Top Chef Gets a New Host (Kristen Kish) and Goes to Wisconsin for Season 21

I hate change but maybe not this one

Reality TV is a core pillar of my media diet, and I’d fancy myself an expert in the category. My obsession started with Say Yes to the Dress and HGTV/Food Network shows as a kid. Then, as a preteen, I started watching Top Chef with my mom, and I learned Bravo put all these other networks to shame.

Weirdly enough, my introduction to Top Chef came through the fringe spin-off show Top Chef Life After, which was in my parents iTunes library. I started watching it bored on a plane with absolutely no context as to who Richard Blaze, Jen Carroll, Spike Mendelsohn, or Fabio Viviani were. Given that these are some of the most iconic chefs to come out of early Top Chef, it wasn’t the worst introduction to the chaotic blend of cooking and personality that the competition show offers. From there, I watched every season of Top Chef with my mom (a long commitment to rewatching on her part) investing in season after season on iTunes since Peacock didn’t exist back then. So even though the show started when I was 3, I’ve seen it all.

Through 20 seasons Padma Lakshmi hosted alongside head judge Tom Colicchio and with an assist from Gail Simmons, but Padma announced that season 20 would be her last and sent the future of Top Chef into question.

This isn’t new in the world of reality TV competition series, but it typically doesn’t mean great things for the future of the show. Project Runway has never been the same since Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn departed passing the reigns to Karlie Kloss and former winner Christian Siriano. Their hosting dynamic never quite clicked, and Siriano never quite found the right balance between cutting criticism and genuine care that Gunn managed. I was scared to have another longtime favorite show upended by a sloppy replacement, so I watched the first episode of Top Chef Season 21 holding my breath on Thursday. Here’s my thoughts on Season 21 Episode 1 “Chef’s Test” and the fate of the show in new hands.

Kristen Kish Steps in as Host

Of all the past contestants to step in for Padma, Kristen is an obvious choice. She’s guest-judged on the show in the past, is one of the more memorable cheftestants, and has that same badass energy Padma always brought to the screen. Still, being a good competitor doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a good host. From the start of the episode, producers clearly wanted to sell Kristen on the basis that she can understand the contestants on a different level than the longtime judges, and they offer plenty of reminders throughout the episode. The first challenges also serve as an introduction to Kristen as well. In the Elimination Challenge, we get a flashback to Kristen’s first challenge on the Seattle season where she had to cook soup for Emeril Lagasse to make it into the competition as she hands down the quest to a new group of chefs.

Overall, she’s funny, decisive, and has good chemistry with the other judges, and I’m excited to see how she continues to fill Padma’s shoes.

No Quick Fire is for the Better

The episode starts with an announcement that there won’t be a Quick Fire this week. It turns out that’s to make time for a sudden death, Last Chance Kitchen style cook-off repeating the challenge Kristen won in Last Chance Kitchen, Tom Colicchio’s after show that allows one eliminated chef to rejoin the end of the competition. She also announces that Quick Fires in the future will only be a competition for money (or probably prizes) and not immunity. There’s still immunity on the table awarded to the winner of the Elimination Challenge, but it does take the weight off the Quick Fires.

I actually really liked jumping straight into the grocery shop and main challenge. The Quick Fires are more often the goofier parts of the show that are more like Food Network cooking competitions that get on my nerves after a while. I feel like Top Chef could do without these starter challenges in the future and devote more time to getting to know the contestants and seeing more content from the challenge that everyone actually takes seriously.

I Love Watching Them Grocery Shop

These last few years that have highlighted the ubiquity of Whole Foods regardless of what city or country the chefs are in, and I’m honestly not mad at it. I bizarrely love grocery shopping, and it turns out I love watching other people grocery shop too. I also want to know more about the logistics. Do they close down the store? Could I be in a random Whole Foods and have it suddenly flooded by frantic reality TV contestants? How do they keep track of their budgets? Can they use their personal Prime account to get discounts?

There’s something about them shopping in a real, operating grocery store imparting chaos on the masses that makes this segment way more interesting than watching them grab food out of a pre-set pantry. I feel like we got more grocery shopping time than usual in this episode thanks to the more streamlined challenge as well.

