I’ve been tracking Instagram follower counts, and generally, I don’t find it that interesting. However, since this is my second season tracking them, I think we can start to see patterns that we can’t see when we only look at one season. Not all chefs have the goal of remaining on a national stage, so there is no value judgement from me about the numbers of followers.

This season, Brittany Cochran started with the fewest followers (just over 500) and ended up with over 2,000. Two notable outliers this season include Jassi Bindra (the second chef eliminated) who had massive growth, and Day Joseph (the first chef eliminated) who ended up deleting her Instagram account.

Rhoda Magbitang, Duyen Ha, and Laurence Louie ended the season with the most followers, though Rhoda has almost double the followers that Laurence has. Even though Duyen placed 7th, she was a favorite (in our power rankings, she was in the top three for six of her ten episodes) and a bit of a front runner (as seen by her NPT+ in Top Chef Reference).

Where things get more interesting is when we start comparing seasons (Season 22 spoilers incoming!).

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In this episode, we finally get to announce the winner of the power rankings, who will be heading to Paducah for dinner at Freight House with Sara Bradley! Carly and Kendra also revisit GOAT status and break out how well everyone ranked the final 3.

Lastly, we congratulate the fantasy league winne…

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We have a winner! Tom and Sara help crown the Top Chef Carolinas champ with a series of stats and anecdotes from the finale. As a mentor to one of the finale contestants and a dining guest at the final table, Sara shares her thoughts on each of the 12 dishes that she ate at the finale.

Tom digs into the numbers on the Top Chef…

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It’s in Tableau, and at this point, I’d recommend rotating your phone into landscape mode to better see things. Don’t worry - I’ll work on improving the user experience for phones! This is the sort of thing that I keep bookmarked on my phone’s home screen, but maybe that’s just me.

What will you find in Top Chef Reference?

It’s organized into different categories using clickable navigation buttons. The categories are:

• Chef-specific information

• Season-specific information

• Superlatives (e.g., most elimination challenge wins)

• GOATs (greatest of all time)

• Data table of all chefs and their statistics

• Cookbooks, memoirs, etc.

• Additional analyses (e.g., demographics, regionality, money earned, most frequent guest judges)

How do you use Tableau?

In each visual, you can click or hover over a data point to find out more information.

Here’s an example of some of the tabs within the dashboard. Again, if you’re on your phone, you may want to rotate to landscape.

Let me know what you think!

I’d love to hear from you! And, if you think there’s an error somewhere, please reach out to me here on Substack or on Instagram (@carly.sue.bear).

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The power rankings have become a nail biter,…

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After Sara introduces Tom to the concept of a coupe, the two step up to the plate and take a swing at the penultimate episode of Top Chef Carolinas. Tom H and Sara enjoy the Tom C 20 Questions game and think it should remain a Top Chef staple, but Tom H has some questions for Sara. Starting with: How in the world did you dra…

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Look at those stares … Tom and Sara recap an episode that presented a wonderful ode to Asheville, NC., and ended with an all-time crashout. It’s time to get out our rule sheet and make a ruling on what happened. Sara shares some intel about what may have gone down and the words that were said — allegedly.

Tom and Sara try to …

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In this recap, Tom tries not to get salty about the elimination, but he gets peppered with shame anyway. Speaking of salt and pepper, Tom and Sara debate the best duo in the culinary world in an episode full of poor pairings.

Sara explains all the ins-and-outs of rabbit cooking while they both wonder who the mystery judges we…

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In my opinion, this bodes really well for Laurence’s chance. This coming week’s episode will have six chefs. While it’s certainly possible that Laurence will go home this week or next, of the chefs who won four elimination challenges (14 excluding Laurence), six have won their season.

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In one of the best episodes of the season, we got a mise en place race AND boats. Mise en place and boats. THAT’S WHAT TOP CHEF DOES.

Tom and Sara take some time to bid farewell to a beloved chef and give some flowers to a fan favorite. Tom and Sara has out the proper pronunciation of pecan, and Sara reveals a personally deva…

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Our own Tom Haberstroh is joined by Charlotte’s own Brittany Cochran who competed on Top Chef Season 23 Carolinas.

She’s the executive chef of Stagioni in Myers Park in Charlotte and the only Charlotte “hometown” cheftestant this season.

Brittany shares what it was like to be the Queen City representative and how she wanted to break stereotypes that she faced in the restaurant biz. She also reveals what it was like to hear head judge Tom Colicchio and Charlotte legend Greg Collier give her flowers on the show and what really went down on the Southern Sides episode.

For the Charlotte diners out there, Brittany also pulls back the curtain on the ghost named Blanche that still haunts her restaurant.

If you didn’t catch the interview on the pod this week, it is now up on YouTube:

You can catch Part 1 with Chef Chris Coleman here and Part 2 with Callan Buckles of Rada here.

The challenges in ACC surround different “commandments” of cooking skills. Most of the challenges involve the chefs earning points. I was curious how well the final five has done earning the most possible points.

**SPOILER WARNING FOR THE FINAL FIVE**

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After debating the crown of condiments, Tom and Sara break down the show’s first episode in Greenville, SC and explain how Last Chance Kitchen production goes down. Though they are facing each other in fantasy, they are both Team Mayo (particularly Duke’s Mayonnaise). With the LCK winner back in the competition, Tom and Sara…

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Last season, I wrote about whether we would lose a front-runner in that season’s Restaurant Wars. This is an extension of that piece in that it discusses the rank of the chefs eliminated in each season’s Restaurant Wars and adds on their NPT+. (Check out my full article on what this means). I’ll be looking at chefs’ NPT+ prior to Restaurant Wars so the results from latter parts of seasons aren’t affecting non-eliminated chefs. The rank is for all chefs in the season; if a chef who was eliminated in RW had an NPT+ worse than chefs who had already been eliminated, that is reflected in their rank.

This is your spoiler warning - what follows will spoil this season’s and all past seasons’ Restaurant Wars eliminations.

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Restaurant Wars in Season 23

Brandon had been doing well this season - I did a status check a few weeks ago, plus Kendra and I talk a lot about him on Track Your Knives. Heading into Restaurant Wars, Brandon’s NPT+ (the stat that allows comparison of a chef’s performance to all other Top Chef contestants across seasons) was tied for third, along with Jonathan and Day. An NPT+ of 183 means they were 83% better than the average chef.

Day’s and Jassi’s NPT+, because they were in less than five challenges, should be interpreted with caution.

Restaurant Wars Across Seasons

The number 1 ranked chef has been eliminated in Restaurant Wars only three times: Seasons 16, 17, and 19. We’ve lost a front runner or contender - someone who ranks 3rd or better - in 13 of 23 seasons. That’s what happened in this week’s Restaurant Wars, with Brandon tied at 3rd in his season. (If you’re looking closely at the below table, please note that I didn’t count the s’mores Quickfire in the count of number of challenges. Don’t come at me, bro.)

More than half of Top Chef seasons have seen a contender or front-runner go home. It’s kind of sad - but also feels iconic and appropriate. Given that the eliminated chef is about evenly split between roles (executive chef, line cook, and front of house), I hope that chefs in future seasons will feel more comfortable taking the risk and volunteering to be executive chef.

Kendra is still ahead of Carly, but Carly’s coming for her! W…

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A loaded recap episode this week tackles all the happenings on Top Chef’s iconic Restaurant Wars episode with a special boots-on-the-ground report from Tom, who attended as a takeout guest.

Yes, that’s him:

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