The Insatiable Viewer: Not All Food Shows Are Created Equal

Now is a very good time to be a television-loving foodie, with several networks other than stalwarts Food Network or PBS devoting air time to culinary-themed programming. In fact, it's safe to say that cuisine as a whole has entered the general zeitgeist in a way that it couldn't really have done before the public's embrace of reality programming.

But there's a rather large caveat: not all food programming is equal. While television offers a bountiful cornucopia of culinary series, there's still a large difference in the quality of these programs, not to mention a staggering range of subjects being covered. There are docusoaps that focus on cake-makers, competition series pitting chefs against each other, old fashioned cook-offs, food-focused travel series, and product spotlights.

While I'd never be able to offer up a comprehensive discussion of all of these series (they are too numerous to even contemplate as a whole), I thought I'd take a look at a few members of the current crop of culinary programs and offer my thoughts about how each stacks up to the competition, with Bravo's Top Chef and Top Chef Masters, Food Network's Chopped, BBC America's Gordon Ramsay's F Word, and FOX's Hell's Kitchen.

So, sit back, grab yourself a plate of something tasty, and let's get cooking.

Top Chef (Bravo)

Top Chef really is the mirepoix of culinary programs today: that essential base that makes all others possible. And likewise, the cabler has taken this base to build an entire Top Chef franchise, which kicked off last month with spin-off Top Chef Masters. The conceit of Top Chef is simple: pit a group of ambitious chefs against one another for a cash prize and a chance at fame and fortune.

I remember when Top Chef first launched, there was concern that the audience wouldn't eat it up in the way that they did the network's own Project Runway. After all, it's hard to experience food visually in the same way that it is fashion on the runway. Wrong. Just look at the sheer number of food magazines, cookbooks, and food-themed memoirs to know that consumers have an insatiable appetite for all things food-related.

Produced by Magical Elves, Top Chef is a stylish and slick production that puts the emphasis squarely on the competitors' dishes, discussing strategy and flavor profiles with equal relish. It helps that the judges are a band of the culinary world's most celebrated stars: chef/restaurateur Tom Collichio, Food & Wine editor Gail Simmons, and a revolving door of arbiters that has included at times chef/memoirist/novelist/TV personality Anthony Bourdain, Ted Allen (who now hosts Food Network's own Chopped), journalist/food critic/Truman Capote manque Toby Young, and many, many others.

Several seasons down the line, Top Chef has remained essential television viewing for any self-respecting foodie, fusing the world of reality competition with the rigorous and demanding world of high cuisine. The casting is always impeccable, the chefs are always forward-thinking and creative, and the stakes are always high. Seeing these up-and-comers put through their paces each week with both a short-form Quickfire Challenge and a longer, more complex Elimination Challenge is a real treat, offering viewers the opportunity to see the chefs adapt, plan, react, and execute dishes under an array of difficult scenarios. The results are as delicious as the dishes they present.

Grade: A

Top Chef Masters (Bravo)

Any discussion of Top Chef would have to involve that of its recent offspring, Top Chef Masters, which launched a few weeks ago on Bravo and has sated the appetite of many a Top Chef fan eager for the return of their favorite series. While the series didn't start off with quite the confidence and poise of its predecessor, recent episodes have shown the series finding its footing and developing into its own tasty dish. Like Top Chef, the spin-off series puts its contestants through both a speedy Quickfire Challenge and a more structured Elimination Challenge, but this time around the contestants are boldfaced names from the restaurant business competing for charity.

Which gives the contestants more to prove (bragging rights are even more essential here) but also takes the series away from its original format. Given that there are twenty-four world-class chefs involved with the series (each with their own demanding schedules), Top Chef Masters pits four of them against each other a week, with the winners moving on to the champion round. While it makes for some high-stakes drama--if you don't win, you're off the series for good--it also loses some points for inconsistency. Each week presents a new batch of chefs, so it's hard to root for anyone in particular as we're not seeing them on a regular basis and each subsequent week brings in a fresh crop of competitors.

