'Top Chef' eats 'Chopped' for breakfast

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By Emley Kerry

Top Chef takes to Vegas this season where the stakes are high and the food is sizzlin'. Top Chef's most decadent season yet brings us undoubtedly the finest collection of chefs and therefore the most innovative food across the board created in the Bravo show's history. As with every season, there were still obvious strong contenders and weaklings, and was just a matter of weeks before the weaker contestants got picked off one by one.

The same could be said about Top Chef's TV competition, which will inevitably falter in the shadow of the food television giant. Chopped is the Food Network's take on the food competition genre: the program works like a series of Top Chef-style "Quickfire" challenges in which each round consists of competing chefs creating progressing courses.

Four competing chefs square off in round one, where they must prepare an appetizer for the panel of judges. The loser with the weakest plate is "chopped," and the three remaining chefs turn right back around to the kitchen to cook the second course, and entrée. After the rapid elimination, the remaining two chefs go head to head in the dreaded dessert round.

The gag of the show is that in each round the chefs are presented with a goodie basket full of seemingly incongruous ingredients that they must somehow work into their dishes.

Because the rounds are so fast and the competitors are only around for an hour-long episode, we never really get to know them as people. Thus, the most entertainment we ever get from them is a brief self-description and panicked scenes of them sweating buckets slaving over their food, hardly comparable to the chefs' personalities that shine through across the 16 episodes of Top Chef.

Because we're not watching the show for the contestants, our attention shifts to the food, which is more of a Frankenstein mishmash of a plate than the refined, high-brow food (even out of lowbrow ingredients like vending machine junk snacks) that comes out of Top Chef's kitchen. The competition becomes more about who can make the most edible plate by tucking the ingredients away into the food so that they are almost unnoticeable. And who can blame them with appetizer ingredients like maple syrup and nori (dried seaweed) to go with beef tenderloin, or entre ingredients like candied ginger, potatoes, 5-year aged cheese, and fish - cheese and fish is a major no-no in food world.

Unfortunately, the three 20-minute rounds are also too short to allow the chefs to show a more involved skill level, and the show becomes more of an adrenaline-fest food freak show than each Top Chef's journey throughout the season.

Tim Allen, best known for his role as a food guru for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, seems a bit forced as the show's host. His formal, rigid pronouncements are a strange change from the competent judging on Top Chef.

Top Chef's Padma Lakshmi, on the other hand, is the classiest, most gracious dame to ever bless television audiences with her regal presence (lady crush alert!). Plus, she used to be married to Salmon Rushdie, so she also has to be either a genius, a muse, or both.

The winner of Chopped walks away with $10,000 - chump change to Top Chef's Vegas contestants who can win that in a single "Quickfire" with way more screen time and the chance to win the grand prize.

Final Verdict: Chopped is a tasty little morsel of a show, a good snack but lacking real substance. Top Chef is more complex and does more than just satisfy a simple TV craving, making it the number one contender in the reality food show competition arena.

Watch Chopped on Food Network Tuesdays at 9 pm, then follow it up with Top Chef, Wednesdays at 9 pm on Bravo.

Originally Published: Issue 824 - November 18, 2009

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