gained a better handle on the strength of his deep family roots in Italian cucina.

An example each of the kind of smarts they demonstrated in the home stretch:

MIKE DOES HIS HOMEWORK

With the two rounds of finals taking place in the Bahamas, Mike had the sense to prepare himself for whatever might be thrown at the contestants in the form of local cuisine and ingredients, notably conch. Now this has always been a feature of the Top Chef finals road trips, and it's hard to understand why anyone who makes it into the location rounds wouldn't do this kind of preparation. But when the elimination challenge there called for using local ingredients with conch as a mandatory one, Mike was all set to go, and produced what the judges agreed was the best conch dish. (Richard, meanwhile, was Richard, and used the conch to produce a version of a staple of his Long Island upbringing: linguine with clam sauce -- with conch for the clams and "pasta" made of sweet potato!)


Mike's "exit interview"

RICHARD LISTENS AND ADAPTS

In the final head-to-head competition Richard -- who had battled back from a late-season slump in which his food just seemed to sink into misfiring technique rather than trying above all to be good -- did something that impressed me even more. The format had two sets of judges dining in shifts in the two restaurants, which made it especially interesting in that the chefs, apart from serving their other "customers," had two judges' services. During the first he had sous chef Spike "spying" on the judges, reporting back comments, and it was clear that the most problematic element in his meal was the foie gras ice cream (yes, foie gras ice cream), whose texture was apparently clumpy and unpleasant. For the second chefs' service, Richard actually remade the ice cream, and clearly produced a much more satisfactory result. The judges were clearly aware that they had been served something noticeably different in their dessert courses, and were interested in finding out what had caused it. None of them said this, but I thought this was simply brilliant on Richard's part, a testament to his ability to solicit and process feedback and then actually adjust to it.


Richard's "exit interview"

IF THE VERDICT HAD GONE THE OTHER WAY --

I don't think there would have been much ground for complaint, but the survey taken by Watch What Happens Now found that 86 percent of respondents agreed with the judges' decision. Clearly both guys came out winners. But Richard was just the winningier winner.


POSTSCRIPT: CHOPPED ALL-STARS FINALE TONIGHT

The "all-stars" format not only ramps up the competition level but shifts the focus to the food, since the less experienced regular contestants on Food Networks' Chopped competition show just aren't equipped to compete at this level under those severe limitations. With the all-stars, the competition becomes about different strengths rather than a catalogue of blunders.

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In the world of TV cooking competition shows, REALLY wanting to win REALLY isn't a substitute for self-knowledge and REAL focus

Wolfgang Puck, offering us his version of Sachertorte, believes we can make "one of the world's greatest chocolate desserts" -- see below.

by Ken

Whew! With episode four of Top Chef's All Stars season scheduled for tonight, I'm almost caught up on the earlier ones, as part of an intensive pull to polish off the finale of Fox's Hell's Kitchen season (which featured a poor talent pool even by HK standards, didn't it?) and the first three episodes of The Learning Channel's new Cake Boss: Next Great Baker with Buddy "Cake Boss" Valastro. The experience has reinforced a couple of observations I'd been thinking about for a future post, from watching, these shows as well as Food Network competitions like Chopped and Ultimate Recipe Throwdown:

* It's amazing how unknowing most of the contestants are about both their own skills, which they tend to overrate, often wildly, and those of their competitors, which they correspondingly baselessly downplay. Now part of the learning process is precisely this matter of coming to understand strengths and weaknesses, both our own and other people's. It just strikes me that an astounding number of these people are way far back on the learning curve.

It comes out in all sorts of ways, not least in weirdly whacked-out responses to criticisms from the judges. Now there's a measure of subjectivity in judges' opinions, but these are generally highly competent professionals, and when a panel like this tells you unanimously that your dish has little or no (or poor) flavor, or that it's ruinously oversalted or seriously undercooked, etc., etc., it's kind of a delusional reaction to declare, sometimes to the judges' face, that "I stand by my dish" or "X just doesn't like me" or "they just don't get my originality" or "they've got it in for me."

