Food TV Competitions Are Bigger Than Ever, But What They’re Really Offering Has Changed

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March Madness and baseball Opening Day may be blotting out the sun for sports fans, but for followers of televised competitive cooking, the next couple of months are the NCAA Tournament, the World Series, the BCS Championship, and the Super Bowl rolled into one, wrapped, covered in a mother sauce, and served on a platter to a panel of judges. Though I watch every cooking competition available, and always have, lately I’ve been trying to understand why. It’s not that they’re inspiring me to cook. They’re barely even inspiring me to eat.

The main event, as always, is the new season of “Top Chef.” But you also have a “Top Chef” knockoff, “America’s Culinary Cup,” hosted by former “Top Chef” doyenne Padma Lakshmi; “Next Level Chef,” Gordon Ramsay’s quarterly competition offering; and Guy Fieri’s “Tournament of Champions.” And that doesn’t include more quotidian feeder offerings such as Fieri’s “Flavortown Food Fight” and “Chopped.” Shows are eliminating chefs so quickly that culinary schools can’t produce enough replacements. 

“Top Chef,” now hosted by former winner Kristen Kish, has barely deviated from the formula. You put a group of accomplished but not famous chefs through a series of challenges, knock them out one by one, and let the survivor enter the pantheon. The show emerged around the same time as programs such as “Project: Runway” and “America’s Next Top Model,” and at this point, it is as much a part of the pop landscape as “Wheel of Fortune.” It’s reliable, comforting bourgeois entertainment. Becoming Top Chef means something. But what, exactly?

This is the question I find myself asking when I watch “Tournament of Champions.” Unlike the relatively buttoned-up “Top Chef,” which drives its contestants around in luxury SUVs and puts them up in nice hotel suites, “Tournament of Champions” is a melée that doesn’t hide its Hollywood backlot underpinnings. Fieri presides over a bracket-style competition for 32 chefs (including 16 who need to win in order even to qualify for the main competition). There is a spinning wheel called The Randomizer that determines what the chefs will cook, how they will cook, and for how long. Then a panel of judges, many of them former “Tournament of Champions” winners, taste and judge the dishes.

Fieri, in his typical hype-man style, touts “Tournament of Champions” as the ultimate culinary competition. And there’s something to be said for the fact that nowhere else can you see Ming Tsai, longtime host of PBS’s “Simply Ming,” competing against (and losing to) Aarti Sequeria, host of the Food Network’s “Aarti Party.” But if you watch a lot of food competition shows — and I do — you start to see patterns. Some of the people competing in “Tournament of Champions” are undoubtedly among the best chefs in America. However, many of them are just simply good chefs who are good on TV and who the Food Network has on retainer to compete and judge. 

Many of them are former “Top Chef” contestants, even “Top Chef” winners. This is the route available to them. The ones at the top are just building their brand. For others, this is literally, to borrow a term from “Top Chef,” their “Last Chance Kitchen.” One frequent “Tournament of Champions” challenger lost her restaurant in the Lahaina Fire. Others admit to going through messy divorces. Another one, a number-three-seed, bounced from this year’s tournament early and was shot 11 times last year in a robbery. For some chefs, it’s a chance to go mano a mano, but for others, “Tournament of Champions” feels vaguely like a cooking-themed version of the old-timey game show “Queen For A Day,” where housewives traded sob stories for audience sympathy and prizes. 

The Gordon Ramsay shows, such as “Hell’s Kitchen,” “MasterChef,” and the currently-airing “Next Level Chef,” exist to promote Ramsay, whose visage presides over the Las Vegas Strip like some knife-wielding God. His contestants are mainly home chefs and TikTok food influencers who are literally leaping onto a rising-and-falling platform for the chance to grab ingredients so they can cook a “next level burger” or whatever. By comparison with the more elite cooking shows, Ramsay offers big cash prizes and actual jobs. But when you see “MasterChef” or “Next Level Chef” winners try to break into the Guy Fieri universe, they generally get clobbered. It’s a long way to the top if you want to cook and roll.

The Padma Lakshmi-run “America’s Culinary Cup” is the latest and strangest entry into the food TV competition wars. Lakshmi stepped away from “Top Chef” in 2023 to focus on her production company and because, she said, she was eating too much. Yet on an episode I saw this month, she watched 12 chefs butcher a side of beef and then sampled a dozen beef dishes. 

“America’s Culinary Cup” is essentially “Top Chef” with slightly different rules, and also a million-dollar first prize. There are some high-end contestants, but the “Top Chef” field is equally impressive. Strangely, the “America’s Culinary Cup” contestant with the highest Q rating is Buddha Lo, who has a Michelin Star and also won “Top Chef” twice, yet here he is again, cooking for our entertainment. The show has high production values, and is OK, but it’s also airing exactly concurrently with “Top Chef,” reminding us that it’s not “Top Chef.”

One of Lakshmi’s regular judges is Michael Cimarusti, executive chef and co-owner of Los Angeles’s Providence seafood restaurant, where my wife and I once ate an anniversary meal that was so expensive we still feel guilt about it more than a decade later. This, to me, is the main problem with cooking competitions. They’re not relatable to the average person or to the home chef. 

At the dawn of the “Top Chef” era, you could find a lot of cooking instruction for normal people on food TV. Rachael Ray, whose whole reason for being was teaching people to cook on a budget, had millions of viewers. Now she hosts a podcast. When my wife Regina and I are looking for cooking tips, we have to find episodes of PBS’s “America’s Test Kitchen” on the Roku Channel, and many of them are 15 years old. 

A couple of weeks ago, Regina and I went to a lecture by British-Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi. He prepared simple dishes in a packed auditorium while also answering audience questions, and he showed us videos of himself preparing other, equally simple dishes, providing a QR code so we could all download all the recipes. 

Since then, we’ve cooked four Ottolenghi dinners from the downloads and also from the signed cookbook that we bought. We had many of the recipe items in our well-stocked pantry and fridge, but they were pretty basic: herbs and spices, canned beans, olive oil, and lemons. For the rest, we had to go to the store, but we spent maybe $50. Out of that, we got 10 meals, maybe more, and everything was perfectly delicious.

In contrast, I’ve never once cooked a single dish inspired by a cooking competition. I love these types of shows, and I’ll watch pretty much every iteration, but I also recognize that they’re kind of useless, self-absorbed, and snotty, even when Guy Fieri, the least snotty man alive, hosts them. To paraphrase Marie Antoinette: Watch them make cake.

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Neal Pollack, “the greatest living American writer,” is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.