Watching Eve go home last night, I was thinking back to a conversation we had the day of that elimination challenge about the competition. Even before that day of cooking poolside, I know she’d been thinking of resigning the competition because the whole Top Chef thing wasn’t for her. I remember her telling me how happy she was with her life and her career in Ann Arbor, and how much she loves to keep learning about food and about cooking. Eve already has a successful restaurant and a cookbook under her belt, and didn’t feel like she needed to prove herself to Bravo or to the judges.
Of course some of the chefs, like the Voltaggio brothers, were more competitive. At this stage in the show, I for one, wasn’t thinking of the elimination challenge as a competition among the chefs but instead as an opportunity to cook great food for the groom and his friends. That’s probably the caterer in me. I suppose I was a lot like Eve on this challenge–I just wanted to cook alongside talented chefs to craft a great experience and make the guests happy.
There is obviously quite a difference between a top chef in the real world and a Top Chef on Bravo. Bravo seems to think that a chef should be a highly driven, hyper-competitive badass with the ability to create well-executed food in any kitchen, on any day, in any amount of time, to meet each week’s unexpected challenge. Can I say, that not in 20 years as a chef have I had to pair food with a shot? Great food and boozey shots have never gone particularly well together, in my experience, but I suppose the scenario makes for good television. And what do I know? I’m just the chef.