On Cake Boss: Next Great Baker one of the bakers was assigned to produce carrot-cake cupcakes, and turned in something that looked to have the texture of dry little meatloaves, in which, as Buddy and his brother-in-law Joey (the oven guy at Carlo's Bakery) and even we could see there was no more than a smattering of carrot shreds in the batter. I can't imagine it tasted like much either, and as the guy muttered about how much his customers love his carrot cake, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, figuring that under the pressure of the competition and the cameras he'd just blown it. But no, when Buddy ranked his crappy cupcakes in the bottom two for the challenge, he turned belligerent and ranted about how much carrot cake he sells and he's never had any complaints until Buddy's. Whoo! I guess you have to give the guy credit for finding that many customers who like crap carrot cake.

And then, from people at a significantly higher level of the profession, there were the consecutive flaming departures from Top Chef All Stars of Elia and Jen. We know from their previous seasons that they're both extraordinarily talented cooks, and the judges made clear that they know that too. But that wasn't what they were judging; they were judging the food in front of them, which not only wasn't up to the standards to be expected in this highly competitive company but apparently just wasn't very good at all.

When Elia was eliminated so embarrassingly early in the competition, it was understandable that she was highly wrought, and I suppose we could accept, maybe even respect, her standing by her food and insisting that judges or no judges she's not going to change it. But there was a really nasty spitefulness to it, and no recognition at all of the possibility that her dish simply wasn't very good. (It was an extremely clever challenge, by the way: Each contestant had to remake the very dish for which he or she had been eliminated in his/her original season.)

But Elia went quietly compared with Jen -- yes, lovely and talented Jen, whom I had been looking forward to seeing give us a consistent demonstration of the culinarily adroit, poised form she showed through the first half of her season -- who underwent a meltdown after being told by the judges that her braised pork belly, although well-seasoned, was textural moosh and the hard-boiled egg crumbled on top of it had no taste. I didn't taste it, of course, but there was no disagreement among the judges on either point, so it was bizarre to have her insisting quite belligerently that it was "a great dish." (By the way, in a candid-interview insert, competitor Casey -- a teammate of Jen's on that challenge, wasn't she? -- says she sampled Jen's dish and it tasted like "wet bacon." Think about that a moment: wet bacon. A great dish?)

Before she headed off, screaming and cursing, she insisted on camera back in the stew room that head judge Tom Colicchio must be punishing her for arguing with him. I guess she had no way of knowing that Tom in fact admired her spunk in sticking up for her food. The problem was that the food doesn't seem to have been very good. Again it probably wasn't a factor in the judges' decision but still didn't reflect well on her that when Tom criticized the decision to have her team's numerous dishes all served on one plate, where it all blended together, she snapped back that she assumed the judges were smart enough to ask for additional plates if they wanted them. Talk about Missing the Point 101!

Well, it was certainly crackling television!

Less dramatic but still pretty loopy has been Fabio's near-threateningly voiced indignation at judge Tony Bourdain, insisting repeatedly that he understands criticism of his food but won't allow himself to be made fun of. Now Fabio under control is one of the most amazingly charming individuals you will ever see (and also an outstandingly talented and skilled cook), but this nutjob version of Fabio was, again, simply out of touch with reality. As we all know, Tony Bourdain can be tart, and there's no question that he really, really hated the dish that Fabio had served, and made no effort to conceal it. But I heard nothing he said that could be in any way misunderstood as a personal comment about the cook -- it was all about the food, which it was generally agreed was terrible. And that, after all, is what Bourdain was there to judge.

(We might also mention the astonishment that many of these contestants have when judges say anything negative about their food. It seems to come as a rude shock that anyone might ever be less than enthralled by their offerings -- again, a serious gap in their knowledge of themselves, and also of their place in the big world around them.)

