‘TOP Chef” returns to night for its sixth (yes, sixth!) season with the same old crew, a slew of new chefs and a new locale, Las Vegas.
The contestants — or, as the shows like to call them, “chef’testants” — are standard issue (the mean girl, the middle-aged woman, the gay man, the New Yawk guy with attitude, and the women with hair so short and bodies so tattooed they look like sailors on shore leave). But somehow the formula still works.
As a bonus this year, there are two extremely good-looking brothers who are chefs in separate parts of the country, Bryan and Michael Voltaggio.
Also true to the “TC” recipe, the show is edited so you know who to like, who to pull for and who to be wary of by the end of the first episode.
Tonight’s episode introduces chefs from around the country, France and Puerto Rico (yes, I know it’s part of the US) with an especially heavy emphasis on Atlanta (three chefs) and San Francisco (four).
The New Yorker is Ash Fulk, a sous chef at a restaurant called Trestle on Tenth, whose philosophy of cooking is: “If it grows together, it goes together.”
The most fascinating contestant is a 40-year-old Haitian immigrant, Ron Duprat, who was in a boat for 27 days attempting to sail to the US with other men (some of whom, he says, “got thrown over.”)
He survived by cooking the fish they caught.
Tonight’s first challenge is to shuck clams, peel shrimp, clean and pull the meat from lobsters, and butcher chops in 30 minutes.
Sound easy? Have you ever shucked a clam? If you know, how it’s a breeze, if you don’t, it’s about as easy as cracking a safe.
The second challenge is the one that wins the night for one chef — and gives another the boot.
Wolfgang Puck, who is a guest judge, is as serious and strict about food as most people are about national health care. He snipes at one dish with fancy puree designs, “You have the steak and then you need baby food around it?”
Host Padma Lakshmi, who isn’t a million laughs (she’s the Kara DioGuardi of “Top Chef”), now actually seems to regret having to say the line that made her famous: “Pack your knives and go!”
I guess it’s better than, “Don’t let the oven door hit you on the way out.”