Top Chef: Showing some signs of life

Posted by Dan April 10th, 2008 at 01:13pm In Top Chef

After a few episodes of lifelessly ambling along, Top Chef finally started to show some fire in the belly last night.

The main portion of interest came in the form of a bizarre post-script after Zoi gave her parting chef-ituary (the part where they say “I just love to cook” and put on a hard-eyed smile and say “you haven’t heard the last from me”). The editors chose to cut to Spike yelling at Antonia yelling at Spike. They were arguing in chef speak, saying things like “stand behind your dish” — it was almost (not quite) as dorky as Elan shrieking about paprika to Marcel way back when.

Then Dale gets involved, which causes Lisa to chime in, which gives them a whole reason to get mad at each other because Dale was mad at her for being a Negative Nancy.

I don’t know that I really want the season to disintegrate into aimless bickering — we all remember the horror and cruelty of season two — but it’s nice to see some competitive spirit and intrigue with personalities.

Ooh, ooh — and there was this part where Jen clapped her hands really hard like she was excited about getting into a fight. And then she kicked a metal folding chair against the wall. It was pretty awesome.

Aside from that end part and a promising “Next on Top Chef,” the episode was standard fare. Judge Tom is still unbelievably obnoxious, Padma is pretty window dressing and Gail is lovely but barely there.