* My other observation, which is more mundane but possibly weirder, is how many of these contestants have gotten the idea that really, really wanting to win constitutes a qualification for winning. This has become standard among the contenders on Chopped and Hell's Kitchen. On the latter, for example, when Gordon Ramsay asks each week's candidates for elimination why they should stay in Hell's Kitchen, almost all of them now tell him how badly they want to win. For many of them it's the only reason they offer Chef Ramsay as to why they should be allowed to remain -- because they wanna.

Now I think I have some idea where this comes from. Occasionally on one of these shows you'll see one of the judges challenging a contestant as to "whether you really want to win." And the meaning is clear enough, I would have thought. They're questioning whether the contestant is really committed to the competition, whether he or she is really engaging all his/her talent and skills and determination to the challenges. And that certainly is a legitimate question.

But to many of these folks it clearly hasn't occurred that "wanting to win" matters only if it involves (a) having the necessary talent and skills and (b) applying them with the maxim focus and determination they're capable of. I got an especially sad example of this watching a rerun of a second-season Ultimate Recipe Throwdown show I'd seen before, in which near-miss contestants from the first season were invited back and given a second chance. There was a sweet, earnest young woman, who clearly cares about cooking and has accomplished much given her limited training and experience. She had been devastated when she lost the first time, as if her life was over, because she was counting on the cash prize to enable her to attend culinary school.

Which would have been nice, I'm sure, but there are other ways to acquire training besides winning prize money on a TV game show. There are cheaper schools, including community colleges, there are wage-slave jobs at the apprentice level. I'm not saying it's easy, but the notion that your entire future as a would-be chef depends on winning Ultimate Recipe Throwdown is, even allowing for her youthful innocence, crackers. Now she was back for her second chance, and she was even more desperate, having had her dreams delayed a whole year, she explained, by her failure to win the first time. As badly as she wanted to win the first time, this time she really, really, really wanted to win.

In this case, though, really, really wanting to win would have started with choosing recipes that might impress the judges but that she could execute in the necessary time under TV-camera pressure (which, after all, she'd already experienced once!) and then preparing and gathering and focusing herself mentally and physically to really execute those recipes. Instead, she floundered amidst her too-ambitious (and in some respects culinarily arguable) dishes and made a steady stream of mistakes. In tears again after her second loss, now sure that her life was ruined because she still hadn't won the money for cooking school, she sobbed in despair that she'd given it everything she had.

Again, of course, emotions are raw and explosive under such tension. I'd like to think that that sweet young this had the courage to watch the aired show, and saw that no, contrary to what she thought at the time, she hadn't given it anything like her all. Even apart from the likelihood that one or more of her competitors was actually a better cook at their respective stages in their lives, meaning that quite likely even if she had given it her best effort, she might well not have been good enough to win that day, the fact remains that she screwed up at every step of the way, from conception through execution.

Really, now! Say, aren't these supposed to be "reality" shows?


A SECOND SEASON FOR WORST COOKS IN AMERICA:
COULD IT MAYBE BE WORSE THAN THE FIRST?

I really, really hated the first season of Food Network's Worst Cooks in America, in which Anne Burrell and Beau MacMillan supposedly took on the task of teaching two teams of certified-zero-skilled cooks some basics but instead proceeded -- unless what happened off-screen was radically different from what happened on -- to teach them, basically, nothing while treating them, basically, with sneering derision and insouciant unconcern. It was such a disgraceful exhibition, showing disrespect not just for the human beings entrusted to them but for food and cooking in general, that I'm amazed either of them has had the courage to show her/his face in public.

But no, Worst Cooks in America is back for a second season, debuting Sunday, January 2, with only a half-change of cast: Beau is gone, replaced by earthy Englishman Robert Irvine, who has been performing all those feats of real-deadline mass-catering derring-do on Dinner Impossible. It will be interesting to see how Robert handles the assignment, given all the no-nonsense real-world on-the-job training we've seen him give to countless cooking zeroes assigned to him as mission "helpers" over his seasons of Dinner Impossible.