The Divided Elimination Challenge Presents Pros and Cons

For the Elimination Challenge, the chefs drew knives that had one of the judge’s names on them. While still an individual challenge, they were put in three groups and assigned what to cook by group. Gail and Tom chose dishes they see flop on Top Chef most often to assign to their groups while Kristen used the challenge to tell her first Top Chef story. So Team Gail made stuffed pasta, Team Tom made roast chicken (with light and dark meat on the plate), and Team Kristen made soup.

Based on the chef’s immediate reactions, these challenges were, perhaps, not created equal. There was only one guy who seemed excited to make pasta. Some were open but nervous because it was far out of their scope (or they hadn’t made it in a while), and there were a ton of complainers. The most vocal was David Murphy, which was telling as to where things were going for him. The roast chicken group were a bit nervous to nail the temperature of the meat but pleased to show off their skills with a protein, and soup seemed pretty widely accepted as a decent challenge.

These 3 groups doing 3 different things for 1 Elimination Challenge was a bit of an awkward prospect. How do you compare one chef to another on fundamentally different dishes the required different skills and keep it fair?

Pros: Having the chefs stagger their cook time and go to judging in smaller groups made it much easier to get to know the chefs earlier on. Normally, it takes me quite a few episodes to get my head around who anyone is. There are a lot of chefs, and very few get highlighted in the initial episodes. I found these small groups cut down on my overwhelm, and I was a lot more engaged with who these players might shape up to be; particularly, pinpointing a winner and loser from each group drew your attention to a wider array of frontrunners and stragglers. This is the most invested I’ve been in a first episode of Top Chef in a while.

Cons: Having chefs cook 3 different dishes and then comparing them all is tough. It’s like apples and oranges both on the mistakes and triumphs. While these 3 winning candidates might have surfaced at the top cooking the same thing, someone might have crumbled in the face of pasta (why does no one want to make pasta?) or served raw meat if they were given a different challenge. Also, it begs the question of if making soup, pasta, or chicken is the bigger feat worthy of immunity for next week.

I wouldn’t be against seeing this format used in early rounds of the competition in the future to cut through the sheer number of early contestants.

Sudden Death Round Evens the Playing Field

Selecting the winner is somewhat lower stakes than choosing who to eliminate, and I might’ve felt a bit off about sending someone home comparing three different kinds of challenges. The choice was somewhat more obvious because one guy didn’t complete his dish, but Top Chef didn’t just send him home and call it a day. No, we had another contestant who was far too cocky and full of himself with nothing to back it up to allow that to happen.

Enter the Sudden Death Round to even the playing field where the lowest ranked chef from each group had 20 minutes to cook a really good dish to determine who goes home. The twist on Kristen’s original Last Chance Kitchen challenge was that these chefs could only use what was leftover from the main challenge shop in the kitchen. This additional challenge brought out an even worse side of David and ultimately resulted in him having an exceptionally short run in the competition. After seeing him tell another chef that she grabbed “his” fish when she made it to the protein first, I was ready to see him get cut. The elimination could be deemed fair and square with the ultimate decision resting on a challenge where all three contestants had the same mandate. This felt like a more satisfying use of air time than starting with an inconsequential Quick Fire.

Wisconsin and Thoughts on the Rest of the Season

I love how so much has changed but so much has stayed the same with Top Chef. For example, over the years, the main sponsor has changed, but it’s still a bougie water company. And I feel like Season 21 with its shake-up of cast functions the same way. As much as the show has evolved, it has stayed distinctly true to itself, not desperate to fix what isn’t broken.

I ended up watching the after show suggested to me by Peacock, Dish with Kish, where Kristen unpacks the episode with past Top Chef contestants and also found it to be a charming addition. The short also revealed that many time contestant Stephanie Cmar now works as a culinary producer on the show, and it was cool to see that Top Chef is continuing to grow with members of the show family both on camera and off.

I’ve been curious about what Wisconsin has to offer for a while since I’ve met a number of people from there who really love it, so I’m excited to learn more about the state throughout the show. I prefer when Top Chef goes to places that aren’t necessarily the biggest cities or places you think about a ton in culinary terms, so this was an exciting location pick.

Are you watching Top Chef this season? Let me know what you thought of the episode in the comments!