With much fanfare, this past episode of Top Chef: Texas featured Restaurant Wars, which seems to excite the chefs but strikes me as the most perilous of challenges—a competent chef who volunteers to be team leader can go down with the ship, taking responsibility for others’ mistakes. The chefs were divided into two groups—the men versus the women. The men wasted no time in getting organized, agreeing on all the dishes, and working fairly well with each other. The women, meanwhile, turned on each other, talking behind each other’s backs and sometimes to their faces. The censor at the Bravo control room must have a blistered finger from all the times he had to press the bleep button—the women sounded as if they were auditioning for Goodfellas.
And yet the women apparently served the better food. The men were called up to judges’ table and New York’s Ty-Lör Boring was sent packing for a Thai crab appetizer that judge Hugh Acheson called “boring, absolutely no pun intended. It failed to evoke really anything Thai. It could have been a Minnesota crab cup for all intents and purposes.” Really? That’s how it ends?