Meanwhile, Anne is back for season two. Since she clearly does know her way around the kitchen, I'm hoping she approached this season as a mission of redemption for last season's shocking exhibition. The likelier reality is that she and the producers think what she did last season was okay, maybe even a triumph. Is there no shame?


WITH WOLFGANG PUCK'S RECIPE, I REALLY THINK WE
COULD MAKE A VERSION OF HIS SACHERTORTE

I'm not planning to try to make one -- for one thing I would probably wind up consuming the whole damned thing in less time than it took to make -- but today's e-recipe from ArcaMax Publishing featured regular ArcaMax contributor Wolfgang Puck's version of Sachertorte, "a rich, beautiful Austrian layer cake that's one of the world's greatest chocolate desserts."

Wolfgang explains that one reason he calls his version "Wolfgang's Sachertorte" is that he uses bittersweet chocolate rather than the traditional cocoa powder, believing that the cocoa butter in the chocolate "yields moister results and even more intense chocolate flavor." "To tell you the truth," he writes, "I've found some of the slices of Sachertorte I've eaten in Austria (I won't say where) to be a little dry for my taste." The recipe even includes toothpick-method instructions for cutting the single layer in which the cake itself is baked, in a nine-inch springform pan, into two layers.

One thing I've found with Wolfgang's Tribune Media Services-syndicated recipes is that they aren't for show. They're meant to be used, and the Sachertorte, while involving a fair amount of time and labor, looks to be within reach of even the average-skilled baker.

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To my surprise, I'm really psyched for tonight's "Top Chef All-Stars" premiere

Top Chef Season 6 finalists (left to right) Bryan
and Michael Voltaggio and Kevin Gillespie

by Ken

It's a good indication that your life is misarranged when your sick days are pleasanter and more productive than, er, you non-sick days. As it happens, i was home today, and stumbled onto Bravo's Top Chef marathon. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on, but when I did, I was fascinated: Bravo had scheduled the "finales" (i.e., the final pair of episodes) from each of the seven completed seasons, as a countdown to tonight's premiere of the first-ever "all-star" series, at least in the Eastern time zone at 10pm, with the usual immediate repeat, listed for 11:15, following the initial airing of the jumbo-size premiere episode (presumably with further repeats throughout the week).

Just last week -- presumably as a function of many cable channels' disinclination to run new episodes of ongoing programs during a holiday week -- Bravo re-aired a dinner from a year or so ago for selected past competitors hosted by the ineffably charming Fabio Viviani from Season 5, who to the astonishment of many viewers -- presumably including the ones who voted him the season's Fan Favorite -- had been eliminated before the final competition challenge. (He's one of the returning "all-stars.") Although I've seen, I think, every episode of every season, my memories of the individual contestants and events tend to be blurry and to run together, so it was interesting to remake the acquaintance of the invited group, and today I found myself wildly sucked in by the "finals" marathon. Between live viewing and DVR capture, I've rewatched a lot of it, and had many old memories confirmed while noticing all sorts of things I either didn't remember or maybe didn't especially notice the first time through. (For one thing, you watch differently when you know, or even just-sort-of-recall, how the competitions came out.)

Bravo has been promoting the heck out of Top Chef All-Stars, and I'd seen the list of returning to contestants -- none of the past winners, but a heavy concentration of others who made it to the final round, with some others who otherwise distinguished themselves. However, seeing a lot of these people back in their original competitive environments really made me eager to see more of a lot of the people who've been invited back. Richard Blais, for example, one of the three finalists from Season 4, who startled the judges by telling them, during the judging, that he had choked in that day's cooking, which indeed he had. Seeing more of Richard, I wonder how I failed to properly appreciate his considerable charm as well as his apparently considerable cooking skills.

He's not the only contestant who choked, or at least had a bad day, at an inopportune time in the competition. (I'm sure the pressure is all but immeasurable, and it's probably more remarkable when competitors aren't seriously affected by that pressure.) A number of the others are also among the "all-star" competitors.

