TC News and Information 7.18.11

Congratulations to Top Chef for garnering four Emmy nominations (“Outstanding Reality-Competition Program,” “Outstanding Cinematography for Reality Programming,” “Outstanding Directing for Non-Fiction Programming” and “Outstanding Picture Editing for Reality Programming”)! No Reservations, the Travel Channel show starring frequent TC judge Anthony Bourdain, also received four nominations (“Outstanding Nonfiction Series,” “Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming,” “Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming” and “Outstanding Cinamatography for Nonfiction Programming”).

In case you missed it, here’s a 30-minute video of Bourdain answering the top 10 questions posed by viewers on Reddit.

Want to meet Fabio Viviani? Bertolli olive oil is sponsoring a contest where the winner will win a trip for two to LA for cooking lessons with the maestro.

Ruth Reichl confirms here that Top Chef Masters 4 is in the works.

Jen Carroll, Spike Mendelsohn, Kevin Sbraga, Dale Talde, Carla Hall and Stephen Asprinio were among the Top Chef alums who showed up for an “oven-warming” party at All-Stars finalist Mike Isabella’s newly opened Graffiato. Check out pics and more on Eater.

A couple of interesting pieces about TC Masters 3 finalist Traci des Jardins here and here. She is also blogging for the new Huffington Post San Francisco edition. Here inaugural post here.

And Harold Dieterle, Fabio Viviani and Richard Blais will each take over the kitchen at Wisconsin’s Lake of the Torches Resort Casino selected Thursdays in August.

Posted on AllTopChef.com

TC News and Information 6.27.11

I'm back from vacation, and our Top Chef contestants have been all kinds of busy!

Tre Wilcox's Marquee Grill has opened in Dallas, and you can drool over some fabulous photos of Tre's offerings here.

Mike Isabella opened his Jersey/Italian restaurant, Graffiato, last week, which will serve pizzas, pastas, charcuterie, and that pepperoni sauce from Top-Chef All-Stars that made Gail Simmons swoon. Photos from Eater DC here; menus and more from the Washington Post here.

Isabella is also working on a cookbook about New Jersey Italian food, with his wife honcho-ing the test kitchen and blogger Carol Blymire as writer. Blymire is an entertaining writer known for cooking her way through cookbooks by Thomas Keller, French Laundry at Home, and Grant Achatz, Alinea at Home, as well as some well played April Fool's jokes. But this is apparently the real deal.

Season 1’s Tiffani Faison has announced plans to open a new BBQ restaurant in Boston called “Sweet Cheeks” and is touring the South for inspiration.

All-Stars winner Richard Blais has all kinds of culinary irons in the fires, including expanding his Flip Burger Boutique chain to DC and Miami, opening a gourmet hot dog restaurant, HD or Haute Doggery, in Atlanta, and a yet-to-be-named restaurant in midtown Atlanta featuring “simple American food that tastes great.”

Another All-Stars contender, Dale Talde, will be head chef at a “New Asian” restaurant in Brooklyn’s Park Slope that hopes to open by September.

Season 3 winner Hung Huynh is slated to help open a Manhattan “seafood restaurant and lounge” called Catch.

Bryan Voltaggio is working on opening two new restaurants, in Frederick, Maryland, and Chevy Chase Plaza, as well as collaborating on a cookbook with brother Michael. His Frederick restaurant, tentatively called North Market Kitchen, is inspired by Mario Batali’s Eataly in NYC, or maybe not.

And don’t miss this fascinating piece from Ruth Reichl about her experience as judge on Top Chef Masters, from her new desk at Gilt Taste, about why she was surprised a woman didn't win and still loves Floyd Cardoz's food.

Posted on AllTopChef.com

TC News and Information 5.9.11

Happy James Beard Awards Day! The Beard media/cookbook winners were announced last week, with Top Chef Season 7 winning for best studio program, and Eric Ripert's public television show "Avec Eric" winning for best on-location program.

Tonight the James Beard Foundation's chef and restaurant awards will be announced, with Tom Colicchio, Trace Des Jardins, and Ming Tsai hosting. The event will be live-streamed and live-blogged. Stephanie Izard's Girl and the Goat restaurant is a nominee in the Best New Restaurant category, and fellow TC Chicago chef Dale Levitski's shares some thoughts - and faces - of her in this video.

If you're looking for an alternative to those Beard awards, you can cast your vote in this competition sponsored by Zagat. You'll probably recall contestant #6, whose red beard had its own facebook page.

Speaking of Southerners, current TC Masters contestant Hugh Acheson's restaurant Five and Dime is featured in this NYT piece on sophisticated Southern cooking.

Hugh is also on the council of the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, set for May 19 to May 22 this year. With themes that include Old Traditions, New Traditions and Imports & Inspirations, Kevin Gillespie is cooking up an "inspired" contribution at Woodfire Grill.

TC Masters Season 2 contestant Anita Lo discusses the difference between appearing on Top Chef Masters and Iron Chef in this Wall Street Journal interview: “Iron Chef” was, by far, the easier challenge – a “walk in the park,” as Lo describes it. “It’s just one competition and you can go home after it,” she says. Plus, on “Iron Chef,” you “can have whatever ingredient you want.” With “Top Chef,” Lo was limited to what she could find in Whole Foods – and that meant foregoing harder-to-find Asian ingredients.

Former Gourmet editor and current Masters judge Ruth Reichl (yeah, she'll be back for this week's episode!) has a new gig with the Gilt Groupe, reports the Village Voice. She also had some insights to share about food, culture, and writing at the College of Brockport recently.

Finally, Eater LA is reporting a July opening for Michael Voltaggio's new restaurant, Ink.

Posted on AllTopChef.com

TC News and Information 4.11.11

So, what did you think of the new format and team of host and "critics" for Masters 3?

