One ingredient can change a dish's entire profile. That isn't what the producers of "Top Chef" wanted in choosing Kristen Kish to succeed Padma Lakshmi, the veteran culinary competition's heart and soul for 20 seasons before her 2023 exit. Like any acclaimed establishment, the show's goal is to maintain continuity of service and standards. Kish confidently fulfills that mission in the 21st season's premiere.
Still, the distinctions between Kish and her predecessor are many, none more obvious than the way she delivers the show's signature heartbreaker for the first time. When Kish says, "Please pack your knives and go" to the first Milwaukee-season cheftestant sent home, her tone is direct and even-keeled, entirely businesslike.
There's no slight furrowing of the brow or regret in her voice, nothing that could be read as disappointment. It's the delivery of someone who has been exactly in that person's shoes and appreciates that the kindest cleaving is clean — and so fast that you don't even feel how sharp it is as it opens the flesh.
The receiver accepts the bad news with grace and humor, adding as Kish shakes their hand, "We've made history," before pointing to themselves and noting, "Your first person to [be] eliminated."
Kish’s "Top Chef" tenure begins with what might be one of the smoothest baton passes from a revered host of a long-running show to a new one yet. That said, it's not as if we were expecting otherwise. The audience already knows and admires Kish, the unstoppable Season 10 underdog eliminated in that run's "Restaurant Wars," only to battle her way back to win the Top Chef title.
In 2012, Kish became only the second woman to win the Top Chef title, which is significant in itself. Throughout her season, she showed integrity, arriving at the competition with her close friend Stephanie Cmar, never throwing fellow competitors under the bus and accepting failure with composure.
All that, along with her telegenic personality, ignited the TV side of her career. Kish went on to co-host "36 Hours" for the Travel Channel, and since 2021, she has appeared on several culinary shows, including "Fast Foodies" for TruTV and co-presenting with Alton Brown on "Iron Chef: Quest for a Legend" on Netflix.
My viewing palate favors her adventures on National Geographic's "Restaurants at the End of the World," which showcased the breadth of her personality, adventurous nature and humane vision. "[F]ood is a vehicle to help tell a story," Kish shared on a 2023 "Salon Talks" about her Nat Geo show, "but really we're creating a relationship with another human being."
To their benefit, the people who watch and compete on "Top Chef" already have a relationship with Kish, but for some, it's also intimidating.
Kaleena Bliss, who comes to the competition series as the Chicago Athletic Association's executive chef, admiringly calls Kish a "badass," and as a fellow Korean adoptee, an inspiration. "But it is a little bit of a double-edged sword that she's competed before" because, she says, Kish will notice any half-measures.
Along with Kish's arrival, the show has tweaked a few of its rules and benefits. The first tweak the contestants discover is Quickfire Challenges no longer award immunity from elimination, replacing that with cash prizes instead. To motivate everyone to perform at a high level at all times, immunity is instead rewarded to each week's winner.
Regrettably, for the person packing their knives, the first contest skips the Quickfire round. But that chef could have saved themselves in the Elimination Cook-Off, in which the lowest-scoring trio had the opportunity to save themselves by making a good plate of food out of everyone else's leftovers in only 20 minutes. That is something any decent home chef can do under pressure, but not while cameras are running and three judges are watching them work.
Our culinary knowledge and literacy have increased vastly since "Top Chef" premiered in 2006 — and in no small part because of it. Food Network may have had a 13-year head start, but it catered to home chefs and bakers. Bravo’s hit takes us inside professional kitchens and the minds of working chefs like no other show did before, though "Hell's Kitchen" premiered first.
"Top Chef" provides an alternative to Gordon Ramsay's abusive intimidations that define "Hell's Kitchen" and any of his other shows where he’s not judging child chefs. Restaurants aren't easy places to work, and as "The Bear" revealed through its hero's PTSD-induced kitchen nightmares, there are more bosses like Ramsay out there than ones who are serenely exacting like Kish or Lakshmi before her.
But watching those types of screamers isn't escapist or motivating to some of us, especially viewers who watch shows like "Top Chef" to expand their knowledge base in the kitchen or to simply have a better grasp of what high-quality cuisine should taste like.
Lakshmi never worked in professional kitchens like these contestants, but as a culinary enthusiast and cookbook author, she knows and loves the craft enough for the pros to respect her. And she wasn't wrathful.
Her gentleness brought balance to the table she shared with fellow judges Gail Simmons and Tom Colicchio. Simmons, like Lakshmi, built her expertise as a food writer but wasn't tasked with the brutal duty of gently shattering an up-and-coming chef's dreams.
That job falls to Kish, whose experience explains her empathy. Some scenes show her sensory recall of the competition's stress as it echoes in her body. She wonders why she's getting goosebumps while watching the competitors hustle around the flames and steel for the first time, before answering her own question with a laugh: "I just got nervous for them, I think."
Kish smiles as brightly as she introduces the elimination cook-off because she's lived through that, too, and won. She doesn't say that boastfully, conveying an understanding of what it's like to be knocked to the lowest rung of a ladder and fight to stay alive.
"She has a different relationship with them," Simmons said of Kish and the new crop of contestants on a recent episode of "Salon Talks." "She really understands what they're going through. She addresses them differently, but also she inspired us to make a lot of other changes to the game and to really up the ante."
And Kish does this from the start, when she confides in the contestants who aren't James Beard Award winners and haven't worked with acclaimed chefs that she didn't have those accolades on her resume when she first stepped up to "Top Chef," either.
"Season 10, I had on my resume, three cook jobs, and I was a current sous chef," she tells them. "So as much as it is amazing that you guys have all come so far in your career, once you get into the Top Chef kitchen, really, quite frankly it does not matter at all."
This, however, only makes us like Kish more, cementing that producers made the right choice in entrusting her with a seat at this table.
"Top Chef" airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Bravo and streams on Peacock.
