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| To Quote George Takei: "Oh My" |
I'm not much of a reality TV fan. Aside from watching our gal Bronwen Weber from
Frosted Art slay any cake maker who gets in her way on the Food Network, I pretty much avoid the highly edited, non-scripted mutterings of people who need to actually get a life as opposed to being filmed in a pretend one. Forgive me, Honey Boo Boo, but I am not at all interested in the goings on inside your trailer park. Sorry, so-asinine-you-are-repulsively-laughable Donald Trump, you're fired.
That being said, I must confess to a weakness for the weekly kitchen drama of the hopelessly addictive Top Chef. I'm surprised to say I find Padma incongruously sexy and I'd sort of like to water ski or go Christmas shopping with Tom Colicchio. (Emeril, not so much, I worry his head is way too big for his neck to support it and one day it's just going to snap off.) Season 10's installment, Top Chef Seattle, came to an end last week and I feel like I'm missing a limb.
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| Shoulda Been a Contenda |
I know it's contrived. That was made abundantly clear when Dallas chef John Tesar of
Spoon Bar & Kitchen was told to pack his knives mid-season when he was obviously the most talented toque in the tea kettle. After they bumped off that Asian lady who couldn't bake potatoes and the smarmy tall guy for redefining the word irritating, they had to axe John in order to level the playing field, thus leaving a few distinctive characters in play to create feigned drama. Braying Josie. Snarky Josh. Satanic Stefan. Likable Sheldon, who naively didn't know the only prize a televised contestant from Hawaii can possibly win is second runner up in the Miss America Pageant, and only then if she twirls the baton whilst performing as a ventriloquist.
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| Brains, Beauty & Talent |
I don't believe there was a single fan of the show who didn't know pretty early on that it was going to boil down to a cook-off between Brooke and Kristen, two chefs in possession of mad culinary skills and obligatory forearm tattoos. Even when
The Unthinkable happened--Kristen getting booted for not tattling on the abrasive, gap-toothed Josie and instead, accepting responsibility for the failure of Atelier Kwan in Restaurant Wars--we all knew there'd be some kind of soap operatic return from the dead for her and she'd be in the finale even if she were portrayed as her own evil twin sister suffering from amnesia. And sure enough, she emerged from Last Chance Kitchen in the penultimate episode, followed by handily beating Brooke in the finale title bout with just an immersion blender and a set of nested measuring spoons.
As Princess Padma intoned at the start of every show, Cheftestant Kristen Kish will now enjoy $125,000 cash (sponsored by Healthy Choice, grand prize winner in the product placement category), a feature in Food & Wine magazine and a showcase at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. If history predicts the future, somebody will then come along and put up financing for a restaurant of her own, hopefully not called Kish and Tell. (She is currently chef de cuisine at Stir, Barbara Lynch's restaurant in Boston. I mention this because No. 9 Park in Beacon Hill was Barbara Lynch's first restaurant and that is where D and I had dinner the night we got married and remains as one of my top five meals ever.)
With her dramatic back story of Korean orphanhood, crazy kitchen wizardry, and fashion model beauty, Kristen might just one day land herself a television show of her very own.
Now
that would be unreal.
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