Keeping on the boil

The Trafalgar Tavern, in London’s naval district of Greenwich, isn’t so much a pub on the River Thames as a pub in the River Thames. The water’s edge laps against the building’s north side, spray splashing up past the windows whenever the Thames Clipper commuter boats speed by.

Built in 1837, it’s only 61 years younger than the US, and is therefore exactly what the American television audience thinks of as a traditional, English pub. It’s also vast. On a weekend, it can feel like half the city is here for Sunday lunch. Two huge floors of sprawling bars, lounges, restaurants and rooms, which one sunny August day in 2022 is just as well because… Top Chef: World All-Stars is here.

During filming for the 20th season of Bravo’s Top Chef in London, Clive Whittingham asked Magical Elves’ Casey Kriley and NBCUniversal’s Barrie Kelly about keeping a classic format relevant.

Bravo’s long-running culinary format is now airing its 20th season, and locations are a big part of keeping the show up to date, according to Casey Kriley, co-CEO of Tinopolis-owned Magical Elves, which came up with the format when it was run by founders Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth.

“It’s a new city every season and that becomes the final cast member,” Kriley says. “What you can learn about the food scene, be it London or other unexpected places, relative to what you might perceive the food scene to be there is a big part of the viewing experience.”

“What sets Top Chef apart from other cooking shows is the casting,” Kriley adds. “We’ve also really pushed ourselves to look anywhere and everywhere for exceptional chefs. We lean heavily on the chef community to recommend people and find talent off the beaten track.

“We also adapt the show based on what we’re seeing in restaurants and over the last few years we’ve seen a move away from the traditional culinary school route of a chef rising through the ranks towards chefs leaning into their cultural history, background and heritage to inspire their dishes. That’s something we’ve pushed for in Top Chef’s evolution. It’s a mix of who you

Top Chef: World All-Stars think should be competing and who you think will bring a different culinary point of view.”

Today the chefs are being challenged to re-imagine some of the UK’s stodgier pub classics. Divided into teams of two, they sit in the riverside beer garden and take their pick from a blackboard offering shepherd’s pie, a full roast meal or school dinner staple toad-in-the-hole (which, for those unfamiliar with British grub, does not actually contain toad). For the World All Stars format, winning chefs from prior Top Chef seasons all over the world are brought together to compete and, despite a day touring the city and tasting the dishes, there are some bemused faces.

“There is a constant debate in development between the producers and Bravo about challenges we can have fun with and be more playful, but at the same time being careful not to jump the shark,” Kriley continues. “Over the last three or four seasons we’ve leaned into the idea this is the equivalent of a culinary Olympics. Instead of trying to create unnecessary drama on the show, drama can be borne out of somebody trying to achieve greatness and the roadblocks they hit in the process.”

The show itself is just getting over a considerable barrier of its own in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic. The sheer number of people and amount of equipment required to film a single episode of a show like this hits you as soon as you round the corner and approach the pub. Students from the nearby university eye the spectacle with intrigue as they pick their way through a set that has spilled out on to the pavement outside.

Part of that is a substantial Covid-19 testing station. Negative PCR results are required just to come here today, and on arrival two more instant tests are taken on site – and this is August 2022, at which point London has essentially given up on restrictions altogether.

“The first season we did after the pandemic had begun was Top Chef Portland, which was by far the most challenging we’d ever produced,” Kriley says. “My co-CEO, Jo Sharon, and I said our number one priority was people’s health and safety because it was before the vaccine. We pushed our entire team at Magical Elves to use it as first organising principal and not move forward with shooting unless 100% confident we could keep people safe. It led to other challenges around creating a bubble and confining people to one site and one hotel. I’ve never lost so much sleep over a series before or since.

“In our industry in general it elevated the budget across all networks for any show they were producing and it says a lot about Bravo and all the networks that they stepped up in terms of safety protocols. They treated it as a separate budget outside of what the normal budget would be.”

Barrie Kelly, VP of international format production at the format’s distributor NBCUniversal, adds: “Everyone was in the same situation – it didn’t matter about the show, you had to find a way. There were different rules in every country to adhere to. You just went with it and the audience understood. Sometimes with television you don’t want to reveal your production hand on screen, but with Covid everybody understood you had to.”

Despite the proliferation of culinary series and formats, Kelly says Top Chef’s focus on consistently attracting the world’s best chefs keeps it relevant and popular with buyers. “It has this reputation of the professional’s professional cooking reality show,” he says. “It means you can probably challenge the audience a little bit more than perhaps you can on something like MasterChef, which involves amateurs and is very accessible.”

Around the world, different techniques have been applied to different versions, from the French Top Chef which uses a kitchen brigade format that establishes a hierarchy in the teams, to Brazil, where they live together in a Big Brother-style house, or the Middle East, where a significant budget has been chucked at a cinematic version that included an opening stunt filmed on the roof of a hotel and chefs flown on to the set by helicopter.

Back in London, the roadblocks are proving smaller but no less troubling for the chefs. Dale MacKay (Top Chef Canada) and Phattanant ‘May’ Thongthong (Top Chef Thailand) got first pick of the dishes but are now grappling with a scotch egg that won’t crisp up. They will be in the bottom two against Top Chef Middle East’s

Ali Ghzawi and Top Chef California’s Amar Santana, who’ve committed the cardinal sin against fish and chips and made the batter soggy.

Having always wondered “doesn’t the food go cold?” when watching shows like this, my suspicion that the chefs whose food gets served nearer the end of the shoot suffer is confirmed.

My table of seasoned pub goers gets the scotch egg near the start and rate it the best dish of the day, but we’re the only people in the room who think so and it finishes last with the judges who had it as their penultimate feed. They’re right about the fish and chips though – for a Grimsby boy, Ghzawi and Santana’s attempt at one of the UK’s favourite national dishes is a crime against food. The judging panel led by Padma Lakshmi and including Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons – who today sit alongside Michelin-starred Brett Graham from another of my favourite haunts, The Harwood Arms – would, of course, protest there’s a lot more to it than that. Their deliberations are pored over from a makeshift gallery in the upstairs bar, where banks of monitors are watched intently for any mention of “the brief.”

As soon as a judge references back to what the task actually was a shout of “Brief!” goes up and the time is noted for the edit. Lakshmi is reprimanded for laughing over one such moment, and they’re asked to do it again – neither the original nor the retake makes the cut. The amount of footage shot and not used is a real eye-opener to a novice like myself.

Buddha Lo (Top Chef season 19) and Luciana Berry (Top Chef Brazil) star with a fish pie that is nothing of the sort. You can’t argue with the creativity, and it tastes delicious, but I’ve watched enough Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares to know that fresh, local ingredients cooked simply is the key to success in these things and the last thing you do is put a dozen different flavours on one plate. There’s at least that here, and I therefore confidently predict its demise. The judges love it and mark it the winner.

Clearly, just as I’m better suited to eating the food in The Trafalgar Arms than cooking it, I should also stick to writing about television rather than trying to make it.

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