Still, this is a minor quibble. Top Chef Masters has proven itself compulsory culinary television viewing and has successfully tweaked the format of its forebear, offering up a different grading rubric that allows the Quickfire results, the individual judges, and the diners equal weight. When dealing with such celebrated chefs as the Top Chef Masters players, it's a nice change, though I do flinch when the results are read out from lowest to highest score, eliminating much of the drama there. Still, it's a meal I look forward to savoring each week.

Grade: A-

Chopped (Food Network)

I was intrigued when Chopped launched earlier this year on Food Network, given that it featured former Top Chef judge Ted Allen as a host and promised to put professional chefs through the ringer by forcing them to cook a three-course meal using mystery ingredients, with one chef eliminated--or "chopped" in parlance--after each course. Sort of like a Quickfire Challenge with bite, no?

Sadly, I have to say that I'm disappointed by this Top Chef wannabe. Perhaps it's the fact that poor Ted Allen is so woefully underused and offers nothing whatsoever to the proceedings. He doesn't taste the food nor act as a judge and is typically reduced to offering up some painfully scripted (and oftentimes rhyming) introductions and segues. Sure, he will occasionally lean over a competing chef's station and inquire about what they're doing but it feels stilted and out of place. There's no running commentary a la Iron Chef and, hell, even Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi has some input on the judging.

The concept is intriguing but it's the execution that's definitely lacking. It doesn't help matters that (A) the set is dark and oppressive and feels like it's being shot in someone's too-small Manhattan apartment and (B) the judges seem awkward and icy cold, offering very little in the way of constructive feedback and remaining completely unknowable to the home audience. There's very little personality at play on the judges' table and nothing they say is particularly memorable or exciting.

Which is a problem when there are going to be numerous comparisons to Top Chef. (The cabler also offers the Top Chef-esque Search for the Next Food Nework Star.) I've given Chopped, now in its second season, several opportunities to wow me but the results haven't been enough to keep me excited about this lackluster program. This is one course I'm more than happy to send back to the kitchen.

Grade: C+

Gordon Ramsay's F Word (BBC America/Channel 4 UK)

British import Gordon Ramsay's F Word (which airs on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom) has to be one of the most controversial and fun food programs ever to run on US television. The reason many people seem to find it frenetic and overstuffed is the very reason that I love it so much: it's a magazine-style food program with recurring segments that are blended with competition (kitchen brigades compete for a chance to cook in one of Ramsay's restaurants), behind-the-scenes (Ramsay raises sheep, pigs in his back garden!), reportage (Janet Street-Porter investigates foie gras production), celebrity interviews (Ramsay faces off with a celebrity of the week in a recipe challenge), how-to (Ramsay shows you how to simply prepare these dishes at home), and grassroots campaign (this season shows Ramsay offering tips on how to cook healthier meals). Whew.

It's a heady brew of travelogue, cooking show, competition, celebrity, practical how-to, and behind-the-scenes that I find absolutely intoxicating. Ramsay is also in his element here and it's easy to see his innate passion for cuisine rather than the bluster and bullying he seems to throw on in some of his other reality programs. Is there a lot going on? Hell yes. But it's always interesting, always hilarious, and always informative. And that to be is the hallmark of a great culinary series.

Grade: A-

Hell's Kitchen (FOX)

And then there's Hell's Kitchen. What started out as a fun and fiery culinary competition series has devolved into a freak show where the contestants--cast for their oddities, eccentricities, or abrasive personalities--attempt to work on the line in a Hollywood restaurant where they are overseen and browbeaten by Ramsay himself.

What sets this program apart from the others is that the contestants usually can barely boil water much less prepare palatable food for the diners. Which is a shame as it could be a great series about life on the line but instead its become trainwreck television. Seeing Ramsay scream at someone with precious few knife skills or professional experience isn't exciting or amusing, it's downright depressing.

