Hosea on Top
After watching the finale of Top Chef on Bravo on Feb. 26, I reread a blog entry I had written Dec. 9, early in the season.
I remembered making some predictions about who would last and who would not, but I needed to refresh my memory.
Hosea totally escaped me as a possible winner. But it turns out that I was right about a couple of things.
Back then I wrote, “My hunch right away is that Ariane and Stefan will make it to the end.”
I was wrong about Ariane, who made a fatal mistake about halfway through. (Was it overcooking lamb or something?)
I was right about the arrogant Stefan making it to the end.
I also was right about him not getting the $100,000: “And if it goes like last season,” I wrote in December, “the talented and sophisticated Stefan will falter…”
I also predicted, “Fabio and Leah are the other top contenders in my book.” And those two both almost made it to the finale.
Carla was a dark horse who in the first half of the season didn’t look like she knew what she was doing. My guess is no one predicted that she would make it to the finale. It’s a shame that she showed such poor judgment in the finale, letting her sous-chef dictate half the menu. In the last five episodes or so, she had showed herself to be the one chef whose passion, soul and personality could come out in the food more than anyone else.
That leads me to Hosea, whose efforts all along have seemed fairly strong and fairly consistent. But I never got the impression that he was really wowing anyone with his food. Maybe I just missed it. Maybe it didn’t come across onscreen after editing. Or maybe he isn’t a wow kind of chef.
Speaking of a lack of wow, I think that’s what cost Stefan the Top Chef title. Early on, I thought overambition would be his downfall. As the season progressed, though, I began to see that he was long on technique but not all that ambitious. In fact, he leaned toward classic, not creative, preparations —actually not a terrible thing in a chef.
The real problem is Stefan’s food had been criticized for a lack of soul more than once. That criticism emerged in the final moments of the finale judging, too, when head judge Tom Colicchio more or less cut off any praise of Stefan with the damning words “no soul.”
