Top Chef 2: In Retrospect

Top Chef holds a sweet spot in Bravo's cupboard of reality shows. The first season served up more than adequate portions of intrigue, misdemeanor, challenges, and most importantly, good food. Season two promised the same sort of kitchen action, if not even sweeter and more intense. Now that it's ended, what did it really boil down to?

If you haven't seen the first season of Top Chef, then there would be no basis for comparison. Overall, the second season held its own. The new host Padma Lakshmi, wife of preeminent writer Salman Rushdie, brought a lot of sass and glamor to the show. The judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons were darlings and as usual, we were served up a display of their excellent and critical palates. Among the contestants, there were the good guys and gals, the villain that everyone hates and the scandals that brew around the corners now and then. It was all amusing enough to keep you glued week after week. The guest judges were industry heavyweights and renowned chefs whose appearance would be enough to make you gush and envy the contestants for having had a chance to meet these folks. But the most important question to ask was, who could really cook? Who was really deserving of the title of Top Chef, together with all the other perks that Bravo was serving up to the winner?

Incidentally, just like in the previous season, the winner of the show was also the one who walked away with the first Quickfire Challenge victory. Ilan Hall, 23, became season two's Top Chef. His Spanish-influenced cooking seem to have outdone all the other contestants' cuisines, and his technique and quality were very good for him to ultimately bag the top prize, but his food was ever unchanging. Day in, day out, he would serve up the same familiar Spanish ingredients, in the same familiar Spanish-style dishes. Try hard as we might, we can't see any hint of an adventurous chef in Ilan. A Top Chef should be able to take risks and spin them around to their advantage, but Ilan's game plan was generally about playing it safe and sticking to the traditional Spanish cuisine that he knew best. That aside, his conniving, scheming, every-man-for-himself attitude really showed through during the Marcel incident-not the best personality you'd look for in a chef. The guy's clearly gifted, but even Tony Bourdain agrees he would not have been the best bet for winner.

Finalist Marcel Vigneron was quite the interesting one, and the drama would have not been so gripping had not everyone's favorite antagonist made it to the final round. He may have stoked his obsession to emulate Ferran Adria by putting foam on every single one of his dishes, but he had a sharp eye for beautiful plating styles and had quite an adventurous appetite for unique, avant garde cuisine. This guy just might have won this contest had his food always tasted as good as it looks. Face it though-the show would not have been so interesting had he not taken the shoes of the antagonist. His creativity and adventurism wowed some of the judges, including Tony Bourdain, but ultimately, his immaturity earned him a lot of enemies and kept him from winning the title. He has a lot of potential, which he has yet to polish if he were to become a Top Chef.

Bourdain's top pick? Sam Talbot, the 28-year old hunk of an executive chef from New York. It's not about the looks, but this guy reflects the strongest characteristics of a successful chef in the making. His technical skills were superb, he stepped up to the occasion when called to be the leader, he handled people in the kitchen very well, and he faced up to problems and dilemmas without having to go through the backstabbing and shoving that the other chefs often succumbed to. He had an excellent palate for unique flavor pairings, and up until the top four, he was a frontrunner for the title. It was only a huge disappointment when he was eliminated on the grounds of not cooking anything during the elimination challenge in Hawaii.

This isn't to say that the judging was flawed; on the contrary, the judging was solid all throughout the show. But a show is a show, and it had to serve up some entertainment. Had Sam won the show, he would've been from the exact same demographic as last year's winner Harold Dieterle-the middle aged, white, male executive chef from New York. Besides, there would only be the most drama having Ilan and Marcel face off each other in the finals, considering the amount of acerbic tension that's built up between the two of them.

Then there was also the controversy on the episode where Marcel was tackled by the other chefs who tried to take him down and shave off his hair. Bravo tells us that the other contestants shaved off their heads first before even attempting to pull the prank on Marcel, but avid fans of the show point out that the real sequence of events was the other way around-they first mugged Marcel before shaving their own heads. Bravo's sequence of events was certainly the more logical one and it vilifies the other contestants less than what the actual sequence of events would paint them, but it's shocking to the average viewer to find out the truth of it. So is this supposed to be a reality show? More like Bravo's version of the story.

Each chef who reached the finals stages of the competition served up their own brand of talent, and no matter how justifiable and unbiased the judging may have been, we the audience can still sometimes end up wondering just how "real" reality TV is. It's still a TV show after all, and in business, ratings can have a much bigger say than talent. Who should've been the winner? You decide.