Top Chef Masters – TV Review

You’re probably familiar with Bravo‘s Top Chef, the cooking competition show that has delivered great ratings to the network since the beginning, but now we’re taking things up a notch. On June 10th at 10:00pm, Bravo is kicking out Top Chef Masters, and there’s $100,000 top prize. It’s all big name chefs this time around, several of whom have been guest judges on the regular version of the show, and we’re doing it all for charity.

Bravo - Photo: Kelsey McNeal

Our host for this excursion is Kelly Choi, creator and host of Eat Out NY, and we have some interesting (though possibly not so camera-friendly) judges. Gael Greene has been a food critic for longer than you want to know, but I’m not sure she adds a lot of zest to the show. Jay Rayner is a celebrated critic from Britain, and probably the show’s only hope for a judge that’s at all watchable. Finally, James Oseland is editor of Saveur magazine.

In this version of the show, four of our master chefs will show up each week and compete for one spot to move on. They’ll be doing quickfire challenges and regular challenges, and they will receive severely complicated scores throughout the show which will ultimately decide the winner.

Here’s the list of Top Chef Masters you’ll be seeing throughout the course of the show.

- Rick Bayless – Frontera Grill, Chicago, Ill.

- Wilo Benet – Pikayo, San Juan, Puerto Rico

- John Besh – Restaurant August, New Orleans, LA

- Graham Elliot Bowles – Graham Elliot Restaurant, Chicago, Ill.

- Michael Chiarello – Bottega Restaurant, Yountville, Calif.

Tim Love - Bravo - Photo: Kelsey McNeal

- Michael Cimarusti – Providence, Los Angeles, Calif.

- Wylie Dufresne – wd~50, New York, N.Y.

- Elizabeth Falkner – Orson, San Francisco, Calif.

- Hubert Keller – Fleur de Lys, San Francisco, Calif.

- Christopher Lee – Aureole, New York, N.Y.

- Ludo Lefebvre – Ludo Bites, Los Angeles, Calif.

- Anita Lo – Annisa, New York, N.Y.

- Tim Love – The Lonesome Dove Western Bistro, Fort Worth, Texas

- Rick Moonen – Rick Moonen’s RM Seafood at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, Nev.

- Nils Noren – French Culinary Institute, New York, N.Y.

- Lachlan McKinnon Patterson – Frasca Food & Wine, Boulder, Colo.

- Cindy Pawlcyn – Mustards Grill, Napa Valley, Calif.

- Mark Peel – Campanile, Los Angeles, Calif.

Michael Schlow -- Bravo Photo: Kelsey McNeal

- Douglas Rodriguez – Alma de Cuba, Philadelphia, PA

- Michael Schlow – Radius Restaurant, Boston, Mass.

- Art Smith – Table Fifty-Two, Chicago, Ill.

- Suzanne Tracht – Jar, Los Angeles, Calif.

- Jonathan Waxman – Barbuto, New York, N.Y.

- Roy Yamaguchi – Roy’s Restaurants, San Diego, Calif.

It’s hard to judge a show like this after only one episode (and in this case hard to know if there is much point in any case), but I really liked how this show kicked off. You might expect that the show is going to take it a bit easy on these big names, but if anything we’ve got the opposite. To their credit, the masters are all really good sports about the whole affair, and they all seem to have a newfound respect for the contestants who go through the trials of the regular show.

I admit to being a biased fan of Top Chef, but staring at the press release for Masters left me puzzled. It’s a theory that might have gone a lot of ways, and frankly the next episodes might still, and a lot of those ways are not so entertaining. There’s just a lot to wonder about. Are the judges really going to give it to these chefs? Are the challenges really going to live up to what the regular contestants have to do? Are the chefs really going to go for it, and are they going to outsnob the judges and not really care what they have to say? Is the audience going to find it tricky to invest when they aren’t following the same chefs through the weeks? Is the whole thing going to wander off into pointlessness via any combination of these things?

A lot of that is still up in the air really, because who knows how the next round of Masters is going to jump into things. The first episode was a lot of fun though, and really worth watching for anyone who even remotely enjoys Top Chef. The Masters were great, the challenges definitely worthwhile, and there were even some wrenches thrown into the works which added to the entertainment.

Check out the page at Bravo – Top Chef Masters for bios, info, and videos, and check out a preview below.