I watch culinary television series because I want to be dazzled by chefs' inspiration, creativity, and passion for what they do. If I felt like Ramsay were training these contestants to become professional chefs (look at Jamie Oliver's amazing docuseries Jamie's Kitchen for that instead), that would be one thing. But instead, the entire affair feels cheap and exploitative, not to mention overtly sensationalized.

There's no way that I'd go anywhere near Hell's Kitchen these days for viewing, not to mention eating. And that's a real problem for a culinary series, which should be aspirational not nauseatingly vapid. It's clear that Ramsay is playing a part here for the cameras, which is a shame when you watch F Word or Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (or its US counterpart on FOX, Kitchen Nightmares) and you see the passionate, inspirational side of Ramsay. Sadly, Hell's Kitchen makes me lose my appetite completely.

Grade: D

And there you have it. I am curious to know, however, what culinary-themed television programs you're watching. Are there any that should have been on this list? Any that you can't live without? Any that you're hungry for week after week? And which ones should be binned? Discuss.

Offal Hard: Chefs Stomach Street Food on "Top Chef Masters"

Was it just me or was last night's episode of Top Chef Masters ("Offal Tasty") the series' very best yet?

In every sense, last night's installment was the closest we've gotten to approximating the tension, drama, and conflict that's evident in every single minute of Top Chef itself. Helping matters in this direction was the flawless casting in this episode, which saw four vastly different master chefs--Frontera Grill's Rick Bayless, Cindy Pawlcyn of Mustards Grill, Pikayo's Wilo Benet, and Ludo Bites' Ludovic Lefebvre--tangle in the kitchen.

The clash of larger-than-life personalities added a spark that was somewhat missing from last week's Lost-themed episode, which was a more somber affair. Here, there was the arrogance of Rick Bayless, the fanatical passion of Ludovic Lefebvre, the quiet precision of Wilo Benet, and the humility of the graceful Cindy Pawlcyn. In order words: amazing casting that added a fire to the competition.

I'll admit that I was rooting for Cindy Pawlcyn to win. I'm a huge fan of Cindy's cooking and a frequent visitor to her restaurant Mustards in Napa Valley. (In fact, I was just there last week for the restaurant's 26th birthday.) She's known for big flavors, fantastic ingredients, and food so good you have to restrain yourself from licking the plate.

Quickfire Challenge. I loved that last night's Quickfire had the master chefs preparing color-based dishes... which were then judged by some food stylists and photographers, people who know not only how food should taste but also how it should appear, presentation-wise. Color-based cooking is no easy feat. Most dishes succeed because they offer a combination of flavors, textures, and colors. An all-red dish then doesn't excite so much as it steamrolls you with crimson. Still, I have to say that I thought the chefs did extremely well under the severe time constraints, though Ludo seemed to be cracking under the pressure just a little bit.

Cindy offered up a sunshine-hued dish of sweet corn and cheese grits topped with a yellow vegetable curry and fried corn tortillas that offered a study in textures and flavors. Ludo's dish--steak tartare with watermelon, red onion, and red beet gazpacho--was ruined not by the lack of the tomatoes but rather by the late addition of that ghastly blood-colored gazpacho over the tartare; the effect looked like a duck had been ex-sanguinated over the dish. Wilo accidentally left the ring mold on his smoked salmon tartare with coconut milk, brunoise of carrots, and tomato paste, but the diners seemed to love it once they removed the silver ring. Rick Bayless' verdant roasted vegetables, mole verde with tomatillos, green chilies, and pumpkin seeds were hands down the favorite dish of the judges, offering a subtlety and panache that seemed to be lacking in the other dishes.

While Wilo walked away with the top spot (despite the ring mold fiasco), it's no surprise that Bayless did as well as he did. However, green might have been the easiest color to work with, offering Bayless a slew of vegetables to choose from and an association with crispness and freshness. Far more difficult were some of the other colors to work with, but still a pretty impressive display of skills and techniques all around.

