Inside the “Top Chef” industrial complex
Buddha Lo was in real trouble.
Yes, the reigning champion of “Top Chef” approached the first Quickfire Challenge of the reality television show’s 20th season, which premiered Thursday, with skill and swagger. But he had cream when he needed butter. Could Lo successfully churn one ingredient from the other well enough to cook turbot?
He was just one of 16 chefs flying around the onset kitchen amid a chaotic pileup of mismatched ingredients. They all hoped to wow the “Top Chef” judges and, by extension, a global audience of millions — and take home the $250,000 that goes to the season’s winner.
St i l l, Lo’s problem seemed simple compared with those of the producers, who had to turn more than 200 hours of such footage into 54 minutes of coherent, compelling television.
The scenes of Lo and his competitors flashed across a bank of video monitors last month in the downtown Los Angeles offices of Magical Elves, the production company that creates “Top Chef” for Bravo. Doneen Arquines, one of the show’s executive producers, and Steve Lichtenstein, its lead editor, were spinning the narrative together.
“We want to hear ‘ Michelin star,’ ‘ James Beard Award,’” Arquines said as Lichtenstein toggled back and forth between camera angles. “And sprinkle in some personality.”
Working on “Top Chef” since it debuted in March 2006, the duo have molded the series into one of the most inf luential forces shaping the way Americans think about restaurants and chefs. The show, which began as a long-shot marriage of reality television and cooking- competition programming, has also changed the way Americans eat
cores of its roughly 300 contestants have leveraged the show to open restaurants and expand empires in cities like Chicago, New York, Honolulu, Houston and Miami, and to draw attention and tourists to smaller markets like Boulder; Athens, Ga.; and Paducah, Ky.
Through its 17 years on television, “Top Chef” has reflected the evolution of America’s culinary world, from the foam- crazed molecular gastronomy of the mid-2000s to the tattooed rejection of fine dining’s pretensions to the reckonings around #Metoo and workplace equity.
With the new season, “Top Chef: World All-stars,” the show is looking to create a sort of Olympics for chefs. Set mainly in London, it is the first season filmed entirely outside the United States and features participants from the 29 licensed spinoff shows created in 23 countries. The flagship show airs in more than 175 international markets.
Appearing in the series is the most effective career accelerant available to working chefs, according to nearly all of the 32 past competitors interviewed for this article.
“It’s like being a sports star,” said Lo, the executive chef of Huso in New York. “People are watching who want to be like you. After I won, the restaurant had like a 500-person wait list for six months.”
The seed for “Top Chef” was planted in 2005, when Bravo executives asked Magical Elves to brainstorm a show loosely based on the premise of “Project Runway,” which Elves created, but with chefs instead of designers. Food was already a focus of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” and the two shows had been hits for Bravo in the early 2000s.
The involvement of Tom Colicchio, who was already a respected chef and restaurateur, helped give “Top Chef” credibility in the restaurant world.
“I just didn’t want to be a laughingstock of the industry,” Colicchio said.
Padma Lakshmi, a host since the second season, said she agreed to participate largely because she figured it would help promote her cookbooks.
“I didn’t know much about reality television at that point,” she said. “I thought it was worth a try.”
In the era of “Survivor,” food writer Gail Simmons was nervous about the genre. “How was I going to explain this to my mother?” she said. “Was I going to be tied to a tree eating insects?”
What “Top Chef” did was combine the culinary fireworks of contest shows like “Iron Chef” with the behind-the- scenes character drama of reality hits like “The Real World.” The formula worked. The show helped turn Bravo into a leader in unscripted, popculture television.
In the process, “Top Chef” conditioned a large segment of the public — and a generation of chefs — to believe that cooking pro
fessionals should be able to prove their worth in a spectacle of cutthroat competition, where success is defined by avoiding Lakshmi’s withering dismissal, “Please pack your knives and go.”
“When people have a problem with ‘ Top Chef,’ it’s because they took what is essentially an art form and turned it into a sport,” said Edward Lee, who has appeared on the show multiple times. “Others love it for that exact same reason. There are winners and losers.”once filming begins, computers and phones are confiscated, and contestants are not allowed to read books, watch television or listen to the radio — nothing that could provide an advantage or cause a secret to leak. Even contestants who are eliminated in early episodes remain isolated.
