Talking with My Mouth Full (18 page)

When weighing the merits of a dish, I ask chefs some pretty rough questions, like “What exactly were you thinking when you combined blue cheese and warm watermelon?” Or: “Was it your intention for this steak to have the texture of a tennis ball?” “Did you really think you could properly braise that pork belly in under fifteen minutes?” When I help vote off an audience favorite, fans no doubt have some questions of their own, starting with: “Who the hell are
you
to judge?”

Of course, if you’ve read this far, you know I have a fifteen-year background in the food industry, and I’ve made this my life’s work. But it’s a fair question, and one I continue to ask myself all the time: Who
am
I to judge?

For that matter, who is anyone to judge food, especially on national television? Why does our show even work in the first place? After all, the audience can’t even taste the dishes. Watching
Project Runway
or
American Idol
, viewers can fairly assess the merits of the competitors, deciding for themselves, “Would I wear that dress?” or “Do I like how he sings?” But food television is one genre where the viewer can’t fully participate in the judging process. (At least not until we invent a way to beam each dish right into your living room.)

Of course, we’re not the first successful TV show about food—not by a long shot. People went crazy for Julia Child’s
The French Chef
in the 1960s. You couldn’t taste what she was making, nor were you necessarily ever going to make it yourself (although many people did, with the help of her cookbooks). Yet the show was a bona fide hit. For TV viewers, food programming has always been a blend of pragmatism and escapism, reality and fantasy. This was true even before Julia and Jacques Pépin. I recently learned that James Beard, the godfather of American gastronomy, was actually the first person to cook on U.S. television, in the 1940s—when TV was still in its infancy.

I like to tell people that watching
Top Chef
is like indulging in a lavish meal without the calories—
and
you don’t have to do the dishes after. In that respect, our role as judges—and as “stand-ins” for the audience—is even more vital than it is on other shows. On
American Idol
, you get a say. You can call or text in to cast your vote. You can be your own judge, because you can hear the music and decide whether or not it resonates with you. But with food you can’t. You can judge only based on what you see, which of course is only a small part of the final equation.

And so we the judges become the taste buds for our viewers. It’s even more important for us to convey how everything tastes, so you get a true sense of the experience at home. What’s good about it? What’s bad about it? Why? Our descriptions and reactions to each dish become that much more crucial, as you see through our eyes and look to us to understand its value.

Because viewers can’t physically taste the food alongside us, their reactions and judgments are mostly based on their relationship to the contestants, their investment in the chefs as personalities.

From where we sit, we experience the show from a completely different angle. The viewer sees the show fully edited, with the story lines cut together, and the on-the-fly interviews interspersed with cooking, tasting, and reacting. You see the chefs in the house, fighting with one another or talking with their families on speakerphone, working in the kitchen, strategizing and forming alliances.

We see none of these interactions when we’re shooting the show. The judges only get to see the entire story line unfold many months later, at the same time viewers do. By then our decisions about the food have already been made, and the show’s outcome has already been determined.

We don’t ask about the chefs’ personal lives or their relationships with one another, and we don’t care. All we know is what we see when they’re in front of us at Judges’ Table or during challenges, when they’re usually on their best behavior—and of course, what we taste of their food. Every decision we make is a singular judgment, exclusive unto itself.

Our refusal to “get personal” or to take into account the chefs’ challenge history gives the show its integrity, but it also makes some viewers very upset. They see someone they hate moving forward. They see someone they love—because he’s cute or because he did really well last time—serve one poor dish and get eliminated. It infuriates our devoted fans, who love to tell us how terrible and biased we are.

Actually it’s quite the opposite. Remember: The viewers are the ones invested in these people as characters. We only care about their food. Of course, we do pick up on their cooking idiosyncrasies. Over time, we notice chefs’ styles and habits: a tendency to use a lot of pickles, or to make an unreasonable number of dishes using scallops.

Still, I judge each dish as if I were a diner who has just been served it in a restaurant. If this were something I was paying for, would I be happy, or would I send it back to the kitchen like that flip-floppy omelet? When I go out for dinner, I don’t care whether the chef has an outstanding reputation but just “had a bad day” so his food is off that night. I don’t care if the sous-chef’s wife left him that morning, or if he’s hungover from a rowdy celebration the night before. If my meal is not good, I am not going back. On the other hand, if I have a wonderful meal, I will most certainly return and will tell all my friends to do the same. But even that doesn’t guarantee I’ll love everything I eat the next time I visit. The same thing holds true in the
Top Chef
kitchen. A chef rarely gets a second chance to please his customers. We can’t judge these chefs based on their cumulative efforts over the season. They must be judged dish to dish.

Tom assesses the contestants as if they were working in his kitchen. He asks himself: “Would I be satisfied if this chef were on my crew? If he cooked this plate for diners at my restaurant, would I praise him or fire him?” The contestants need to cook to his standards. When Tom walks through the kitchen and inspects their
mise-en-place
, he asks questions of them as if he’s their chef, checking in before a busy service.

Having a guest judge with us who is totally impartial to the process—someone who has never met the chefs or gotten to know their food—keeps us honest and even more objective. For each episode, the guest judge comes into our little world for only a few days, with no preconceived notions of how the chefs should be, how good their food is, or where they’re from.

