Bringing back memories of kickball
Choosing teams for Restaurant Wars is almost always an awkward affair
Tonight is the halfway point of Top Chef Season 23 and has the classic Restaurant Wars challenge. Well, not exactly a classic; this time, they’ll have to do take-out orders! Last week’s episode ended with a self-selection of teams and a cliffhanger on who, if anyone, will be the 8th chef competing in Restaurant Wars.
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!