Beginner's luck? The truth about the first Elimination Challenge in Top Chef

Mar 13, 2025

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We’re hours away from a new season of Top Chef! The 15 contestants seem amazing, and I can’t wait to start watching the season. We’ve got a lot of great stuff coming your way, but I’m going to start off this season by highlighting the winners of the first elimination challenges of each season and seeing what we can learn from the past.

Most of the elimination challenges were individual, and were what I’d classify as a “normal” Elimination challenge. Moving forward, unless otherwise noted, elimination challenges include sudden death quickfires and quickfire eliminations as well.

ALT: First elimination challenges in Top Chef seasons: Number by type. Two seasons had two elimination challenges in the first episode: Season 5 New York (Quickfire Elimination and Elimination) and Season 12 Boston (Sudden Death Quickfire and Elimination). Grouped bar chart of the number of times each type of challenge was an individual challenge vs a team challenge. Elimination challenges were individual challenges 14 times and team challenges 6 times. Quickfire eliminations only happened once, as an individual challenge. There was 1 individual sudden death quickfire challenge and one team one. All the data here are for the first elimination challenges of the seasons.

Beginner's luck? The truth about the first Elimination Challenge in Top Chef

What history has shown us

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