Elimination Challenge. If the chefs thought they could rest on their laurels from the Quickfire, they were dead wrong as the elimination challenge, I thought, was one of the toughest on the series so far. The four chefs would draw knives to determine their offal-based proteins, which would then be transformed into street food which the chefs would sell to tourists at Universal City. Ouch.

I consider myself a major foodie but the thought of offal often turns my stomach. (No pun intended.) That said, I would have eaten any of the remarkable dishes that these talented chefs turned out in this episode. Offal is a tough sell for most diners, let alone tourists at Universal City, so I think that all four of them did an incredible job masking some of the, uh, more forward flavors of the offal and creating dishes that satisfied and tantalized with equal measure.

Cindy cooked up a hot and spicy menudo with tripe and lime that the judges felt played it a bit too safe, offering an underseasoned soup that lacked the heat and passion of Pawlcyn's well-known dishes. (Damn.) Ludo was all over the place once again, delaying the serving of his dish due to the fact that he wanted it piping hot; he offered a pig's ear quesadilla with chorizo pinto bean puree, lime aioli, and smoked paprika. I thought Ludo did a damn fine job, considering that pig's ear is a tough ingredient, probably the toughest of the offal they had to work with this week. He smartly cooked the ear in a court-bouillion, though I'm not sure I would have combined said ear with the stringy cheese. Still, Ludo was very canny about the delivery system for the pig's ear, creating a dish that pleased the customers more than it did the judges, it seemed.

Rick drew the knife for tongue, an ingredient he was thoroughly familiar with, and created chorizo, bacon, and tongue tacos with tomatillo guacamole and pickled onions. The judges raved about the taco, declaring it a superb mouthful that gleefully combined flavors and textures and drew some acid from the guacamole and onions in order to cut through the fat. Wilo adapted the traditional tripleta into a beef heart, ham, and chicken tripleta in a pita pocket with a spicy mayonnaise sauce that won over the judges and he was extremely crafty about substituting the pita for the more traditional baguette; it offered a cup-like shape that held up well to the onslaught of ingredients.

I knew that Bayless would walk away the ultimate winner here, as much as I would have liked to have seen one of the other chefs make it onto the champion round instead. Still, both challenges played to Bayless' strengths and he was able to infuse both dishes with his trademark Mexican flavors and spice.

What did you think of this week's episode? Would you have eaten these dishes knowing that they contained what they did? Did you change your opinion about offal as a result? And who do you think should have won this week's elimination challenge? Discuss.

In two weeks on Top Chef Masters ("Magic Chefs"), the next four chefs find themselves manually challenged when they must cook an egg with one hand tied behind their backs; a magical-themed Elimination Challenge sees Neil Patrick Harris presiding as guest judge.

The Master Chefs Get Schooled on "Top Chef: Masters" Series Premiere

Just out of curiosity, how many of you tuned in last night for the series premiere of Bravo's Top Chef Masters ("Masters Get Schooled"), the spin-off series for its venerable Top Chef series?

You read my advance review of the series premiere yesterday, but I'd love to know what you thought of the episode itself and the new format of the series, in which four chefs will compete head-to-head over six weeks to determine who will move on to the final rounds.

Last night's episode featured Hubert Keller, Christopher Lee, Michael Schlow, and Tim Love as they were tasked first with creating a dessert plate for a group of Girl Scouts in under thirty minutes and then had to create a three-course meal for some college students using only a microwave, hot-plate, and mini-convection oven in an actual dorm room.

So how did they do? Let's discuss.

I thought that the Quickfire Challenge was a good one because desserts somehow always manage to trip up the competitors on Top Chef, so I was pleased to see these master chefs put through their paces under severe pressure and some intense scrutiny... especially from that outspoken little red-haired girl who certainly voiced her opinions and objections. I felt bad for Michael Schlow, who tried to do way too much, offering a milk chocolate cake (which failed to rise), peanut butter-chocolate candies, and honey almond cream. Likewise, Tim Love was extremely ambitious with his strawberries three ways, including a chocolate-dipped strawberry, a strawberry smoothie (which the kids called bitter), and a chicken-fried strawberry that defied description. Christopher Lee offered French toast skewers with caramelized banana, orange sauce, and maple syrup fluff.

