Top Chef season 21 premiere: Hello Wisconsin!

Eighteen years in, Top Chef is a well-run kitchen. Devoted fans know exactly what they’re getting each season. There will be burners and tensions cranked high during Eliminations, there will be both triumphs and tragedies—an undercooked protein, an over-seasoned sauce—on the plate, there will be the warm presence of Gail Simmons and the gastro gruffness of Tom Colicchio at the judges’ table, and there will inevitably be at least one contestant who misguidedly decides to make risotto in a Quickfire Challenge. But season 21 of Bravo’s long-running cooking competition, which brings the gourmet action to Wisconsin in newly-extended 75-minute episodes, ushers in a different era for the foodie franchise.

First, the biggie: Padma Lakshmi—an enthusiastic, empathetic and exceedingly knowledgeable presence on the judges’ panel—announced she would be stepping down as host following last year’s Top Chef: World All-Stars. For Padma’s replacement, the powers that be have cast Kristen Kish, a renowned chef who knows her way around a cooking show—she’s hosted the likes of TruTV’s Fast Foodies, Netflix’s Iron Chef: Quest for An Iron Legend, and NatGeo’s Restaurants At The End Of The World. But, even more compelling, she has firsthand knowledge of all of the conceits and quirks of Top Chef, having won the show’s Seattle-set tenth season.

That seasoned quality instantly gives Kish’s hosting debut a boost. When this year’s batch of 15 hungry chef-testants proudly raise their hands to tout their various culinary accomplishments—James Beard Award nominations, Michelin-starred kitchens, and, for competitor Kévin D’Andrea, a finalist stint on Top Chef’s French edition—our new host reminds the group that prior to her own victory, she had a few humble cook jobs and one sous-chef position on her CV. Fancy-schmancy titles won’t win them the $250,000 or the feature in Food & Wine or the appearance at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. “Once you get into the Top Chef kitchen, it quite frankly does not matter at all,” she says.

And those plucky cooks find that out real quick as they’re thrown immediately into that very kitchen, but not the usual Quickfire. No, we’re going full-force into an Elimination for the first challenge of the season, but before we get to all that, there are a few other changes the chef-testants—and we viewers—should know. This year’s crop will now be able to win a cash prize every Quickfire Challenge. The rub? They won’t be getting immunity as a result of a Quickfire win, only a victory in the Elimination Challenge, making the winning chef safe in the next episode. So winning the first Elimination won’t just score them major bragging rights but will also give them “more incentive to keep cooking gangster food the entire time,” says Brooklyn-bred toque Danny Garcia.

Our opening challenge has the chefs drawing knives, each with a judges’ name on it. Those that pulled a “Kristen”—such as the Mexico-born Manny Barella and the Winsconsin-proud Dan Jacobs (we could take a shot every time Dan mentions “Milwaukee,” but we’d all quickly die)—are tasked with making a soup, inspired by Kish’s own first challenge on Top Chef: “I feel like that’s a good test for a top chef because it’s about developing flavor, not just something that’s thrown together.” The “Gail” crew—including Texas pitmaster Michelle Wallace and the perpetually cowboy-hatted David Murphy, who shaded Tom Colicchio’s own penchant for hats and prompted an excellent montage of the judge’s ill-advised headwear through the years—will be tackling stuffed pasta. And Tom wants to see his knife pickers properly roast a whole chicken, with both white and dark meat accounted for.

Contestants will have $200 and 30 minutes at Whole Foods, followed by two hours the next day to cook and serve at Milwaukee’s Lupi & Iris for the judges, including legendary Wisconsin restaurateur Paul Bartolotta and James Beard winner Adam Siegel. Both Cowboy David and Alisha Elenz, a private chef from Chicago, are doing a stuffed gnocchi, but his will have an offal ragu (“sustainable sexy, baby, yeah!”) Rasika Venkatesa, a Chennai-born chef from San Francisco, is worried about going home first—it’s “every chef’s nightmare”—but feels no unease about pairing her kozhukkatta “pasta” with beef. (“It might piss off some people but I’ll deal with that later.”) And Manny is whipping up his own chicken stock, despite only having two hours: “I’m not doing store-bought chicken stock, especially not for the soup challenge.”

Though Michelle is very at home firing up the grill to char her green onions and lobster tails, rolling out pasta sheets unnerves her. (“Lord, be with me!”) To her delightful surprise, she has no reason to worry: Kristen, Gail, Tom, and the rest dub her delicate dish of lobster ravioli with charred corn sauce and crispy chorizo the best of the pasta bunch, earning her a spot in this week’s top three. (By contrast, Cowboy David yee-haws himself into the bottom with his mushroom-stuffed gnocchi, festooned with “too many dots” of chicken liver gravy and Calabrian chili.)

The soup set is next. Tom loves the corn-forward flavor of New Orleans chef Charly Pierre’s corn and ham soup with pickled shrimp, while Gail praises Manny’s green pozole with charred salsa verde. (“It’s packed full of comfort but you made it so elegant.”) Manny’s bowl wins out the soup course, while the overly salty citrus gremolata that tops Amanda Turner’s chicken and dumplings lands the Austin cook in the bottom three.

As for those burnished birds, Danny runs into some early oven trouble, putting him at risk of raw poultry, but his quick-thinking allows him to turn out a “fucking delicious” fines herbes fowl with carrot-miso puree. And though Kaleena Bliss’ spiced-curry chicken is deemed the driest of the flock, Kenny Nguyen’s failure to plate the dark meat of his pho butter roasted bird means he’s automatically in the bottom.

The judges’ panel initially has difficulty objectively comparing soup to stuffed pasta and spiced chicken, but they land on Manny’s perfect pozole as the challenge’s overall winner. As for the loser, well, the bottom three aren’t done cooking just yet—the judges pose a cook-off between Cowboy David, Amanda, and Kenny, with the prompt to simply make “a good plate of food.” (Again, Kish’s contestant experience provides a lovely bit of inspiration here, as she relays to the chefs how she herself had initially been eliminated from the competition before fighting her way back to victory in Last Chance Kitchen.)

With twenty minutes on the clock, the trio has to use whatever ingredients are left over in the kitchen, which to Kenny is “an insane situation” but to Cowboy David is “a dream come true.” (Speaking of David, props to him for that hilariously timed “I should have never said anything about your hat!” shout-out to Tom Colicchio.) Amanda snaps up the snapper from under David’s fingers to compose a crudo with hominy purée, and Kenny quickly gets chopping on cabbage for a Vietnamese-inspired salad with sake-tamari shrimp, but David is pretty much flailing for the entire twenty minutes.

His offering of poached shrimp with sungold tomatoes, coconut-cilantro broth, and green curry sauce is overloaded and utterly directionless—or, as Tom says, “a bunch of stuff that he put in a blender”—so it’s not a shock that the California cowboy is put out to pasture. “Never thought I’d be out first. Thought I’d be hanging out last,” David sorrows. “Those little mistakes will send you home.” That’s Top Chef, partner!

Stray observations

• We can’t blame Cowboy David for cracking during that cook-off: Having not only the judges looking on from the chef’s table but also the rest of your competitors hovering above the kitchen as you sauté for your life is like something straight out of an Ari Aster movie.
• This season is set in the Midwest so it was to be expected but: So. Much. Corn.
• We always enjoy the little bits of humor and humanity that the show sprinkles into all of the culinary chaos. Case in point: Amanda’s witchy astrology aside and Kenny’s reveal that his childhood dream was to be a back-up singer. “I hit alll of the notes. Like, my falsetto? Elite.”