‘Top Chef’ Is ‘Always Changing’—But Never Like This

LOS ANGELES—When Tom Colicchio walks into his restaurant Craft on a recent Monday night, he keeps his head down and strides directly into the kitchen. He’s not there to check up on his regular staff, but rather the four Top Chef contestants who are using his space to recreate the five-course meal that won them the Restaurant Wars challenge earlier in the show’s 20th season, which is set to crown its World All-Stars champion on Thursday night.

When I express some surprise that the winning team—Buddha Lo, Sara Bradley, Amar Santana, and Ali Ghzawi, who was flown in from his home country of Jordan for the event—are actually recreating the dishes themselves, Colicchio asks, “Why wouldn’t they be back there cooking?”

“It’s never the same when you have someone take a recipe and try to cook your food,” Amar tells me later. (As any Top Chef fan will understand, it only feels right to refer to the contestants by their first names.)

Fellow Top Chef judge Gail Simmons arrives moments later, all smiles and warm greetings to the assembled press, staff, and Bravo executives who have gathered to celebrate the reality competition series as it approaches its biggest season finale yet.

Conspicuously missing from the event is Padma Lakshmi, who shocked fans last week by announcing her departure from the show after 19 seasons as host. “After much soul searching, I have made the difficult decision to leave Top Chef,” Lakshmi wrote on social media last Friday. “Having completed a glorious 20th season as host and executive producer, I am extremely proud to have been part of building such a successful show and of the impact it has had in the worlds of television and food.”

Lakshmi has declined requests to further explain her decision since revealing the news, but in a recent interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, she hinted at some misgivings about her role as a figurehead for the show, clarifying that while the show has won Emmy Awards, she has not: “Top Chef has won Emmys. I wasn’t a producer when the show won [in 2010]. They made me hold [the award] onstage when the show won and took it away.”

When Lakshmi signed on to host the Bravo competition series for its second season in 2006—following a notoriously poor performance from Season 1 host Katie Lee—she couldn’t have known how big of a cultural impact it would have 17 years later.

As Colicchio tells the intimate group of guests before they dive into their first course, he initially imagined Top Chef would run for two or three seasons and that his family might get a kick out of seeing him on TV. But especially over the past several years, the show has ballooned into an Emmy-winning behemoth that has minted a new generation of culinary stars and radically transformed how its many devoted fans interact with the food world.

The pandemic may have taken an immeasurable toll on the restaurant industry, but somehow, Top Chef only emerged from its COVID season stronger. And for this current World All-Stars edition, it assembled its highest caliber group of chefs yet—including finalists and winners from the many international versions of the show—for its first full season abroad in London and now Paris for the finale.

Simmons, who has been a key member of the show’s judging panel since the beginning, had exceedingly high expectations going into Season 20, especially because she, Colicchio, and Lakshmi had been wanting to bring something on this scale to fruition for years.

“We didn’t know if it would ever happen, so when they actually told us we were going to London and then Paris for the whole shoot, we were just so excited,” she tells me over cocktails before the meal begins. “We just wanted to make it feel big, because none of us ever imagined we’d make it to 20 seasons,” she adds, echoing Colicchio. “And it also felt like, coming off the pandemic, something to celebrate.”

As Simmons puts it, “COVID saw a ton of evolution in our show.” They couldn’t bring in new guest judges every week, so they turned to alumni contestants who could remain within the show’s “bubble” for several weeks and appear at the Judges’ Table throughout. “And it worked so well that we brought one of them back for every episode the following year, even if we didn’t have to.”

This push and pull between tradition and evolution has been a major consideration for the show as it has grown in size and scope.

“We talk about that a lot and it’s a very delicate balance,” Simmons says. There is “obviously a formula,” including a Quickfire challenge at the beginning of every episode and an Elimination at the end. “The really broad strokes of our show are always the same. But then our big challenge is reinventing it every year, making it a little different,” she explains. “And every year we want to do that enough to keep people interested, but not so much that it feels like a different show or like we’ve jumped to something that feels inauthentic.”

“Our show is always changing. Even Restaurant Wars has changed,” Colicchio adds.

Restaurant Wars, in which two teams of four chefs compete against each other to essentially conceptualize and open a restaurant within 24 hours, comes at the midpoint of each season. If you make it to Restaurant Wars, you know you at least have a decent shot of making it to the finale.

The biggest change to Restaurant Wars in Season 20 was the controversial decision to remove the “front-of-house” component, in which one chef has to manage the dining room instead of staying in the kitchen.

“I’ve hated having them do front-of-house from day one,” Colicchio admits. “I just thought it was terrible. Why is someone going home for front-of-house? It never made sense to me.” When I ask if it’s gone for good, Colicchio doesn’t hesitate before responding, “Hopefully.”

Simmons confirms that most of the chefs “hate” it as well, even if it can be illuminating for both viewers and the judges about how they handle pressure-filled situations. But while Amar and Ali both tell me they too were happy that no one on their team was forced to do front-of-house, showrunner Doneen Arquines reveals that Buddha and Sara—both of whom made it to the Paris finale—were disappointed to see it go.

Perhaps all of the chefs competing for the World All-Stars title were so skilled that the show just couldn’t bear to keep any of them out of the kitchen. The competition may be stiffer than ever this season, but Colicchio says he approached his role of judge in the exact same way he always has. “There’s a set of criteria that’s very objective,” he insists. “How is something cooked? How is something seasoned?”

