Top Chef Update: Why Isn't Chef David Murphy On Last Chance Kitchen?

Sometimes people just get sick of this shit.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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UPDATE, 12:49 PDT: After initially saying David “opted out,” Tom has now walked that back and said he “misspoke,” and that David “got a second chance at the end of the challenge.” Sorry about the contradictory update, it’s still hard to tell what’s going on here.

The flood of new subscriptions after last week’s Top Chef Power Rankings, far and away more than I’ve gotten on any other post, leads me to conclude that I should embrace Top Chef #Content. Not that it’ll ever be the only thing we do here (I have far too many self-defeating pretensions for that), but sometimes there’s something to be said for doing the thing that feels easiest. Rise later! Grind less! Anyway, here goes.

I’ve mostly limited my Top Chef coverage to Top Chef proper, acknowledging the existence of the post-show, Last Chance Kitchen, but covering it mostly in terms of how it effects the main show. Yet readers (not to mention tweeters, skeeters, and Facedorks) noted after last week’s episode that Top Chef’s first eliminated chef this season, David Murphy, the Hawaiian-shirted guy with a cowboy hat and tattoos with the food-waste-themed pizza joint in San Francisco (Shuggies), was absent from Last Chance Kitchen.

Usually, the eliminated chefs go directly to the post-show on Last Chance Kitchen and try to fight their way back onto the show. That didn’t happen with Hopalong Howie the San Francisco Cowboy, and it seemed kind of messed up that the show would do him like that. Well now, at least according to Tom Colicchio, it wasn’t the show’s decision. It was Hopalong Howie’s.

In response to someone asking him about it on Twitter, Colicchio tweeted simply, “He opted out.”

I reached out for comment but it sounds like David isn’t doing interviews. Which is not particularly surprising, the news that he wouldn’t be doing media to address his not wanting to do media.

Being on Top Chef is a tough gig, in almost any way you can imagine. For one thing, you’re putting your entire persona and perception in the hands of the show’s editors. Hopalong Howie stood out right away as the guy who was probably going to be the most polarizing personality this season, with his collection of loud affectations. He also kind of started to bomb right away, making fun of Tom’s hats at the beginning of the show (a fair needle, though maybe not well-timed) and then mentioning multiple times “I hate pasta” and “pasta isn’t really my thing.” Which, let’s be honest, isn’t going win you many friends anywhere. (I promise I have my own lengthy list of personal peccadilloes that don’t endear me to anyone).

Acknowledging that the editors and producers can manipulate this stuff how they see fit, it appeared as if Hopalong Howie was kind of bombing, and that was before he got eliminated basically twice (first landing in the bottom of the team challenge, and then losing to the other two bottom chefs in sudden death). Speaking as a guy who has bombed in front of a crowd many times, it sucks. And usually you console yourself with the knowledge that only like 20 people saw it. That’s not true in this case, obviously. (They will, however, forget about it five minutes later in both cases, which is why shame and embarrassment aren’t the most useful emotions).

Top Chef also holds an interesting niche in reality TV. At this point, agreeing to be on a reality television program is as sure a sign of a personality disorder as just about anything, and we mostly view it as such. Top Chef is a special case in that regard. For instance, I would never be on a reality show in a million years (not that anyone has asked), but I’d probably make an exception for something that had the potential to do for my career what Top Chef can do for a chef’s career. I think a lot of people are like that.

Being a chef is a job that’s mostly low pay for insane hours, unless you become extremely successful. Ta da, this show can do exactly that, and might in fact be the most tried-and-true method of going from good chef to chef-well-known-enough-to-make-money-without-putting-in-70-hour-weeks. And so it probably attracts lots of people who wouldn’t ever agree to be in a reality show but will for this one. (The fact that many Top Chef winners and finalists, like Melissa King, opt to do more TV and pop-ups and cooking events after winning instead of opening their own restaurants says a lot about how hard the lifestyle is, and the problems with the restaurant business as a whole).

And all that upside applies, of course, only if you win the season or do reasonably well. Here’s how Brooke Williamson, then a season 10 runner up to Kristen Kish, before she won season 14, described it to me back in 2015:

Was that something you understood going in, how much Top Chef would have an effect on business?

No. You know going into it but you never know how well you’re going to do. And I was definitely nervous about making an ass out of myself and not doing well. If you get eliminated early, it doesn’t really affect your life a whole lot. It’s just a massive waste of time.

How much time away does it require and how much does that sort of hurt what you’re doing ?

Like two months of complete immersion and complete separation and total lack of contact with my family, which was really, really hard. My son was four and a half at the time. So my intentions were to make it to the end. Because when you get eliminated you don’t get sent home, you stay.

Oh really?

Yeah, at that point you just have to stay. And you’re separated from all the people who are still competing, and it kind of makes the whole thing a waste of time — a waste of time away from your family, a waste of time away from work. So, no. I had no idea what it would do but I was obviously hoping for the best.

And that was coming from someone who basically did experience Top Chef’s best-case scenario: becoming a full-fledged food celebrity (the interview, in fact, took place at an expensive resort in Montana who were hosting Williamson and her family and paying her to create a special tasting menu for VIPs. Sure beats doing 300 covers a night).

Long story short, David Murphy maybe not wanting to put up with this crap anymore is reasonably understandable. It’s hard to know whether he bailed completely, or just “opted out” of Last Chance Kitchen while still being sequestered in Wisconsin. He was still posting on Instagram about being on Top Chef before the first week (even though filming must’ve taken place months ago, long after he knew he’d been eliminated), which you imagine he wouldn’t have done if it had been a total falling out. Or maybe it was just contractually obligated. Who knows! Maybe I should stop guessing!

Hopefully people understand that Top Chef competition cooking is different enough from actual cooking that you can be bad at or not enjoy the former while still being great at the latter.

Anyway, chin up, goofball. We were all looking forward to making fun of you a lot more this season, but I get it.

Other Notes:

-I did get some pushback over the paywall on the last Power Rankings. First it was like two tweets from random accounts, but now there’s a whole Reddit thread of people bitching about it.

On some level, I get it. Most everything I write I’d prefer be seen by the most people possible, and limiting the audience to paying customers only is massively painful for me, and basically every writer I know. I even made the first ranking free, and for the second, I probably put like 1500 of the 2000 or so words of that post visible to everyone.

But look, man, I didn’t want finance guys to destroy the ad-supported internet either, but here we are. I spent 15 years trying to build an outlet I could write for that people could read for free and then they pushed me out the door when I had a toddler and family to support in the middle of making record profits. And so, now I have to charge (and I just left the standard pricing Substack had on there without altering anything). Paying for every little thing you read sucks and all, but at least when you do it you can know that the writer’s duty is actually to you, the reader, and not a team of finance dipshits, their sales buddies, and advertisers. They can all eat a mile of my shit.