How does Season 23's final four compare to other seasons' final four?

Jun 17, 2026

∙ Paid

How’d you all do this week without Top Chef on Monday? I have to say, 100 Cooks is not filling the void, as much as I love Alex Guarnaschelli and Terry Crews.

I talked about this season’s final four NPT+ on Track Your Knives. The final three, especially, were quite impressive.

NPT+ takes a chef’s not-bottom percentage (NBP) plus top-or-win percentage (TOW) and normalizes it across all Top Chef seasons. A NPT+ of 100 is the Top Chef average; 150 is 50% better than the Top Chef average.

(If you haven’t yet, head over to Top Chef Reference to play around with the data yourself!)

Top Chef Reference is fun to play with, but I wanted to go a bit deeper than what is on there and look at the final fours as a group.

The final four in Season 23 had the 4th highest average % of being on the top* of elimination challenges and the 3rd highest average % of being on the top* of quickfire challenges across all seasons’ final fours. Scatterplot where each season is a circle, the x axis is the average % on top of elimination challenges, and the y axis is the average % on top of quickfire challenges of the final four chefs.

Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Pack Your Knives.

Or purchase a paid subscription.