Colicchio believes that “preferences” may be subjective, but cooking is fundamentally objective. Something is either made properly, or it’s not. Using lamb as an example, he says, “I don’t care if they cooked it medium or medium-rare. It doesn’t matter what my preference is. That’s why I ask, ‘How did you want it cooked?’ If they say medium-rare, I want to make sure it’s medium-rare.”

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Every once in a while, chefs will clearly mess something up and pretend that the mistake they made was intentional. But even though he rarely buys it, Colicchio says he’s “surprised they don’t try it more often.”

Once the meal at Craft begins, Colicchio can’t help but judge the dishes on the British-inspired menu again, comparing them to the first time he tried each course in London. He’s not as impressed by Buddha’s tomato tea component as the rest of our table, admitting that it’s a clever take on the traditional English breakfast but pointing out that chefs have been making tomato water for years—Buddha just warmed it up. His favorite dish is Sara’s spin on Cullen skink—cod wrapped in leeks and swimming in a smoked fish and onion sauce—though he was overruled during the episode and the win went to Buddha.

Buddha, who won Season 19 before jumping back on board for Season 20, is the hands-down favorite to win again in tonight’s finale. Before heading abroad, he obsessively studied the international editions of the show to accurately size up his competition, leading Amar to call him “The Encyclopedia” and Ali to dub him “Top Chef Nerd” during our conversation. But all of that research, on top of his inherent culinary prowess, has clearly paid off.

As Buddha told me before the season began, “If you are going to enter a competition like this, where you’re in it to win it, you just can’t rock up somewhere thinking that you’re going to win,” adding, “I think if you’re serious about winning, you should have studied.”

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If there’s a potential upset candidate, it’s probably Sara, who fought her way back from Last Chance Kitchen to become the only finalist who didn’t win their season of Top Chef (she was runner-up to fellow Southerner Kelsey Barnard Clark in Season 16). Top Chef Mexico winner Gabri Rodriguez, meanwhile, has proven himself to be the ultimate survivor and underdog after many missteps along the way.

“Every season, there’s always someone who makes it a lot further than they should,” Colicchio says, either because someone else makes a worse dish, they keep finding themselves on a winning team, or in the case of Gabri heading into the Paris episodes, he got carried by Buddha. “It’s almost not fair,” he adds, “but that’s how the game is played.”

Comparing the contestants to star athletes, Colicchio says, “You can have a bad game, it happens. You have to make sure it doesn’t happen at the worst time. You don’t have to have the best dish, you just can’t have the worst dish. That’s what keeps you in the game.”

Whatever happens Thursday night, Top Chef will be in the position to reinvent itself like never before when it returns for its 21st season next year without Lakshmi at the helm.

After using his Twitter account last week to wish Lakshmi “all the best success in the future,” Colicchio shut down any suspicions that he would be leaving the show with one word: “Nope.”

Simmons seems equally eager to continue her Top Chef journey, stressing to me how thrilled she is to get started working on Season 21 and confirming that the production is “already deep into casting” and that shooting is set to begin later this summer in a yet-to-be-disclosed U.S. city.

As for who the show could tap to replace Lakshmi as host, speculation began almost immediately following her announcement. And the one name that immediately rose to the top of the conversation was Top Chef Season 10 winner Kristen Kish.

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Given how much time the show has spent in recent years building up the brands of its most successful stars, it would make sense for them to elevate a host from within the Top Chef family. And Kish, with her already extensive hosting experience on shows including TruTV’s Fast Foodies, Netflix’s Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend and most recently, the excellent Restaurants at the End of the World on NatGeo, feels like an obvious choice.

When I spoke to Kish earlier this year, she confirmed that she had turned down a chance to compete in the World All-Stars season. “It’s not for me—that competitive nature of being back in that space—for a multitude of different reasons,” she said. “It did not fit into my schedule, my life, my emotional and mental wellbeing. There’s some people that are cut out for it. I am not one of them.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean she wouldn’t be interested in serving as host. Also working in her favor is the fact that despite opening a restaurant in Austin, Texas, she’s clearly not tied to it the way other chefs are, as evidenced by the demanding schedule of her travel show.

Simmons reveals to me that the show also tried to get two-time Top Chef finalist Gregory Gourdet to compete in the World All-Stars season, but he was not willing to abandon his successful Portland, Oregon-based restaurant Kann, which just this week won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. The same thing could prevent Season 13 contestant and frequent guest judge Kwame Onwuachi from taking over as host given that he recently opened the ecstatically reviewed Tatiana in New York City’s Lincoln Center.

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On their Ringer podcast The Watch, fellow Top Chef superfans Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan threw out Season 14 winner Brooke Williamson and Season 16 finalist Eric Adjepong as potential within-the-family options, and wildcards Samin Nosrat, Gigi Hadid, and Chrissy Teigen (“who low key might just get the job,” Greenwald predicted) from outside the tent.

All compelling ideas, but none would have an easy time filling the simultaneously welcoming and intimidating void left behind by Lakshmi.

Both Colicchio and Simmons separately tell me that Season 21 will be a “back-to-basics” year for the show after the globe-trotting extravagance of Season 20. But there is no way the show won’t look very different without the grounding presence of its longtime host, especially if unlike this current season, the chefs will once again all be unknown to viewers.

“We’re coming back to America,” Simmons says. “So I don’t know how that will play out and I don’t know how we’ll top this season, because it really felt like a high point in our adventure.”

And while it was “great knowing that we could do” an all-star season internationally, Colicchio says he’s personally looking forward to scaling things back a bit.

“It’s not like we’re going to go back and take line cooks like in Season 1,” Simmons assures me. “We still know that it’s about professional chefs. But yes, it’s about stripping it down a bit with chefs who think they know, but have no idea.”

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