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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I know there’s been spoilers floating around Instagram for what happens in terms of whether there’s an 8th chef, but I won’t be spoiling it here. There have been two seasons where an uneven number of chefs competed:

• Season 10 (Seattle): the winners of the previous Elimination challenge got to choose their teams. However, they had to choose their teams between their Elimination challenge win and when a fellow chef would be eliminated. Once they chose their teams, Padma asked the chefs on the bottom of the challenge to come to Judges’ Table where one of them was asked to pack their knives and go.

• Season 21 (Wisconsin): the chefs self-selected their teams, though the winner of the previous Elimination challenge got to wait for the two teams to be decided and then she could choose which team to join.

Speaking of self-selection - this season was only the second time that Top Chef has had the chefs sort themselves into teams. I felt the awkwardness in the room as the chefs figured it out on the spot. There’s almost always some awkwardness as teams get chosen. I wish I had the data on how many seasons have someone mentioning middle school kickball! Oh well, there’s always next year.

There is a tie for the most common way for teams to be chosen: Quickfire winners become team captains who choose the rest of the team and a knife draw (random selection) for who will become team captains. Each of these have happened in seven seasons. Four seasons have had Restaurant Wars teams chosen entirely at random (with a knife draw or in one case, a coin flip). As already discussed, two seasons have used self-selection. An additional two seasons have used the winners of the previous Elimination challenge as team captains, where the Elimination challenge was to create a restaurant concept with a dish that represents it.

There was one time when the teams were chosen by gender (Season 9, Texas), and I don’t understand why. Production couldn’t have planned for an even number of two genders to be in the competition. Part of me thinks that they wanted to ensure the continued drama with Beverly and Sarah. In any case, I hope that they don’t do this again.

If you haven’t yet submitted your power rankings for tonight’s upcoming episode, don’t forget to do so at find-topchef.com. I’m super curious if people will be ranking the chefs from each team together or if they’ll be interspersing chefs to hedge their bets. Kendra and I will look into it in the upcoming Track Your Knives episode (listen to last week’s here).

Our very own Tom Haberstroh got to eat at Restaurant Wars, so be sure to listen to the regular Pack Your Knives recap episode when it comes out!

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Sieger and Anthony: congrats on being the 48th and 49th chefs to win an episode! Both of these chefs won the episode in a rare situation, by winning a team Quickfire challenge and then an individual Elimination challenge. There’s only been one other chef who has done this particular combination: Sara Hauman in Season 18 (Portland).

Team Quickfires are pretty rare; only about 11% of Quickfires have been team challenges. There are four chefs who won the team Quickfire challenge and the team elimination challenge in a single episode:

• Sara Mair, Season 3 (Miami)

• Stephanie Izard, Season 4 (Chicago)

• Carlos Gaytan, Season 11 (New Orleans)

• Travis Masar, Season 11 (New Orleans)

The most common way to win an episode was to have an individual win for both the Quickfire and Elimination challenges (32 times), followed by an individual Quickfire win with a team Elimination win (11 times).

Some other fun facts about winning an episode:

• Brooke Williamson is the only chef to do it more than one season - and she did it twice in her first season (Season 10, Seattle)

• Six chefs other than Brooke have won more than one episode in a season:

  • Stefan Richter, Season 5 (New York) - 3 episodes

  • Angelo Sosa, Season 7 (DC) - 2 episodes

  • Ed Cotton, Season 7 (DC) - 2 episodes

  • Tiffany Derry, Season 7 (DC) - 2 episodes

  • Gregory Gourdet, Season 12 (Boston) - 3 episodes

  • Buddha Lo, Season 20 (World All Stars) - 2 episodes

Tom and Sara get caught up in the web of mysteries following the events of Episode 7 and Last Chance Kitchen. With Restaurant Wars around the corner and some uncertainty floating in the air, there are a lot of questions left unanswered. Tom and Sara try to make sense of it all.

Step aside Top Chef and Top Scallop. Welcome to …

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I decided to do a quick look into when chefs haven’t been required to do desserts. Yes, I know that tonight, the chefs are required to do it - but stick with me :)

From this, it seems like making desserts when not required is a pretty risky move - twice as many dishes were eliminated as won elimination challenges. But the average placement of those who made desserts when they didn’t have to was really good (5.5 average; 5 median). I think this bodes well for Brandon and Duyen, each of whom have made a dessert for an elimination challenge prior to tonight’s episode and were in the top group of chefs for the challenge.

I hope you’ve got something tasty to snack on while you watch tonight’s episode! And if you haven’t yet, become a subscriber here to get insights on trends in Top Chef!

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An easy way to see if there is a front runner is to look at the percent of challenges that chefs have won. (I’m not sure why Melissa King’s 41% win rate is seared into my brain from Season 17!)

Laurence is currently leading the chefs with a 36.4% win rate. Jennifer’s is slightly inflated because instead of 11 challenges competed in, she’s only competed in 9; she’s won two Quickfires. Both Rhoda and Sieger have relatively high win rates (the same as Jennifer and Anthony), and are the only eliminated chefs to have won any challenge.