Of course, when it comes to a wide body of knowledge and skills harnessed to a productive imagination, competitions tend to be singularly inefficient ways of finding out who's "best," even assuming that "best" has any meaning. As some readers are aware, a lot of my attention over the years has been involved in the classical-music world, where competitions have become more and more important, not just for commercial reasons (for which their appeal is obvious) but more disturbingly for artistic determinations. Now, the people who do well at competitions undoubtedly have generous measures of talent and skill, and many competition-winning composers and performers have gone on to distinguish themselves in the ranks of their profession. However, it's if anything more common for the people who "have it" over the long haul to have finished second or third or even out of the running in competitions they entered.

And it's even worse in the TV world, where it's increasingly becoming an article of faith that the way we find out who's "best" at whatever discipline is at issue is by assembling a bunch of pretenders and then eliminating them one by one until there's one person left standing. In most cases, the format focuses so heavily on anointing this mythical "best" contestant that there's not much consideration left for whether that "best" person is actually any good.

I don't think this has been the case with Top Chef. One obvious problem for viewers is that we don't get to taste any of the food, which after all is the entire raison d'être of the proceedings. So we have to trust our eyes, and our experience-based instincts, and of course the reactions of the various judges (about whom more in a moment) to sort of guess about the quality of the food produced. While some very talented people no doubt get eliminated earlier on, for all sorts of reasons (some good, some not so good), the people left standing in those final rounds clearly can all cook. And especially on a second viewing I've been fascinated to see the ways in which people I've satisfied myself can cook at a very high level may misfire on a given day, or in a given challenge.

Of course sometimes the reason isn't at all mysterious. In Season 7, that icky Angelo was felled by devastating illness the days of the final challenge. Since I was rooting heavily against him, I was chagrined to see how well he competed -- admittedly with remarkable help from his designated sous chef, Season 3 winner Hung Huynh -- under the circumstances. (Icky Angelo will be back with the all-stars too. Ick!)

THE CAIN AND ABEL OF TOP CHEF?

There's no point in my offering observations on individual cooks for readers who haven't seen them, but still in my mind the most fascinating competitors were the brothers Voltaggio, Bryan and Michael, from Season 6. In the early rounds of each season's competition the viewer is left to sort out the contenders from the lower tiers among the 15 or so initial contestants. There are often people who require a number of rounds to get their bearings, and gradually come out of seemingly nowhere to become real forces -- like one of my favorites, Carla Hall from Season 5, who's another of the returning "all-stars" -- which is also part of the interest of the series. True, some of the people who come on like gangbusters early on fall by the wayside, but usually they're going to be heard from most of the way. 

It seemed clear pretty early on that both Bryan and Michael were likely to be in it to the end. Now it didn't hurt that they're both extraordinarily good-looking (sorry to be so superficial, but I'm sure the producers don't expect us not to notice!), and sure enough, they were two of the three finalists -- along with one of those initial dark horses, Kevin Gillespie.

Michael V is for me without doubt the most interesting of all the Top Chef contestants. He's the younger brother, and there was a powerful sibling-rivalry element -- played out at the end with the participation of the divorced mom who raised them, apparently a dreadful cook, but seemingly a sweet lady who didn't have an easy time of it financially, and has spent more than her share of her time watching her boys compete. In the final judging, asked why he should be Top Chef, Michael began by saying, "I just don't want Bryan to be Top Chef." He was joking, of course, but not entirely. It seemed clear that Bryan would handle a win by Michael a lot more easily than vice versa.

Bryan seemed not only worlds more likable but also an obviously brilliant cook, whose food I suspect I would enjoy a lot more. However, Michael's obsessive cutting-edge culinary curiosity and extraordinary discipline -- at least in the kitchen -- seemed to me to place him in a category apart from all the other seven seasons' worth of Top Chef contestants.

