Bravo Confirms Televisionary Scoop: Katie Lee Joel HAS Packed Her Knives After All

As I reported last week, news had reached my ears that Top Chef host/automaton Katie Lee Joel would not be returning to Bravo's hit culinary reality series for a second season.

It's always vindicating when a story you've broken (and which subsequently was picked up by most entertainment websites) is confirmed to be true. So it tickled me pink when Bravo finally confirmed my story about Katie Lee Joel today, via Bravo's Vice President of Production and Programming Andy Cohen's blog:

"I want to address something you may have heard, that Katie Lee Joel wont be joining us next season on Top Chef. It is unfortunately true that Katie has left us to pursue other opportunities. She is a dynamic, beautiful woman who is passionate about food with a real zest for life. Everybody at Top Chef is going to miss her next season but she will always be part of the Bravo family."

Quite possibly because Bravo has wisely already constructed a thousand clones of Ms. Joel, a la Battlestar Galactica's Cylons. Let's just hope they haven't performed the same procedure with Top Chef loser Tiffani. Because that would be scary.

I especially liked how unofficial Bravo spokesman Andy Cohen dropped a culinary metaphor in there to describe Katie Lee Joel's passion for food ("a real zest for life"). Too bad he neglected to mention that she was about as dull as as a used knife and never really seemed like the sharpest one in the drawer to begin with...

Top Chef's second season was announced by Bravo last month, but no return date has been set for the series' ten-episode sophomore season.

UPDATE: Bravo has announced that Padma Lakshmi has replaced Joel as the new host of Top Chef.