You’ve already seen my thoughts on the debut episode of Top Chef D.C. Let’s find out what others had to say about Tom and Padma’s trip to the District.
- Joe Yonan at WaPo notes that the reality TV program has an unusual sense of “reality.”
- TV Guide loved the debut and called the D.C. episode “capital entertainment.” Of course it did.
- Time‘s James Poniewozik submits that “there is no such thing as ‘deconstructed borscht’: that, my friend, is just a freaking beet.”
- Washingtonian guest blogger (and Y&H’s dear friend) Carol Blymire likes Toby Young‘s replacement at the judges’ table: “He’s not some food critic searching for soundbites. He’s Eric Freakin’ Ripert.”
- Slashfood piles up the cliches in describing D.C. A “three-martini lobbyist lunch?” What is this, the Kennedy Administration? And I keep looking for those Ripert restaurants aside from the Westend Bistro.
- Gawker points out that the “first episode of Top Chef is always difficult to relate to emotionally.” Joshua David Stein serves up the absolute best line on the debut when he writes, “In the Quickfire, Tom Colicchio showed a complete mastery of the way things work in our nation’s capital by offering the contestants 20K in cash on a silver platter, a trick he learned from Jack Abramoff.”
- Eater has hired comedian Max Silvestri whomocks D.C.’s ideas of cool: “There was a New York Times Magazine article recently about the Obama White House’s young staffers and how they were playing by their own rules and making D.C. cool again. No longer Hollywood for Ugly People! But then the article went on to describe what their “cool” was and frankly it sounded pretty embarrassing. Lots of beer pong and sweatpants and awkward white people trying to dance to Jay-Z.”
- WaPo‘s Lisa de Moraes writes that “America didn’t have much of an appetite for the debut,” noting that the program pulled in only 1.8 million viewers, the smallest opening audience since the first edition.
Photo courtesy of Top Chef