The risotto curse: is it real?

On this week’s podcast, I talked with Tom and Eric about the risotto curse and whether it was a real thing. And yes, it really is a real thing.

There are three categories of outcomes of a chef’s dish: at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom. You would expect that roughly one third of dishes would fall into each category. I validated this across all seasons and all dishes, and 32% of all dishes were at the bottom of the dishes in a challenge. So that expectation holds.

So keeping in mind that 32% of all dishes are at the bottom…53% of all risotto dishes were at the bottom. This relationship between all dishes and risotto dishes and the distribution of dishes at the bottom is statistically significant.

Most of the times that chefs made risotto were in an individual elimination challenge, and more than half of the dishes that were made in those challenges were at the bottom of the dishes. The proportion was even higher for team elimination challenges. That surprised me, since I would think that in a team challenge, chefs would have more time to focus on their dish and ask for help when they need it.

Across all dishes, challenges, and seasons, 23% of dishes were eliminated. In the 26 elimination challenges, nine risottos were eliminated. That’s 35%!

I have complete dish data on seasons 1 through 3, 16, and 20 through 22, and I scraped Wikipedia for the winning and eliminated dishes for all seasons. I also found risotto dishes on episodes of seasons 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15. So, this definitely isn’t the final analysis, but it’s hopefully a large proportion of the risotto dishes. I’ve included the risotto-adjacent dishes because when judges are told something is a risotto, they expect a risotto - even if it’s not a traditional risotto.

I’m looking forward to future analyses, including comparisons across dish types! We’re getting close to being able to go even deeper into the data…thanks for being on this journey with me!