Top Chef Chases Its First Emmy in 16 Years — With 57 Nominations Behind It
Bravo's Top Chef has collected 57 Emmy nominations across 23 seasons. It last won in 2010, taking the top prize for best reality competition program. Sixteen years later, the show is back in the same category — along with bids for best reality host, best casting, and best directing for a reality series — at the upcoming Emmy Awards (The Hollywood Reporter).
Head judge Tom Colicchio, a James Beard Foundation medal winner who runs 12 restaurants, told The Hollywood Reporter that Top Chef deserves to win because it is harder to produce than the other shows it competes against. The reason, he said, is logistics: the series shoots on location rather than on a studio lot, which means building full kitchens from scratch and moving a crew of roughly 150 people each season (The Hollywood Reporter).
Fellow judge Gail Simmons made a similar case, pointing to the specific challenges of filming cooking television outdoors. Every season lands in a different place, she told THR, and the show deals with perishables, knives, and fire — variables most reality competition nominees never face (The Hollywood Reporter).
Season 23 filmed in North Carolina and Greenville, South Carolina. Its winner, Rhoda Magbitang, received a dinner at the James Beard House in New York as part of her prize package. The season also saw a contestant leave mid-competition for medical reasons after aggravating an injury (The Hollywood Reporter).
Hosting the show in her third season is Kristen Kish, herself a past Top Chef winner. She is nominated for best reality host. Kish told THR that her growing comfort in the role is like a muscle being exercised — a process visible on screen, as when she comforted contestant Nana Araba, who grew frustrated and emotional after failing to plate all the elements of her dish (The Hollywood Reporter).
Colicchio also noted that the culinary industry itself has become less cutthroat than it used to be — a shift reflected in the temperament of the competition and the people who come through it (The Hollywood Reporter).
For a show that has been nominated 57 times, the gap between its last win and now is striking. Whether the Emmys' voters agree that building a kitchen in a new city every season, with a crew of 150, sets Top Chef apart from its category rivals is a question the ceremony will answer.