But most successful was Hubert Keller, who seemed to best understand and execute the brief: he designed an incredibly imaginative plate that included an adult-focused dessert (chocolate mousse and meringue) but interpreted in a kid-friendly fashion: a meringue swan, a whipped cream mouse (complete with ears and tail), an oversized goblet of mousse. The flavors were sophisticated but approachable and he tweaked the presentation to suit the diner. Well done, Mssr. Keller.

I was stunned to see just how many restrictions the producers had placed upon the chefs for the Elimination Challenge. It's tricky enough when the task involves microwave ovens and hot plates but take the chefs out of the familiar environs of the kitchen and place them in cramped, messy, and equipment-less dorm rooms and you have some serious challenges. (Loved how Keller used the shower to drain and cool his pasta. Stroke of genius, really.)

For the first course, Love offered up a scallop carpaccio with lime and chili that was elegant and refined. Likewise, Schlow went the raw fish route with a salmon crudo with cucumber, mint, red chilies, and kumquat and Lee did the same with a red snapper ceviche with citrus, avocado, and popcorn, which offered a range of textures and flavors. But once again, it was Keller who delivered the goods, with fresh Scottish salmon served over a creamy whole-grain mustard and caper sauce and topped with radishes.

Second course: a cabbage soup with smoked bacon, fennel, and white beans from Schlow that was rich and hearty; Lee served up risotto with proscuitto, sage, and parmigiano reggiano that was overcooked (hard to cook risotto to order in a dorm room; bad call); Keller offered a carrot and petit pea soup with cinnamon croutons; and Love turned tragedy (accidentally freezing all of his ingredients) into triumph with a squash and corn "posole."

Third course: skirt steak and braised kale (overly salty) from Love; pork a la apicius with broccolini and mushrooms from Schlow; mac and cheese with prawns, mushrooms, and herbs from Keller; and a pork chop with piperade, crushed potatoes, and mache and fennel salad from Lee.

All in all, a strong display of skills and vision from all but it was no surprise that Keller walked away the ultimate winner here. I had a feeling from the opening seconds of the episode that Keller, of San Francisco's Fleur de Lys, was the one to beat and I can't say that I was shocked that he's moving on to the next round of competition.

What did you think of the episode? Was Keller the strongest competitor? Does the series live up to its Top Chef pedigree? Do you miss Tom, Gail, and Padma? Discuss.



Next week on Top Chef Masters ("The Lost Supper"), the next four master chefs are tasked with creating an elegant amuse-bouche from vending machine fare; Lost provides the inspiration for the elimination challenge.

Knife's Edge: An Advance Review of Bravo's "Top Chef Masters"

If you're at all like me, you've been going through some serious Top Chef withdrawal these past few months and while the series itself won't be returning until sometime later this fall (with a Vegas-set edition), you can get a taste of the culinary competition series by tuning in tonight to spin-off series Top Chef Masters on Bravo.

Hosted by Kelly Choi, Top Chef Masters seems similar--on the surface, anyway--to its predecessor in that several judges square off through both a Quickfire and an Elimination Challenge. However, in Top Chef Masters, the chefs are more well-known than the original series' contestants... and in many cases have appeared on the series as guest judges.

The pressure to win then is even more severe. In addition to bragging rights at being named the ultimate Top Chef Master, these master chefs are competing for donations to the charity of their choice and the first few episodes depict four contestants apiece fighting it out for a spot in the finals. This change in format makes it easier to keep track of the contestants (there are, after all, 24 chefs this time around) and give each of them some weighty screen time.

But if you thought that the producers would let these masters skip through some simple challenges, you've got another thing coming. The Quickfire Challenges are more or less a best-of from the five seasons of Top Chef that have aired so far and the contestants are hampered even more by the fact that they are given less time to complete these challenges than their less famous counterparts.

