I don’t know if you’ve watched Next Level Chef before, but it’s not exactly Real Housewives or even Big Brother. The judges are honest when the dishes are bad, but it’s almost always framed as a well-intentioned critique to help them become better chefs. There’s the occasional snarky confessional over the time tokens, elimination cookoff choices or two chefs trying to grab the same ingredient, but overall, pretty much every contestant gets a positive journey-style edit. The show wants us to root for them all, except for some reason, one of the chefs this season, who out of nowhere, has started getting a villain edit.
Christian Alquiza has been one of the frontrunners throughout the entire competition. He’s a social media chef featured on First We Feast, and for the first ten or so episodes of the season, he got pretty good content from the edit. We saw him making a lot of fun dishes, bonding with his fellow contestants and generally being one of the more talented and likeable contestants. The last two episodes, however, have gone out of their way to make him seem really unlikeable.
