Talking with My Mouth Full (16 page)

It’s now time to decide who’s going home.

Contestants—and viewers—often assume we make a quick decision. In all honesty, it’s a long, drawn-out, deeply serious process, condensed into just a few quick minutes for the benefit of television. And trust me: we don’t take the responsibility lightly.

Something a lot of viewers don’t seem to believe: our decisions are based on what we eat, not on whom we like. Sometimes we’re faced with more than one chef who made poor food and poor choices. Sometimes they’ve
all
made great food, and we’ll have to go through each detail with a fine-toothed comb to decide which is the very best and who should go home. We ask ourselves which dishes had the most punishable flaws, and which combination of flavors and techniques fell flat. Usually we agree; sometimes we don’t. The producers don’t let us stop talking until our decision is unanimous.

At this point there’s another break while the cameras are again rearranged. The anxious chefs are brought back to Judges’ Table. Tom recaps our issues with each of their dishes—and finally, one unlucky chef has to hear Padma’s dreaded words: “Please pack your knives and go.”

I’m always surprised that chefs take our criticism as calmly as they do, for the most part. If someone ever trashed
my
cooking, I think I’d toss a “
How DARE you?
” right back. I’d defend my choices and fight my hardest for another chance. And I confess: at times I wish more contestants challenged us on our decisions—if only so I’d know what is going through their heads. But I also can’t imagine how hard it must be to think on your feet when you’re nervous, stressed out, and intimidated, and you’ve been cooking since 4 a.m.

The only contestant who ever really talked back to us was Jennifer Carroll, on Season 8, our
All-Stars
season. We criticized her under-seasoned and poorly prepared bacon-and-egg dish, and without hesitation, Jen launched into a full-blown attack on us, vehemently disagreeing with our opinions. Many viewers—and Jen’s fellow contestants—were shocked and appalled by her outburst, but I was secretly thrilled. Though her spirited defense didn’t ultimately change our decision (she was eliminated), it certainly challenged us to evaluate her dish more closely.

After sending countless exasperated chefs packing, I find they usually fall into four types:

The Towering Egos.
Astonished to be on the losing end—it’s totally beyond them as to why we didn’t like their food—and ignoring our constructive feedback, they act as if they don’t need any advice. They certainly don’t listen to it.

The Confessors.
Instantly and completely defeated by the challenge, they can hardly wait to admit their mistakes. “My sauce didn’t have enough salt.” “The pâté was too grainy—I should have put it through a tamis.” With these chefs, we barely have to say a word: they can’t stop talking, simply throwing themselves on our mercy.

The Whiners and Blamers.
They do nothing but complain. “My oven’s temp was off.” “I cut my finger.” “The milk curdled.” “He sabotaged me.” Excuses, excuses, excuses.

The Learners.
These are my favorites. No matter where they are in the lineup, these chefs are most eager to improve. They know what they did wrong, and will often try to defend their dishes, but they also want to gain from the experience and advance their cooking skills. They listen and take it all in. They’re the chefs who show the most evolution from the beginning of the season to its end—think Carla Hall, Mike Isabella, Kelly Leiken, Richard Blais, Kevin Sbraga.

That final confrontation is usually the end of our day with the chefs. But more often than not, the four of us aren’t going home yet. We have to reshoot the lines that we blew or that the cameras didn’t catch (they call these “pickups”). We finish between midnight and 3 a.m.—sometimes later. We’ve seen the sun rise on too many occasions.

The shoot schedule is by far the most challenging part of working on
Top Chef.
It’s hard being away from my “real” life—my home, my routine, my husband—for such long stretches of time. The job is physically demanding, not just for the long hours but for having to sample up to forty-odd dishes each day. Living in a hotel for weeks on end, while eating all my meals in restaurants, from room service, or on the set wears thin pretty quickly, too.

For all the planning and orchestrating that goes into every episode, there are still countless unpredictable elements: this
is
“reality” television, after all. Season 2 stands out in this respect. We’d filmed the first ten episodes in Los Angeles. Already, it had been a rough season: two contestants had quit (one because of a dispute over stolen lychees, the other to defend a fellow chef—in the heat of competition, no less). Then there was an incident involving several contestants ganging up on Marcel (one of our most controversial contestants of all time) and attempting to shave his head; as a result, we had to send another chef home prematurely.

A few months later, we flew to Hawaii to shoot the Season 2 finale. Taro fields in deep valleys full of emerald-green meadows and savage forests. Mutant-sized flowers. Cattle and cowboys. Stop signs reading “Whoa,” for the horses. Volcanoes and helicopter rides. Just weeks before we arrived, there had been an earthquake; from the plane we could see the sides of the mountains that had fallen off into the sea.

We’d voted off Sam Talbot, the fan favorite. (Sam tells me people still approach him all the time insisting he was robbed. I admit he’s talented, but neither of his dishes for that elimination employed actual
cooking
—he made a mascarpone mousse and a kind of local tartare called poke. As great as Sam is, that day he deserved to be eliminated.)

It came down to Ilan, who was only twenty-four, and Marcel, who was twenty-six. They were both so young. We had to resign ourselves to the fact that we weren’t looking for evidence of established greatness so much as potential.

The judges who came in for the finale were a blast, and among the most lauded chefs in the country: Scott Conant, Wylie Dufresne, Michelle Bernstein, Hubert Keller, and Roy Yamaguchi.

Ilan’s meal was Spanish-inspired, starting with
angula
(baby eels) and
pan con tomate
, but he did a great job including local Hawaiian ingredients, too—a gazpacho of native macadamia nuts and a fruit soup with Surinam cherries, a species I had never seen before. His seared squab with foie gras, shrimp, and lobster was simple and flavorful. The Romesco sauce on his beef course was the best I’d tasted—coarse and garlicky with just the right amount of smoky paprika.

