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Next, they'll yoke a Ferrari to a plow

Bravo

Rick Bayless and other Top Chef Masters participants go through exercises that border on the absurd.

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By JEFF HOUCK | The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 26, 2009

I ask this after watching a couple weeks of the new cooking competition series, "Top Chef Masters," on Bravo.

The series based on the "Top Chef" franchise features four established, renowned chefs competing for charity against each other in "quickfire" and "elimination" challenges. The chef with the most points, as bestowed by guest judges and a permanent panel of experts, goes on to the finals to fight Blaster in Thunderdome for control of Bartertown.

Wait, that would be "Top Chef Mad Max." I apologize.

You can understand my confusion. These shows are getting more extreme and convoluted by the episode. Food is quickly becoming a side dish to the plot. That's kind of a bad idea, considering the shows are supposed to be about cooking.

During the first episode of "Masters," the roster included chefs Christopher Lee of Aureole in New York; Tim Love of The Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in Fort Worth, Texas; Michael Schlow of Radius Restaurant in Boston; and Hubert Keller of Fleur de Lys in San Francisco. It was like getting the Super Friends together to cook dinner at the Justice League.

Their first assignment: Make a dessert. The guest judges: a group of Girl Scouts.

Uh, these are big-time chefs. Asking them to start with dessert is like asking U2 to sing the alphabet. There are lots of things they could be doing that would be more entertaining. Using Girl Scouts was a savvy touch by Bravo, which no doubt hoped to capitalize on the middle-school audience who watched Kathy Griffin's "I'll Cut A Bitch" special.

The chefs' second assignment: Cook for college students in a dorm room using only a microwave, a hot plate and a toaster oven. The microwave was so foreign to Schlow, he poked at it like a monkey testing a light socket. Poor Hubert Keller was reduced to using a shower stall to shock the macaroni for his legendary mac 'n' cheese.

The second episode got even more bizarre. The quickfire challenge had chefs using only vending machine food as ingredients. The elimination challenge used the TV series "Lost" as a theme and gave them a short amount of time to cook using food staples from the deserted island on the show. Half the chefs had never watched the show. The very frustrated Wylie Dufresne, known for his food-meets-science style of molecular gastronomy, detonated a series of f-bombs in disgust.

Sadly, "Top Chef MacGyver" is part of an expanding genre. Food Network, which helped pioneer the chef-in-a-time-vise programming with its "Iron Chef" and "Dinner: Impossible" shows, has a series in its second season called "Chopped" that uses a similar premise of using bizarre ingredient combinations. Last night's episode was titled "Coconut, Calamari and Donuts." I don't even like those three words in a sentence, much less a meal.

If you want to impress me, make a show featuring a mom or dad who works 60 hours a week and still finds time to cook delicious dinners. Call it, "Dinner: Impractical."

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