If you're among those wondering "Who the Hell is Curtis Stone?" Eater has a pretty thorough run-down of answers, and WWD has an insightful piece as well (Stone does not seem to be a Housewives fan - lol).

Bravo has blogs up from Ruth Reichl and James Oseland, both of whom vigorously disagree with the diners, who were allowed to select the winning TCM Restaurant Wars team. Bravo also continues its extended Judges' (ahem, not "Critics') Table videos, and in this week's clip, Oseland talks about how "weird" and "space-alien-like" he found poor Hugh Acheson's scallops.

Before you become too attached to Ruth Reichl as a Masters critic, read this TV Guide interview with Magical Elves producer Dan Cutforth. Ruth was not available to film all the episodes (kind of like we were teased that Anthony Bourdain would be on more All-Stars episodes than proved to be the case?). However, Cutforth says Gael Greene will be back for “a few” episodes, Gail Simmons for “a couple,” and Padma Lakshmi for “one.” Sadly, no mention of bringing back Jay Rayner.

Cutforth also talks about the difference between “critics” and “judges” and says: “We were actually really happy with the panel of critics we had assembled, but you always want to keep evolving and keep things moving... That said, we wanted to reflect the new reality of food criticism, which is that food blogs and online criticism are a huge part of the restaurant business now. So critics panel will also include people from sites like Grub Street and RestaurantGirl." Danyelle Freeman of the blog Restaurant Girl was, of course, among the critics for the first TCM3 episode. Grub Street (New York Magazine's food blog) fesses up that its own Alan Sytsma is also a guest judge this season.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on Masters contestant Naomi Pomeroy, with more of her back story (plus a recipe for the former Mrs. Hebberoy's Potato and Green Garlic Soup).

Mary Sue Milliken turned down TC Masters repeatedly, accordingly to the Las Vegas Sun.

And here's an interesting interview with Masters contestant Sue Zemanick, of New Orleans' Gautreau, who says she prefers to stay out of the spotlight.

While Top Chef Masters contenders are competing on behalf of charities of their choice, other TC'ers are lending their names to causes as well, including All-Stars Richard Blais, Mike Isabella, Carla Hall, Antonia LoFaso, Jennifer Carroll, Angelo Sosa, Dale Levitski, Jamie Lauren, Dale Talde, Tre Wilcox, Casey Thompson, and Fabio Viviani, who have signed onto the Humane Society of the United States’ Protect Seals boycott of Canadian seafood in an effort to end Canada’s commercial seal slaughter.

And a host of New York chefs are joining in HRC's Marriage Equality Campaign, including Tom Collichio, with this video.

Posted on AllTopChef.com

Conference Call with James Oseland, Ruth Reichl, and Curtis Stone

Earlier in the week, I participated in a conference call with new Top Chef Masters host Curtis Stone and new judge Ruth Reichl, along with James Oseland, who has been judge for the past two seasons. Right off the bat I learned that James and Ruth like Curtis - they really like him. Honestly, they couldn't say enough nice things about Stone, which was good to hear because, personally, the man has never impressed me.

If you didn't know already, Curtis was on Celebrity Apprentice a couple seasons ago and says the experience helped him empathize with the Masters cheftestants:

It was very interesting. It gave me a real perspective on how the contestants were feeling in this competition because, you know, you’re standing there thinking am I going to look foolish here? You know, is he going to destroy me? And just like with these guys, it’s their credibility on the line and they’re doing the best they can but we give them some really unbelievable circumstance to cook under on Top Chef Masters and, no matter how great these chefs are, we really make their lives - you know, we really make them show that mastery through their cooking in the limited time we give them and all the rest of it. So I could really empathize with them.

Curtis also felt that with his experience as a chef, part of his responsibility at Judges' Table was to "plead [the chefs'] case to the critics and to try and justify why...what ended up on the plate that’s in front of us."

There’s nothing more nerve wrecking than cooking for other chefs apart from cooking for critics who hold your career in your hand. I think - I value both and I know this sounds like a copout of a response - but I really do value both equally because I think chefs can understand what you’ve done from a technical perspective...what kind of techniques did you use, how did you treat the ingredients to get them to taste a certain way. So they look at it more from a technical perspective. But then critics look at it from the diner’s perspective and I think that that is probably maybe even slightly more important because you can impress a chef but at the end of the day, they’re not your customers. Diners are.

James Oseland thinks the new format is beneficial to the participants:

I think that the chefs ultimately became more comfortable because we were giving them the chance over the course of multiple episodes to become more...familiar with the kitchen, to know where the salt was kept, to know that...the kind of salt that’s used in the Top Chef Masters Kitchen is...a coarse-grained kosher salt versus a fine-milled kosher salt, so we weren’t tasting food that was...aggressively awfully salty. Whereas on the first two seasons, a lot of times it was...really hard to get a sense of who they were because they were in so many respects just sort of really struggling with the sort of basic fundamentals of cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen.

Ruth Reichl was asked about her thoughts on the online character who is a hybrid of her own Twitter persona and Anthony Bourdain, "Ruth Bourdain," nominated for a James Beard Award this year. Reichl's theory on Ruth Bourdain's true identity might be an interesting guessing game for Top Chef Masters viewers as she said, "there is actually a little suspicion in the back of my mind that it may be one of the people who was a judge this year." Hmmm...who could it be?

Speaking of judges, there are some interesting guests this season: Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and her husband, Geoffrey Arend (Body of Proof), are serious cooks. Ruth Reichl found it a bit intimidating that such a beautiful woman would also spend time making her own puff pastry. Singer Kelis is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef. Maroon 5 and contestants on the Biggest Loser also make appearances.

It all has my interest piqued...yours?

Posted on AllTopChef.com