This post was submitted by TNG contributor, Andrew Woods.

Andrew Woods is a 26 year-old political consultant and food fanatic from Charleston, SC. He is an openly gay man with Southern manners and too many pairs of khaki pants. He moved to Washington in 2005 and lives on Capitol Hill with his long-term partner, Mark and their two black pugs. He’ll do almost anything for good sushi. He runs an independent food blog at http://www.goodtastedc.com where you can find more recipes and commentary.

Ten years ago, most cooking shows were strictly instructional, along the lines of the Julia Child model. You would learn how to make the perfect holiday roast from a charming celebrity chef or super homemaker. Along comes Bravo. I’ll avoid a history lesson on how Bravo developed, struggled, and found its stride with shows like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and other amusing brain candy. Instructional cooking shows aren’t for everyone, but the foodie movement produced an interest in celebrity chefs and excellent food. Enter Top Chef.

One of the great things about Top Chef is that the show is taped in a different city each season, highlighting lots of well-known (and lesser-known) local chefs and restaurants. They also give a crop of young chefs (some are just young at heart) an opportunity to show their stuff, producing impressive food for a panel of judges who dramatically declare winners and losers. The show has stayed pretty true to its format — with a “Real World” style getting-to-know-you meeting at the house, then off to the kitchen for the real fun.

This season, the producers decided that the emerging fine food culture of Washington, D.C,. coupled with the renewed interest in the hope and change themes of Barack Obama’s young presidency qualified D.C. for a turn as Top Chef host city. What struck my friends and me most about the first episode, which aired on June 16, was that the season should be called “Top Chef Washington.” To most Washingtonians, D.C. denotes the local culture — our many parks, artistic points, of interest, and ever-changing neighborhoods. All I got out of the first season is typical Washington fanfare — complete with a fake Oval Office for photo shoots. The first challenge, called a “quickfire,” takes place on the roof of the Newseum, complete with the Canadian embassy and US Capitol in the background. Fine. It’s a focal point in the city, but not especially original. After all, the people who work in the building with the big white dome are about as popular as swine flu.

The quickfire challenge was one of my favorites — the mise en place. It requires the chefs to do preparatory tasks for cooking such as peeling and dicing potatoes, breaking down chickens, chopping vegetables, etc … The fastest chefs were allowed to move on in various rounds, concluding in a four-chef cook off. The winner of that cook off would have an advantage (and usually immunity from elimination) in the elimination round. Two chefs stand out, Angelo, a good-looking, charismatic chef with an amazing culinary resume, and Kenny, a passionate African American chef with near-perfect technique and his own business. Angelo edges Kenny and a few others for a dramatic $20,000 dollar prize. He’s a tad cocky, but stylish so I can’t help but like him. He stands out in a good way, but the producers will certainly look forward to opportunities to take him down a notch.

On to the elimination challenge: The four chefs in the cook off each pick teams that strategically are comprised of chefs they believe will be easiest to defeat. It’s awkward to be picked early, as those chefs know that their competitors don’t take them very seriously. Think the opposite of getting picked last for dodge ball in middle school PE. They’re asked to create dishes for a catered event at the Andrew Mellon auditorium kicking off the Cherry Blossom Festival that represents their hometowns. Bravo calls this the House of Chef-resentatives. Gag me. Some towns have more obvious food cultures than others, but a lot of the food looked really interesting. Interesting means different things to different people. Most of the food was pretty, but some of it was disastrous. My favorite meltdown was Jacqueline, who represented the Hudson Valley of New York with two low-fat, grainy liver mousses that made Chef Eric Ripert sneer very Frenchly. I joined him in his sneer at home. Pate is usually about 20 to 30 percent fat and she thought it would be cute to “lighten it.” When called on her foul smashed organs, she claimed ignorance. She said she didn’t have her recipes, and despite making the dish “hundreds of times,” hasn’t memorized how to concoct it. Fortunately she wasn’t in the Royal Acadamie de Cuisine in Louis XIV’s France. She’d likely be guillotined.

In a thoroughly unsurprising move, the judges crowned Angelo the victor yet again for a superior looking slice of arctic char sashimi with smoked bacon foam. Frankly, I think the only thing that could possibly make a foam forgivable is that it tastes like bacon. Otherwise, I’d blow the frothy nonsense off my plate. His runners up were mostly his partners from the quickfire win, Kenny, Alex, and Kevin. In a truly shocking move, Jacqueline survived the elimination because of an even less pleasant creation and an even less pleasant chef. Enter John Somerville. He has gray dreadlocks down his back. He wears a bandana that resembles a hipster hijab. It was not until he spoke that I was actually certain of his gender. A very strange man indeed. I am not disappointed that we won’t be seeing him again, but am pleased that the standards of the show were such that his pre-made pastry dough didn’t make the cut. He created a maple-mousse napoleon with macadamia nut and vanilla sauce. It looked like someone had drizzled magic shell caramel sauce on a soggy biscuit smeared with brown mayonnaise. Pack your knives and go.

The show was entertaining, but nothing to write home about. As in previous seasons, the real “top chefs” and “bottom chefs” (minds out of the gutter, please) are pretty obvious already and the rest fall somewhere in the middle. The next 12 weeks or so will be an adventure in trimming the fat until Angelo and Kenny battle it out for the top prize. In the mean time, I’m looking forward to seeing some local hot-spots featured on Bravo so we can cheer and invent a new drinking game each week. The show’s worth watching. Just remember it’s more of a producer-conceived formula than genuine food competition.

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