Ever wonder what Hubert Keller would do when faced with a group of demanding girl scouts in a dessert challenge? Then this is the series for you. These chefs might be the best and brightest in the nation but they are put through their paces with some tough challenges. In the first episode alone, they're tasked with creating a dessert plate on the fly in under thirty minutes and then later in the Elimination Challenge, have to create a three-course meal using only a microwave oven, a hot plate, and a mini-convection oven.

Ahem. And did I mention that all three courses have to be prepared in an actual college student's dorm room? Oh yeah, there's that too.

Top Chef Masters isn't for the faint-hearted. The stakes are just as high here to win as in Top Chef and these master chefs approach the challenges both with as much humility as they do with a shark-like desire to win... and to wipe the floor with their competitors.

Top Chef Masters' first episode features the uber-talented Hubert Keller, Christopher Lee, Michael Schlow, and Tim Love (you can read more about each of them here) and, despite the smaller cast in each episode, it's fantastic to see them work out solutions to each of the challenges. Being a great chef has a lot to do with being highly adaptable and you can see the gears turning inside each of their heads as they figure out their mode of attack for each challenge.

Subsequent episodes will feature such notable chefs as Cindy Pawlcyn, Rick Moonen, Anita Lo, Michael Cimarusti, Elizabeth Falkner, Wylie Dufresne, Mark Peel, Michael Chiarello, Roy Yamaguchi, Graham Elliot Bowles, Wilo Benet, Art Smith, Suzanne Tracht, Lachlan Mackinnon Patterson, Nils Noren, Rick Bayless, John Besh, Jonathan Waxman, Ludo Lebebvre, and Douglas Rodriguez. (Whew.)

Sadly, Tom Collichio isn't presiding over the judges' table on this spin-off but the contestants must instead contend with the sophisticated palates of Observer critic Jay Rayner, New York Magazine's legendary Gael Greene, and Saveur editor-in-chief James Oseland. No slouches theses.

The production values are just as high for Top Chef Masters as any Top Chef episode, or indeed any Magical Elves production and the pacing is slick and fast. Some might chafe from the alteration in format, with only four chefs competing at a time, but I think it works here, at least for the first few rounds of elimination.

So who will walk away the ultimate winner of Top Chef Masters? It's way too early to say but I will say that the first episode has made me hungry with anticipation for more. Prepare to be dazzled by these masters.







Top Chef Masters premieres tonight at 10 pm ET/PT on Bravo.

Sharpen Your Knives: Talking with the First Four "Top Chef: Masters" Contestants

True confession: I've been suffering from some painful Top Chef withdrawal since the last season wrapped up.

Fortunately, Bravo realized that many of us have been craving another culinary competition and next week will launch spin-off series Top Chef: Masters which will pit 24 of the country's most celebrated chefs against one another in a battle of wills and skills that will leave only one standing as they fight for bragging rights and a donation to the charity of their choice.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Hubert Keller, Christopher Lee, Michael Schlow, and Tim Love, the first four contestants on Top Chef: Masters last week via a press call to see what they had to say about the series' grueling Quickfire and Elimination Challenges and just how they fared on the chopping block. (Meanwhile, look for an advance review of the first episode of Top Chef: Masters next week.)

"The charity part was absolutely first and foremost," said chef Michael Schlow of Boston's Radius, speaking about why he joined the cast of Top Chef: Masters. "I think you know all of the chefs that are involved in the show will say that. Plus you know it's an honor to be asked to be on a show that's titled Top Chef: Masters. It's a top-rated food program -- the regular Top Chef program is a top-rated food program in the country, and so I think we're all flattered to be asked. I mean we want to represent our cities and our towns. And so the idea of not only doing this for charity but getting a chance to hopefully showcase some of our talents in a fun setting with our friends, it was enough for me, and it was a great opportunity."

