Starting the Season Thread.
I’m not sure if I like this or not. The Web Site is laid out just like Top Chef with 12 chefs bios. It sounds more like Top Chef Masters type cooking. But, the faces in the Bios look young like Top Chef. I don’t see many older, Masters faces.
Whatever it is… It debuts tonight May 9, in Top Chefs time 9 pm (10pm Eastern) slot. Looks like we’ll be getting this competition this summer instead of Masters or Deserts.
I’m watching it now. So far it’s making me a little nauseated.
I’m hoping it gets better. I’ll give it three episodes and decide.
My biggest concern is the lack of a “home kitchen”. A place the chefs get comfortable in and can deliver great food. This show will have them in a different country and kitchen every week.
I nearly switched channels during the Pub Crawl. My idea of a cooking competition isn’t running through London with a map and swallowing pub food & beer in 60 seconds. That was the nearly 20 minutes of this episode. They weren’t even given time to properly taste the food they had to cook in the challenge.
I have no idea at all if tonights eliminated chef was any good. The challenge didn’t even give her a chance to show her skills. Pack your Knives and Go Home takes on a whole new meaning when you’re in some strange country. I hope they gave her an airline ticket. 
It was ok. I didn’t really get the point of having them shovel food and/or beer in. I did like the parts with the patrons giving the one team a hard time about changing the pub’s name and the shoestring “chips”. I agree, it was hard to tell who was talented. And any show with a contestant named Nookie Postal…I just don’t know about that…
I watched Top Chef for a few seasons. The last season finale where they are cooking in a gondola and then hacking bits of food out of an ice block was nauseating.
This show to me, now seems like a colossoal waste of resources.
No Kitchen Allowed at least has Madison Cowan.
Missed this show but I’m sure it will be repeated 62 times over the next week. Time to hunt it up on the DVR.
Eh. I’ll give it one more week. So far, too much posing and posturing and bragging about their own greatness, with lots of running and shaky cameras and fast cuts from one scene to another.
If they can drop the foolishness and actually show some cooking, I’ll stay with it.
The bragging crap gets OLD and tiresome. The biggest braggers are typically the no-talent, no-skills group IMHO. Name dropping means NOTHING.
And stabbing your competitor in the back with a chef knife, and then throwing him/her under the bus is tacky. The “strategy” of eliminating the strongest cooks is telling the world you KNOW you are terrible.
And I can’t stand Curtis Stone.
~VOW
The 2nd episode was a lot better. At least we finally saw some good cooking. I’m still trying to judge the skill levels of these chefs. I think a few of these chefs are good enough to at least get on Top Chef. It’s hard to say because so far these chefs haven’t been given much chance to show their skills.
Traditional french cooking has never been a strength for many of the chefs on Top Chef. It’s not taught as much these days and the younger chefs don’t know the techniques. The lady that won tonight seemed to really nail her dish. The customers with Curtis were really complimenting it. Saying it was better than the lyonnaise food they got in NY. She’s someone we need to watch closely.
I’m still not a fan of the frantic running & driving around. I don’t see the point in sheep herding on a cooking show. I really wish this show focused more on cooking.
Blogs are up, from Curtis, Cat Cora, and Hugh Acheson
http://www.bravotv.com/around-the-world-in-80-plates/season-1/blogs
I haven’t seen the show yet, but Cat Cora’s dress in the commercials hurts my feelings.
Is it just the weird circumstances of the show, or did they purposely set out to get contestants who were too crazy to be on Top Chef? There seems to be an unusually high “obnoxious weirdo” quotient.
I like the idea of the chefs going around and attempting to replicate and adapt local dishes, but the preliminary challenges are stupid and boring (although I did like when the self-proclaimed experts of wine and cheese argued that the cheese and wine makers who set up the challenges were wrong about their own products).
I don’t really like the idea of one team being handicapped in some major way, either (e.g., no potatoes in the pub challenge, no instruction on the complex French dishes). It does remind me of last season of Top Chef, where the show threw so many stupid obstacles at the Chefs that the show was basically America’s Next Top Model with slightly more cooking.
The show could be really interesting if they’d just focus on the cooking. I was curious to know more about the experience of cooking in a restaurant of that type, the local ingredients, how the expectations of customers differ, how chefs adapt traditional dishes to their own style, etc…
Also, the way that elimination works, it basically comes down to which chef on the losing team is sufficiently persuasive in turning enough of the rest of the team against somebody else. At least Top Chef comes down to an evaluation of the food itself (however flawed).
It seems the first question on the application was, “How willing are you to throw a teammate under the bus?” followed by, “Are you the best chef evaarr?” This offensive hubris better turn to schadenfreude quickly.
When they voted off somebody whose food was listed as a winner, when two other dishes were failures, I had a bad feeling. I predict the people towards the end will be weak because they’ll start voting off “threats” very quickly. I’m already watching Food Network Star, it might be my only food show for a while if this doesn’t mellow out.
This show is actually pretty good. The tasks are not outrageous, they are food related and test the chefs culinary skills. I like that the teams are given time to visit local restaurants to sample the local fare that they have to recreate in the elimination challenge. I also like the focus on local dishes and the fact that the judges are local chefs. The hosts, Curtis Stone and Cat Cora, are good. Exhaustion isn’t a part of the show, and they get to prepare the food with the same utensils that local chefs use.
BUT…
It is almost ruined by the “Survivor” style voting at the end. Allowing the contestants to vote someone off was a terrible decision. Last night the best chef and one of the most interesting and nicest contestants was nearly voted off because she was too good. Having a cooking show and getting rid of the best chefs is not interesting. They should call it “Mediocre Chef.”