Food’s just part of ‘Top Chef’ drama

Published 2:46 pm Monday, August 24, 2009

HOLLYWOOD — It’s a funny thing about food, which does its job only when it’s in your mouth, that we derive so much pleasure from watching it on television. “That looks good,” we say. But we don’t really know. We could be wrong.

Of course, there is more to most shows about food than the food itself. There is talking about food, which helps us imagine the taste of what we aren’t tasting. And there is, in its preparation, the display of expertise that helps us believe we might get a handle on our own life, in or out of the kitchen.

On “Top Chef,” which ladles “Iron Chef” over “Project Runway,” the food is part of a larger drama that leads to a big prize. (And this year, little prizes along the way.) There is sweat, there are tears, not all of them from chopping onions, and once in a great while there is blood.

And there are judges — chef Tom Colicchio, writer Gail Simmons, journalist Toby Young and host Padma Lakshmi, along with food-world celebrity guests — to tell you whether the dishes the contestants create, in always astonishing short order, are any good.

“Top Chef: Las Vegas,” which airs on Wednesday nights on Bravo, is the sixth edition of the series since it premiered in 2006. Lakshmi has called it “highbrow and serious,” and, if only compared with most reality shows, it certainly is.

The personal circus, while given much play, remains secondary to the cooking contest.

There are two brothers of distinctly different temperament. There is a man who came to the United States on a boat from Haiti; it was cooking that kept him from being thrown overboard, he mentions a couple times. There is a woman with leukemia.

There is, inevitably, a proud loudmouth. There are too many of them at first — 17 to start, and only one eliminated at the hour’s end — to get more than a glancing sense of all but the strongest personalities, or their cooking styles, but it doesn’t take long to spot the contenders.

Far more relaxed is the show “What Would Brian Boitano Make?,” Sundays on Food Network and starring the Olympic champion figure skater as friendly cook. Its title riffs on a song from “South Park: Bigger, Longer &Uncut” — “What Would Brian Boitano Do?,” a snatch of which serves as the theme: “He’d make a plan and follow through / That’s what Brian Boitano’d do.” And that is what he does.

It is an amiable bit of silliness, framed a little like a sitcom or a children’s show.

But he is graceful in the kitchen — it is his own San Francisco kitchen — which is as much the point of these shows as the food. His dishes are colorful and not forbidding: crab and avocado crostini, polenta with spicy sausage, and cappuccino panna cotta, which sounds pretty good right now. I can almost taste it.