The guest judge is wholly responsible for choosing the Quickfire winner each week, usually less than two hours after meeting the contestants for the first time. The guest tastes a few bites from each chef as their introduction, then makes a split-second decision on whose food is best. For the Elimination Challenge the next day, they weigh in to the discussion as much as any of us.

To me, it’s obvious how much we as the judges want the chefs to succeed. And yet we constantly hear: “You’re so
mean
to the chefs!” Or: “Don’t you have a hard time critiquing people to their faces?”

“Everyone gets reviewed,” Tom smartly replies. “It’s part of the process of working in hospitality.” He’s right. Whether you own a restaurant, write a book, or put on a Broadway musical, at some point in your career you will be critiqued. As a chef, you will be reviewed, whether it’s by the
New York Times
, your local paper, or a thousand bloggers. That’s part of being in a service-driven industry.

Tom has had to read countless reviews of his restaurants over the years, and while plenty of them have been glowing, they haven’t always been perfect.
Top Chef
is, in a sense, a constant review process—one that, by the way, all the chefs actually signed up for in advance. As a rule, we try to be more constructive than newspaper reviews. We allow the chefs to defend themselves on the spot. (Traditional restaurant critics visit anonymously; there’s no dialogue.) We give our chefs the benefit of the doubt and the chance to prove us wrong. If they make it to the next challenge, they get to try again the very next day, with a completely clean slate.

To become a true chef takes a great deal of time. Though it may appear otherwise, there are no overnight successes in the culinary world. Some people see
Top Chef
and think,
This could be my golden ticket to fame and fortune!
They graduate from culinary school and expect to be in charge of a kitchen the very next day. But that’s just not how it works. Have we perpetuated a falsehood that being a chef—a celebrity chef, no less—is easy?

What does “celebrity chef” even mean? I hate the term. I guess it means you’re famous? And you cook, sort of?

Being a chef, being the head of a kitchen—being an expert of
any
kind, really—takes years of training and hard labor, keeping your head down and paying your dues. For chefs it typically takes ten to twelve years, maybe seven or eight if you’re really ambitious. Many cooks will work a lifetime and never become a chef.

There is no single proven path to success. You don’t necessarily have to go to culinary school, for example, but you do need to start at the bottom and rise up through the ranks, so you know how to work every angle of your craft fluently. You need to understand how to make creative decisions, financial decisions, staffing decisions, how to build purveyor relationships, and how to guide every single person on your team.

Mentorship plays an important role, too. There’s luck and there’s hard work, but there’s also smart people to learn from, who set the standards and create climates in which others can thrive. I feel more than a little lucky that I’ve had people like Jeffrey, Daniel, and Georgette, my producers on
Top Chef
, and my bosses at
Food & Wine
to nurture and guide me. They took me in, taught me what they know, and of course allowed me to make many mistakes.

More and more, the role of a chef demands that you be out of the kitchen, too. Restaurant chefs can no longer hide behind the kitchen door—guests expect to see them. To market a restaurant you need to sell yourself and your product, which requires charisma. These days a chef has to be more multidimensional than ever: you need to be a manager, a host, an entrepreneur, and an innovator, oftentimes all at once.
Cooks
are in the kitchen all the time. But in 2012, to be a
chef
means doing a lot more than just cooking. Although cooking will always be at its core.

For years—back before it was sexy for chefs to be on television, and before they became fixtures in the media—chefs could be tyrants, because they were only ever talking to their cooks and waiters, and in the climate of a kitchen that behavior was tolerated, if not expected. Now everyone has a blog, including those same cooks and waiters. If you make enemies, plenty of people can do you a lot of damage. It’s a lesson I see both chefs and aspiring chefs learn the hard way.

And it’s not just industry people who have blogs. These days, everyone with a computer and a credit card thinks he can be a restaurant critic. From Wall Street bankers to the guy who sells me my morning coffee, they all want to play restaurant trivia with me. I can’t tell you how many times I get asked questions like these:

“Speaking of April Bloomfield, have you been to her new place yet? I have. Twice.”

“Did you ever eat at El Bulli in Spain? I did. Twice.”

“Do you have the secret number for Balthazar? I do. Twice.”

For a significant portion of diners, eating at the hottest new restaurants has become a status symbol, a notch on the belt. And some wind up blogging about their exploits. This definitely serves a purpose. Mainly, it democratizes things. Certain restaurants used to think they could get away with treating VIPs well and not caring for everyone else. Now you never know who could be watching, tweeting, photographing, blogging. It forces restaurants to devote more time and attention to every customer. And that’s as it should be: every one of us is entitled to good food and good service.

The downside is that cowards can now hide behind their computer screens and write degrading, destructive criticism with no sense of the power they wield, or how damaging it can be. Too often I see the ethical code of journalism blurred in online reviews. Some people in the blogosphere have even given up their anonymity altogether, and will trade positive writeups for VIP service and free food. That’s not just bad journalism; it’s extortion.

On a broader level, some people question what it means to critique food in the first place. I am asked all the time, “How can you be objective in food criticism? Eating is so personal! How do your own likes and dislikes not play into it?” (I get this last question from picky eaters, especially.)

Despite my personal aversion to black beans, pickled ginger, and veal, I’m still open to tasting them when I have to. If someone cooks with those ingredients on the show—or at a dinner party or at a restaurant as a gesture of generosity especially for me—I will eat them. But I won’t choose to order black beans or veal or cook them for myself at home.