Sean Keane from the Roundball Rock podcast joins us this week to discuss Top Chef season 1, episode 4 -- "Food on the Fly." This episode challenged the chefs first to get all their quickfire ingredients from a convenience store and then to prepare an entree that could be reheated in a microwave. These days David Chang and all the hip chefs brag about all the things they cook in a microwave, but back in 2006 that was tantamount to telling one of these fancy chefs to shoot their dog.
"I haven't used one of these in 10 years," says chef Andrea, who is inexplicably still on the show. That is the “Oh, I don’t watch TV” of food.
Yet cutting the chefs down to size a bit seemed to all be part of the (producers’) plan. To get them to drop all the fancy talk and try to relate to some normal people. I guess we thought that's what foodies needed back then, to stop talkin’ so fancy all the time and just throw some normal slop in the microwave from time to time and give the piggies what they want (to cavort, mostly). They weren't entirely wrong. It was good TV, anyway.
This episode also featured possibly the meanest Top Chef guest judge ever, in Jefferson Hill — then the executive chef at the Rotunda at Neiman Marcus, yet another San Francisco location that doesn't exist anymore (we will stop reminiscing about these one week, but not this week). These days Jefferson Hill is... well, no one really knows! He seems to have disappeared from the internet record. Maybe he faked his own death, or lives in a really nice barn somewhere with a dog.
Other drama includes: Miguel stealing Tiffani's idea for Krispy Kreme bread pudding (which sounds disgusting, even though I like both Krispy Kreme and bread pudding), Miguel trying to get Stephen to understand that not everyone is a snob, and Dave being upset that Harold and Stephen clowned his lasagna. Can you believe they’d stoop that low, to ridicule a man’s lasagna? That’s low, boys.
Candice ends up going home, and it feels like the producers were setting up a character arc for her that never quite panned out. The presumption was that she might be more than she first appears, but if so we never found out.
Then we try to figure out which classic Real World tropes each Top Chef contestant was cast based on, argue over who is the most successful Real World castmember, and try to imagine a season of Top Chef cast with ex-Real World people. Good times were had. Food was watched. Pack your knives, and also your headphones.
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More movie and culture stuff coming soon (as well as a new Frotcast, with Alice Fraser, in which we attempt to get to the bottom of the Australian breakdancer madness, which should be up in a day or so).
In the meantime, here’s a great Yaphet Kotto story about Robert Mitchum. Nothing like old character actors telling stories.
Top Chef Frotcast Post-Show S1E4, 'Food on the Fly,' with Sean Keane