“It was like chef jail,” said Roscoe Hall, who was eliminated in the first episode of Season 18, which was filmed in Oregon during the 2020 summer of social upheaval. “I was all alone on the top floor of that hotel in Portland, watching riots from my window, drinking a bunch of microbeer.”
Contestants are paid very little — nothing beyond a $50 per diem in early seasons. Magical Elves declined to say how much contestants were paid for “World All-stars.”
Hugh Curnutt, a professor at Montclair State University who studies reality television and has written about “Top Chef,” said that the show arrived as the post-network era prompted a swelling appetite for content to fill an exploding number of channels. Reality television offered a relatively fast and affordable
model, anchored by casts of “non-unionized labor that is not paid well,” he said.
But even those who fare poorly on “Top Chef” commonly experience fame, opportunities for restaurant ownership, endorsement deals, book contracts and more television appearances.
Hugh Acheson, a Georgia-based chef and restaurateur, has appeared on “Top Chef” multiple times, as a competitor and guest judge. He compared the show’s pay structure to expensive restaurants that recruit young chefs to exchange their labor for “experience” — a practice that has recently come under fire, prompted by revelations of labor practices at Noma, the celebrated restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“Like working at Noma a couple of years ago, you’re doing it to put it on your resume, but you’re kind of working for free,” Acheson said. “At the end of the day, Elves and Bravo are making a lot of money off ‘ Top Chef.’”
“Top Chef: Portland” was set in a city at the center of debates over racial justice
and one that prides itself on culinary diversity. For “Top Chef,” it was an ideal backdrop to showcase an ethos the series had cultivated for years.
Kiki Louya, a Congolese American chef, grew emotional during a challenge that included a tour of restaurants featuring food from the African diaspora, which validated one of her motivations to appear on the show.
“It’s important for people to see that kind of cooking,” she said. “I think our cast was one of the most diverse.”
In fact, numerous veterans of the show, including Acheson, praised its track record of providing a pathway to prominence for chefs historically underrepresented in the food world. A partial list of female and minority chefs who have received career boosts from “Top Chef” includes Eric Adjepong, Nina Compton, Byron Gomez, Gregory Gourdet, Carla Hall, Stephanie Izard, Kristen Kish, Mei Lin, Maria Mazon, Shota Nakajima, Nini Nguyen and Kwame Onwuachi.
“It’s very difficult to garner the sort of respect and appreciation you get from ‘ Top Chef’ as a Black woman in this industry,” said Dawn Burrell, a contestant on “World All-stars” and a “Top Chef: Portland” finalist. “I consider it training for my actual life.”
Past contestants also spoke with gratitude about the opportunity the show gave them to be role models and to take stands on — and raise money for — meaningful causes. Casey Kriley, a CEO of Magical Elves, said the #Metoo and Black Lives Matter movements inspired the show’s creators.
“We had a lot of conversations internally at Magical Elves as it relates to the content we wanted to put out there, in terms of our commitment to creating change,” she said. “We wanted to do better.”
The Portland season realized many of these ambitions, but it was also a low point for the show. Shortly after the final episode aired, The Austin American- Statesman reported that winner Gabe Erales was fired from his previous restaurant job “for repeated violations of the company’s ethics policy as it relates to harassment of women.”
Three weeks after the finale aired, Erales apologized on Instagram. “I had a consensual relationship with a co-worker and later reduced her work hours,” he wrote.
The incident provoked outrage across the restaurant business, but past contestants signed nondisclosure agreements and generally do not criticize the show publicly.
Preeti Mistry, a past “Top Chef” contestant, said the cone of silence proved the power of the show and the extent to which stakeholders and the large network of alumni protected its reputation.
“The chef industrial complex, on a benevolent day you could call it a fraternity or sorority,” they said. “On a less benevolent day you could call it.the Mafia.”
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The line of chefs eager to appear on “Top Chef” remains quite long, despite how Season 18 ended.
WLO, Season 19’s champion, survived the first episode. That he would put his life on hold to appear on “Top Chef” again was never in question, though. Lo recalled telling his wife, who is also a chef, that he had been invited to defend his title.
He said, “I wasn’t even done with my sentence and she said, ‘ You’ve got to do it.’”