Bravo’s new reality series Top Chef premiered last night. I was all excited to see what the contestants would dream up and maybe learn a few culinary tips. What I didn’t expect was to have steam blowing out my ears for half the show. Indulge me a little indignant rant, if you will, on behalf of housewives everywhere.
When the contestants first entered their living quarters, one of them, Dubliner Ken, took a quick tour of the kitchen and pronounced it a second-rate “housewife’s kitchen.” He then turned to the oldest female contestant and said, “You should feel right at home.” She should have slugged him with the Vodka bottle she was shown using to flatten chicken breasts.
Then, later in the program, chef Keller, guest judge from Fleur de Lys in San Francisco said of the contestants offerings, “This isn’t a housewives’ cooking competition. These are supposed to be chefs, right?”
Justice does come in one form or another. Ken was the first kicked off the show for his dry, tasteless halibut atop a pretentious soy bean, green onion and parsley puree with a touch of tomato compote and a fig gastrique. What the heck is a fig gastrique? My twelve-year-old son could make a good potty joke out of that one.
As for chef Keller, he’d better hope that there was just some bad editing on the show. In an earlier competition to see who had the right stuff to work the line in the kitchen, he asked Ken to taste a sauce. Ken stuck his pinky in the sauce and then into his mouth. Chef Keller, horrified, kicked him out of the kitchen because “no one in my kitchen touches the sauce.” He said he’d have to now throw the sauce away. Later, Ken confronted Chef Keller and asked him if he’d actually thrown away the sauce. There was some hemming, hawing, and an indirect answer before another judge lit into Ken for confronting the chef. So the question remains whether patrons at the Fleur de Lys were served sauce sullied by Ken’s pinky.
Besides the dissing of housewives and Ken’s pinky in the sauce, the show was a little bland for all the hype. Let’s hope next week’s episode has some more spice. (And a housewife for a guest judge!)