But what about the risk factor of pitting well-known and established chefs against each other? Weren't the contestants at all worried about that?

"As far as the risk factor goes, yes, you know you get on any reality TV show, there's a lot of risk involved and I think all of us kind of were biting our cheese a little bit to find out how it was going to be edited because we obviously don't know that until the episode comes," said Tim Love of Fort Worth's The Lonesome Dove Western Bistro and The Love Shack. "But I think it turned out to be really great. And of course I'm sure you can tell from the episode, we all enjoyed hanging out with each other. And anytime you can get together with some of your colleagues like that in a different setting, it always makes for a lot of fun. We see each other at food and wine festivals and things like that, but to get together and make an episode with three other great chefs like these guys that I worked with, it was a great honor."

Famed Fleur de Lys chef Hubert Keller concurred.

"It's true there is risk involved that I think all of us having our own restaurants and business and everything, I think we're running risks everyday, right?" said Keller. "So I think it's part of our lifestyle also that when something is up, when [you get into] something, yes, actually we do take risks and it's all about what we're doing. And otherwise for me also since I was participating as a judge in three different seasons in the past and the first Top Chef was also filmed at Fleur de Lys in San Francisco, I must say it's something that I could not have turned down."

"I think we're all going to beat this question down the same way," said Chris Lee of Manhattan's Aureole. "I mean for me it was definitely because of the charity, was the real one reason why I decided to do it. I thought there would be a risk, but I kind of went in there light-minded or light-hearted about the whole thing and just trying to keep a good, positive attitude with it and just did what I did. If I looked stupid I tried to have a sense of humor."

"Of course your staff always wants you to bring home you know the win and whatnot," said Love. "But the risk really is nothing compared to the reward when you go into something like this where you go in for a charity, you got an opportunity to make some money that will make a change in somebody else's life. It's really kind of cool. And the competition itself really for me kind of took a backseat and the fact that we're there you know to make a good show and we're there to compete with our colleagues and I think everybody that enters the competition is pretty much a winner, otherwise they wouldn't have chosen us. And everyday, as I said before, we get judged everyday in our restaurants. So being judged by others is really not, and I don’t mean to speak for everybody, it's really not I think new for anybody."

"The way I'm entering the competition was definitely not something to prove ourselves," admitted Keller. "I think we did enough in our career, where we are today. So as an example, every restaurant that we have or we're running or chefs, right, we are not proving ourselves but we are definitely competing, right, with the other peers in different cities, different restaurants. So I just saw it more on that way on basically entering to compete, because competition, that's what we do in our profession, like with our restaurants. But it's not to prove ourselves; I think that was not the goal of that."

Still, everyone's a critic, right? So why invite even more criticism by participating on a series that showcases that constant appraisal?

"We actually discussed this on the set a couple of times," admitted Schlow. "And what we said, and we actually had said it at probably one of the episodes, was everybody is a critic. Just because you might not have a pen in your hand, you're still a critic. And what Hubert was saying a little bit earlier about the risk and – that we put ourselves out there every single night you know we're inviting criticism or commentary anyway. I think unfortunately the term criticism always moves in negative. It doesn’t, it just means you're forming an opinion good or bad."

"And the reality is, is that with the Internet and all the blogs and everything else, in Chowhound, in Yelp, in Grub Street, there are a lot of critics out there that may not be professional critics but they have their opinions," continued Schlow. "And you know you have to listen to everybody. As we said, on the set, luckily for all of us you know 99.9 times out of a hundred, the criticisms and the critique are good, but there is always that one or two times that you may say you know we prepare something and the guests don't like it."

So which one of these famed masters will move on to the next round? You'll have to tune in next Wednesday to find out. In the meantime, find out more about the first four contestants below.

Meet Tim Love:



Meet Hubert Keller:



Meet Chris Lee:



Meet Michael Schlow:



Top Chef: Masters premieres Wednesday, June 10th at 10 pm ET/PT on Bravo.