But the win rate doesn’t feel like the complete picture. Duyen hasn’t yet won a challenge, but I feel like she’s a strong competitor. This is where some of my baseball-derived stats come into play.

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As always, enter your scores each week before the episode airs on find-topchef.com and become a subsc…

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The highly-anticipated Carolina barbecue episode is here. And we have thoughts.

Sara shares her barbecue experiences in food competition venues and Tom gives his scouting report on the various bbq joints (did you know you can get burnt ends at the Charlotte airport?).

Was this the best episode to date? Tom thinks so. Why is i…

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On this shocking episode, Team Tom survives the US Whitewater Center rapids while Team Sara capsizes into the rough waters. Tom and Sara break down what went wrong for the elminated chef, and take stock in the points standings. Has a new favorite emerged?

Find out what Sara thinks is “f—ed up” in this episode (and Tom can’t d…

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08:50 Bonus question answer

10:35 Our Power Rankings

12:30 Power Rankings analysis

27:15 Our thoughts on next week

29:05 Fantasy League analysis

36:05 Discussion of Last Chance Kitchen

37:54 Closing and announcement of week 5’s bonus question

Tom got to eat the food! On this episode, Tom shares his experience of eating the Top Chef “Southern Sides” elimination challenge and why the edit was so different than his own meal.

With Tristan Epps-Long back on the show, Sara and Tom run through the the surprising underdog story of the quickfire. Sara tells Tom Colicch…

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• What additional nuances would I add to my analysis of winners of the first two elimination challenges?

• Have we ever seen this many chefs in the bottom of an elimination challenge before?

• And Sara posed a question to me on the S23 episode 3 podcast about if there had been any chef who won an Elimination challenge with a trio, besides the one we just saw happen.

I’ll dig into one of these questions here - but you’ll need to listen to hear the rest! (Spotify and Apple) Be sure to follow me and Pack Your Knives on Instagram to get additional visual content.

Winning a challenge with a trio or duo

The question stems from the commonly accepted opinion that if a chef creates a duo or trio, they’re giving the judges food to compare against and it ends up hurting the chef more than helping.

I’m still in the process of gathering data, but in the spirit of not letting perfect be the enemy of good enough, here you go! Analyst Carly, at your service!

Skip to the end if you want methodological details (or read my post from last year). WARNING: There are spoilers through episode 3. Below graphic was updated after publishing to update Day’s overall edit from under-shown to over-shown.

What I’m seeing:

So far, only five chefs are over-shown: Nana, Laurence, Jennifer, Brittany, and Day. Let’s break it down:

• I think Nana had a lot of confessionals because of how she struggled in each elimination challenge. A far-out theory is that she’s going to win Last Chance Kitchen, and they want to make sure we know her well since she’d be missing a lot of episodes of the main competition.

• Jennifer had a lot in the first episode and the third, in my mind to a) set up the fact that she and Justin are a couple, and b) because of her shoulder injury affecting her cooking.

• Brittany has had a lot of confessionals in the two episodes where she was in the bottom of the elimination challenge - that’s also true of Justin, but because we’re only three episodes into the season, the fact that Brittany has had one more confessional than he had is the tipping point into being over-shown.

• Day was the first chef eliminated. My guess is that they needed to both show her personal story as well as her episodic journey.

• And Laurence? While he’s now leading the Fantasy League in number of points, Rhoda had been in the lead for the previous two episodes. I’m not yet sure what has led him to have one of the highest numbers of confessionals. It could be that he’s a great narrator - or maybe that he’s going to be a main character this season.

Given how strong Rhoda and Anthony’s seasons have been thus far, I was surprised that they have so few confessionals. This is definitely something that I’ll be keeping my eye on.

How are S23 chefs being edited compared to past winners? And what about potential biases in the edit?

Comparison to winners

I don’t yet have confessional data for all seasons, but I can compare these chefs to the winners of nine past seasons.

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With Supperland hosting Top Chef this week, Tom and Sara took their talents to Supperland in Charlotte to recap the episode.

Liver mush. An incomplete dish. Flaccid pork.

Live in person, Tom and Sara together break down the episode with the help of Supperland’s Jamie Brown, w…

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If you’re just finding us, head over to find-topchef.com to submit your power rankings and play along, and subscribe here at Pack Your Knives for deeper weekly insights.

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This week did not disappoint! We’ve got 139 power rankings submitted, Rhoda making Top Chef history, and 86 leagues with 282 fantasy teams to dig into. Let’s get into it. If you’re a visual person, check out my post on Instagram.

Episode outline

00:00 Hello and welcome!

04:55 First episode, first impressions

08:18 Carly and Kendra’s power rankings

11:00 Orientation to Power Ranking results

11:42 Shout-outs to listeners/players doing well!

13:50 Power Rankings analysis

27:26 Thoughts on Power Rankings going into episode 2

35:35 Reminder to submit rankings and join Fantasy Leagues