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On Wednesday night, Top Chef headed to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the start of Season 21. The long-running chef competition show promised a lot of changes for the new season, including a brand new host: Top Chef season 10 winner Kristen Kish. Kish replaced Padma Lakshmi, who left the series after 17 years to work on other television projects.
Another major difference this season is that chefs competing on the show won’t be able to earn immunity from elimination by winning the Quickfire challenge, which takes place at the beginning of every episode. (They will, however, be able to win cash from a $100,000 prize pot.) Instead, the winner of each major challenge, aka the elimination challenge, will also win immunity from elimination the following week. This, according to competing chef Danny Garcia, will give the competitors incentive to “keep cooking gangster food the entire time” instead of taking it easy after a Quickfire win. Sure!
In the first episode, at least, those changes don’t seem to have made much of a difference — for one thing, the episode focuses an extended elimination challenge instead of giving contestants a little practice with a Quickfire. Here are our main takeaways after watching.
We like Kristen Kish!
Adding a new host to a long-running show is hard (Great British Bake Off comes to mind). But luckily, and perhaps predictably, Kish makes the transition pretty seamless. She’s not changing the tone of the show in any major way, it seems, and she’s keeping the classic “pack your knives and go” send-off. This isn’t very surprising given that Kish has appeared on Top Chef so frequently and already has a rapport with judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons. Still, it’s nice to have our expectations validated.
75 minutes is entirely too long for a Top Chef episode
Arguably intended to bring more focus to the actual cooking on Top Chef, season 21’s episodes are 30 minutes longer than previous seasons, clocking in at 75 minutes of airtime. Maybe our millennial brains are too influenced by Instagram reels or whatever, but that is simply too long for an episode of competition reality TV! Do we really need extended grocery shopping sequences? No.
An episode this long needs more challenges, not fewer
In this first episode, instead of starting with a Quickfire, contestants go right into a three-part elimination challenge, in which groups of five have to either cook roast chicken for Colicchio, soup for Kish, or pasta for Simmons. It’s a somewhat confusing twist, given how the host and judges emphasize the importance of Quickfires this season, and the challenge isn’t varied enough to be interesting for so long. Parts of the judging sequence — which takes up a huge chunk of the episode — feel a little like just trying to hit the word count on an essay. They throw in a last-minute cook-off at the end, but overall, we hope this season adds on more challenges to make the longer length make sense.
There’s not nearly enough Wisconsin
Other than shots of Milwaukee landmarks and the presence of Wisconsin-based contestant Dan Jacobs, the first episode didn’t do much to really showcase the city. It felt like it could have been shot anywhere. We’re not interested in cheesy (pun intended) gimmicks related to the state’s love of dairy products, but it would be great to see more local character in upcoming episodes.
Overall, it really doesn’t feel that different
Even without Padma and the changes to the Quickfire, Top Chef still feels exactly like Top Chef. And maybe that’s because judges Gail Simmons and Colicchio are still there, and we’re still watching chefs present food for their critique. Perhaps the series will mix things up with more innovative challenges in upcoming episodes, but for now, it doesn’t seem as if the wheel has been totally reinvented.