The crucial demonstration for me was the season's "Restaurant Wars," the favorite challenge of most competitors, in which the contestants still standing at that point are split into two teams and with a day's preparation open their own "restaurants." Almost without exception, given the participants' level of talent, the results are seriously disappointing. But in that season, Michael V took complete charge of his team and, while winning no prize for collegiality, produced an instant restaurant that was both the most functional of all seven seasons (and by a wide margin) but also the most culinarily alert and inventive. There are times when you don't need fancy measuring instruments to know that you're in the presence of genius -- and that wouldn't have changed if Michael hadn't been the season's winner. He was, though.

In my recollection, at least, it was striking that Michael's "Restaurant Wars" team was an autocracy, with Michael's judgment controlling just about all decisions and his vigilant eye governing nearly all phases of the execution. Meanwhile on the other team the lovely and talented Jennifer Carroll, who to that point had seemed to be as formidable a contender as the Voltaggio boys, was the very model of cooperativeness and collegiality, and the results were disastrous. (Again in my recollection, it was at this point that Jennifer, who had seemed imperturbable, began to disappear from the competition. I'm pleased to see that she's among the all-star competitors. it seems clear that she lost her confidence in her original season. I'm hoping she'll be able to maintain it this time.)

IT'S KIND OF LIKE, YOU KNOW, REAL LIFE

Now this is a hotly debated point in the restaurant world, and in the nonrestaurant world as well. The dominant view in the modern culinary world is that kitchens have to be run by unremitting terror enforced by unrelenting verbal, emotional, and even physical abuse, which people like Gordon Ramsay genuinely believe is the only way to keep a professional kitchen functioning at any kind of high level. And I have to admit that in my own life, much as I hate it, I'm more likely to respond to demands on my time enforced through naked fear.

However, there are chefs who hate this approach, and insist on running their kitchens on a basis of collegiality, respect, and cooperation. There's no doubt that this is a much harder approach to make work successfully, because it depends on so many people living up to the trust placed in them, but it's not hard to see the possibilities for getting much superior results from people treated this way. This is, as it happens, the very same distinction an especially wise colleague in the online political world was just pointing out as perhaps the crucial difference between the worldviews of the Right and Left. Righties believe that you get more out of people by abusing them; lefties believe that you get more out of people by treating them with respect. (For what it's worth, in the six seasons that Bravo has had voting for Fan Favorite, only one competition winner, Season 4's Stephanie Izard, has won that title.)

This is just one of the human-interest themes played out in the Top Chef competitions, above and beyond the culinary dimension. In which connection it has also been fascinating today rewatching the judges and the limited portion of the judging process that has been included in the shows -- both the people we see all the time (most frequently head judge and cohost Tom Colicchio, of the Craft restaurant empire; host since Season 2 Padma Lakshmi; and judge through all seasons, and now also the host Top Chef Desserts, Gail Simmons) and the large cast of culinary celebrities who've passed through the show in various capacities. (I see from Wikipedia that Anthony Bourdain, who has already racked up five very solid guest-judge appearances, will be alternating with Gail Simmons on a regular basis this season.)

Anyway, I say bring on those Top Chef All-Stars!


POSTSCRIPT: STOP ALREADY WITH THE $$$$ GIVEAWAYS!

I meant to say something about the innovation of recent Top Chef seasons of finding excuses in every episode to hand out cash prizes. I hate this, and am unhappy to see how much money is being given away in Season 8. I had no problem with guest judges giving copies of their latest book as they announced the winner of the current challenge, or inviting the winner to dine at their restaurant. But now they're dispensing cash like "Sunny John" Boehner handing out tobacco-lobbyist $$$$ on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Is the incentive of winning the title of Top Chef really not sufficient? Early in tonight's premiere episode, Marcel "The Foam Guy" Vigneron recalls ruefully that he finished second in Season 2 and "didn't win a thing." True, the title and associated prizes go to only one contestant, but what all the others get is -- how to say this? -- newly TV-jumped careers.

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