Unwinding with guest judges and producers after our Season 2 finale in Hawaii

Our choice wasn’t easy. Marcel worked hard at creating an experience we would never forget. He made sea urchin and Meyer lemon gelée with fennel cream, caviar, and kalamata oil; cucumber and radish salad with ouzo vinaigrette; hearts of palm and maitake mushrooms with sea beans and kaffir lime sauce; strip-line steak with garlic purée; blini with Kona coffee “caviar.” It was ambitious. But Marcel ran before he could walk, so to speak. There were too many small flaws in his judgment, and too many bells and whistles. We left his meal unsatisfied.

There was a moment at the dinner table, as I sat with all these renowned chefs—having eaten this barrage of food—when they turned to me, seeking my opinion on who should win. The weight of my position, my personal opinion,
mattered
to them. I was now sitting at the table with the leaders of our industry—not just writing about them or eating in their restaurants, but literally breaking bread with the people I’d admired for years. And instead of being intimidated, I felt entirely, ecstatically, in the right place.

We picked Ilan, and then we all went home.

Cut to a few months later, when word hit that the winner’s name had been leaked just two days before the final episode aired. An article about Ilan had been posted online for only a few minutes, but it was long enough to be all over the Internet. The blogs had a field day. We all scrambled to control the damage. Secrecy is essential to shows like ours, and the breach made us feel so vulnerable. What’s more, now that the suspense was gone, we were convinced no one would watch the finale. I worried that everything we had worked so hard for would be wiped out with one ill-timed blog post.

I went to sleep the night before the finale aired and dreamed vividly that the headline on the front page of the
New York Times
Wednesday Dining Section the next morning would read: “Reality-TV Franchise Ruined.” I woke up at four in the morning in a cold sweat, full of anxiety.

At six o’clock I got out of bed and picked up the paper. Sure enough, the front page of the Dining Section bore these words: “Under Pressure, That’s Reality.” The writer, Frank Bruni, was the formidable restaurant critic for the “paper of record,” but he had never commented on reality television before—or
any
food show, for that matter. Now here he was, reviewing us, a show about restaurant critics. I took a deep breath and dug in.

The article was, to my surprise and immense relief, the most accurate, enthusiastic depiction of the show I’d read to date. Bruni articulated exactly what we were trying to do each week, praising the show’s “surprising seriousness.”

As it turned out, that night, our final episode’s ratings were the highest they had ever been, with close to 4 million viewers, an astronomical number for a cable food show. People thought we’d staged the leak to boost the ratings!

The experience of Season 2—from the chaos in LA to the Hawaii finale, from the terror of the leak to the triumphant
Times
piece and the record-breaking finale ratings—made me realize: our little show was onto something. We weren’t just a random cable reality series anymore. We were a cultural phenomenon. Frank Bruni, along with the world’s most acclaimed chefs, journalists, and food bloggers—and, most important, the TV-watching public—actually cared what we were doing! They were all paying attention. And somehow I was part of it.

My life changed markedly. After Season 2 I was recognized on the street, in grocery stores, on the subway. Not because I’d exposed myself getting out of a limo or thrown a champagne glass at someone, but because I was part of a moment in pop culture that meant something to people.

As much as I grumble about the amount of time we spend on the road, I have always loved to travel, and
Top Chef
has given me more opportunities than I ever could have imagined. Every season and every finale is filmed in a new destination, so I’ve been able to live and work in places that until now were largely unfamiliar to me: Las Vegas, Miami, San Francisco, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Washington, D.C., Singapore, the Bahamas!

On my days off, I always take time to explore, take in the sights, spend time with distant friends I’d otherwise rarely get to see, and, of course, discover the local food scene. After six years on
Top Chef
, I have become a walking tour guide for friends and colleagues. (At the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, for example, I recommend the highly refined and culturally significant water slides.)

What’s more, I truly love the people I work with on the show.

Tom and I work most closely; he’s like my big brother. And like my own brothers, he’s never treated me with any condescension, even my first day on set, when he knew barely anything about me or my experience.

Regarding the seating arrangements at Judges’ Table, Tom graciously says, “I’m most comfortable when Gail’s sitting to my left.” And I, too, feel most comfortable sitting next to him. On off-nights we hang out at the hotel bar. When we show up in a new city, we both have a list of restaurants we want to try together. Tom’s always up for an adventure.

Tom has a puritanical stubbornness that can occasionally drive us all crazy, but it comes from a devout seriousness about food. He received three stars from the
New York Times
at the age of twenty-six and has stayed relevant as a chef ever since, with the scars to prove it. He’s very active in the fight against hunger, donating to food banks and lobbying in Washington. And he still spends the vast majority of his time on the line at one of his restaurants, only taking time off to shoot
Top Chef
, to promote a good cause, or to spend quality time with his wife and three sons.

Padma, the Ginger to my Mary Ann, has become a good friend. She’s like my sorority big sister, forever getting me into trouble, and always up for fun. It’s great to have a girlfriend like her on the road, not to mention her uncanny ability to hone in on the best Thai food within minutes of landing in any location. She has a passion for food and travel that is sincere and curious, and an incredibly thorough knowledge of not just Asian herbs and spices but traditional Italian cooking (she speaks fluent Italian, along with Hindi, some French and Spanish), falafels, and cheeseburgers. If it weren’t for the show’s editing, you would hear her waxing poetic on any of these subjects at great length. She’s an amazingly hard worker, having written two cookbooks and hosted several food shows of her own. Knowing her hours and the demanding nature of her role on the show, I don’t think she gets enough credit for what she does.