Your New Top Chef Season 23 Explainer... and Twiiiins
Brother against brother! Husband against wife! Mass hysteria!
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Folks, it’s nearly Top Chef time. Can you believe that this show has been going for 20 damned years? Can you believe I’ve been doing Chef Power Rankings for at least the last 10? Oh how time flies when you’re ridiculing subpar beurres monté through a screen. I’m not wasting my life. Don’t let them put in the newspapers that I said I was wasting my life.
Anyway, the cast list and official show announcement went out this past week. While I’m not going to share the entire thing (probably we don’t need to know every single guest judge, I prefer to be surprised, like that time we all learned that Zooey Deschanel is a gluten-free vegan who is allergy to soy), there are a couple doozies of twists that I thought worth highlighting.
When does it start?
March 9, on Bravo, Peacock, YouTube, and “additional platforms.” Every episode will be “supersized” to 75 minutes, which is too long for a reality competition show if you ask me.
Where is it set?
In the beautiful Carolinas! The sweet Carolinas, as I call them while being dragged away from my local bar and grill. Specifically, the season will be “centered in the emerging and eclectic culinary hub of Charlotte, N.C., with several episodes in Greenville, S.C.”
Maybe next year, Myrtle Beach!
What kind of shit will they do?
Perusing the list, I’m seeing NASCAR, sweet potatoes, “a progressively spicier menu featuring some of the world’s hottest peppers” (aka a Hot Ones challenge), whole hog BBQ (RIP, your mom), dehydrated ingredients, fishing, a swamp rabbit trail, Appalachian ingredients, the “Try Guys,” Fortune Feimster and some random other actors. Plus “a regal celebration in honor of Queen Charlotte's birthday.”
To paraphrase Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet: the monarchy? Fuck that shit!
Will there be twists? What of Last Chance Kitchen???
This season, Top Chef’s after show, Last Chance Kitchen, the release notes, will begin with the third eliminated chef. That means the first two eliminated chefs are out-out, with no chance to return and no ambiguity about who is or isn’t allowed to compete on Last Chance Kitchen (presumably to avoid a repeat of the David Murphy situation from 2024).
Furthermore, only one competitor will be returning to the show via Last Chance Kitchen. That seems nice and straightforward, though perhaps we’ll miss some the element of surprise. I do occasionally enjoy that the show involves the competitors dancing at the pleasure of its capricious king Tom Colicchio. Honor us with your various filets, knave! Perhaps we shall reward you with our favor. Or perhaps, the blade.
Who are the competitors?
- Sieger Bayer – Chicago, IL
- Jassi Bindra – Houston, TX
- Sherry Cardoso – Brooklyn, NY
- Brittany Cochran – Charlotte, NC
- Oscar Diaz – Durham, NC
- Brandon Dearden – Hamilton, MT
- Jonathan Dearden – Alexandria, VA
- Duyen Ha – Los Angeles, CA
- Jennifer Lee Jackson – Suttons Bay, MI/Detroit, MI
- Anthony Jones – Alexandria, VA
- Day Anaїs Joseph – Atlanta, GA
- Laurence Louie – Quincy, MA
- Rhoda Magbitang – Kailua-Kona, HI
- Justin Tootla – Suttons Bay, MI/Detroit, MI
- Nana Araba Wilmot – Cherry Hill, NJ
Wow, that’s only one memorable Zoomer name! (Sieger Bayer! Seeger Bear! The ol’ Silver Bullet himself!) What else should we know??
Well, it seems worth noting that two of the competitors are married. To each other!
That’s right, Justin Tootla, an Indian-American guy who seems to favor a sort of neckerchief/ascot as his personal style trademark, is married to fellow Jennifer Lee Jackson, who apparently has not opted to go by “Jennifer Lee Jackson-Tootla,” despite how boss that would’ve been (JLJT!).
Locally, the pair is known for their work at Voyager in Ferndale and their own acclaimed restaurant Bunny Bunny in Detroit. They ran the kitchen at Voyager in 2018 when it was named in Food & Wine’s top 10 list of restaurants of the year. Described as “life partners,” Jackson and Tootla met at Culinary Institute of America and have both worked for major restaurants in New York City. [Detroit News]
Presumably neither of them are there to make friends, but in any case, the married-couple-competing-against-each-other angle seems to be unprecedented in the show’s history.
HOWEVER, per this Reddit thread, season 16 competitors Brian Young and Caitlin Steininger, both married to other people when they competed, ended up marrying each other. Could other loves bloom and/or wither and die in the pressure cooker of reality cooking competition? Well, we can certainly dream.
Oh, also, two other guys are identical twins.
Brandon Dearden, who currently works in Hamilton, Montana, is the identical twin brother of Johnathan Dearden, who works in Alexandria, Virginia. Obviously the brother situation is not a first, since Michael and Bryan Voltaggio, arguably the two most famous Top Chef competitors ever, competed against each other in Top Chef season 6 (which Michael went on to win).
However, the Voltaggios were two years apart in age and easy to tell apart, since Michael was covered in tattoos and looked like an unreliable Incubus roadie, whereas Bryan looked like a bassist from a straight edge band turned agreeable middle manager. The Deardens, by contrast, are identical twins, who are both bald and have forearm tattoos. It looks like they made them turn their faces different directions in the cast photos so that the photographer could tell them apart.
Can we make one of them wear Tootla’s ascot? That would make things a lot easier.
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