"top chef masters recap" news and stories

This week, the knives came out -- or at least a heavily edited sense of cutthroat competitiveness. Anyone who knows and loves Top Chef Masters will admit it's relatively low on intra-chef tension, what with all the humility and sharing and mentorly learning going on.

But in this, the second pass at weeding out 22 accomplished chefs for the title of Ultra Pro Haute Cuisine Jedi Master (we're paraphrasing here), there was a whole lot of drama. Blood! Sweat! Tears! Insincere hugs! This is why we pay for basic cable, folks. Certainly it's not for the incessant Stoli vodka and Lexus product placements.

Funny that in the most inane of situations -- in this case, a soul-food birthday party for former ER stalwart Mekhi Phifer -- the most traumatizing things can happen. Maybe it was the alchemy of the personalities. Maybe it was a clash of culinary cultures. In any event, we ended the episode with as many Stoli martinis as they did, both shaken and stirred.

Oh, this is going to be fun. We can tell right now. Last year, the folks at Bravo decided to get chocolate in our peanut butter, as it were, by taking our favorite chef-competition show and mixing in not a bunch of brash young upstarts, but a handful of egotistical, brilliant and/or eccentric James Beard-honored, Michelin-star granted, five-star-chefs.

If they weren't quite "putting their reputations on the line," as host Kelly Choi so dramatically put it, they were at least exposing themselves to the demands of cooking without their sous chefs, their own signature line of cookwear and a Today Show audience full of doting guests (Michael Chiarello, we're looking at you). And they were doing it all for a good cause (other than driving more people into their fine-dining establishments during a recession, of course).

This year, they've thinned the ranks of the cheftestants from 24 to 22, asked back some of the first season's most colorful characters and shook up the elimination process (what, a team challenge in episode 1?!). But the formula remains the same: Put a bunch of headstrong masters of very diverse cuisines in a room, give them unusual little tasks like they're schoolchildren, and let the egos fly.

Since the show is divvying them out six at a time, we have a few weeks to get acquainted with all of them; that is, unless they're summarily rejected as if they were community college grads looking for line-cook gigs.

Michael Chiarello. Photo: Bravo TV.

At this late stage in the season, there's a few things about "Top Chef Masters" we've come to expect. Foremost among them: When host Kelly Choi breaks out her best grade-school instructional voice, we know we're in for something special.

Last night was no exception. When she offered an oh-so-helpful etymology primer -- "The word 'chef,' as you know, means 'chief'!" -- you could practically see the four remaining pros shudder in their aprons.

Yup, after a season of going it solo, the polished pros would direct a crew of underlings for the penultimate elimination challenge. That the challenge itself was one of the vaguest and least interesting of the season -- cook a buffet for 200 "Hollywood insiders" -- didn't matter, especially considering that the pool of sous-chefs they had to choose from were some of the most memorable: the snottiest, cockiest young turks of "Top Chefs" past.

Spike Mendelsohn, Ilan Hall, Richard Blais, Dale Talde -- they all stood there like kids waiting to be picked for dodgeball.