🐐 PYK's Top Chef GOAT Leaderboard

Who are some of the most impressive Top Chefs?

As a viewer, we can’t taste the food we see on Top Chef. It’s really quite sad. But some might say that I eat data for breakfast, so figuring out who has the most tasty data is a close approximation.

After 21 seasons, we have a lot of data to bite into. This is just a taste of it, to see whose statistics begin to satiate my appetite.

My Definition of GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)

When I think about who could be considered the greatest, I think of a few things: consistency, duration, and star factor. To be considered a GOAT, a chef must have competed in more than three elimination challenges and meet at least one of these other criteria:

• Consistency: An overall win rate of .260 or greater or

• Duration: At the top of elimination challenges seven or more times or

• Star factor: Won two or more episodes (won both the quickfire and elimination challenges in one season).

I use a rate in order to better compare chefs with differing numbers of challenges participated in. The rate chosen (.260) is between the 93rd and 94th percentiles. Because the overall win rate is about wins, I wanted to look more broadly at high performance, which is why I considered being at the top of elimination challenges many times a sign of a GOAT. And then, the star factor: it’s pretty impressive to win both the quickfire and elimination challenge in a single round … and to do it more than once? 🤩

Below this table, I share my takeaways (and no, I don’t mean my leftover food).

(Scroll to the right to see all statistics for chefs that meet these criteria. Click on headers to sort!)