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Top Chef and Taste
Traditional Foods as Trends

By: Ryan S. Eanes

Arguably Bravo’s Top Chef has become television’s most popular reality competition 
program related to food. Despite the mainstream or lowbrow connotations that are often 
associated with reality television, Top Chef retains at least a veneer of sophistication that 
is typically associated with the gourmand—haute cuisine is the object of the game, and 
food is to be respected. However, in an episode from the most recent season, the Top 
Chef judges challenged the show’s “cheftestants” to rethink a number of food “trends,” 
despite these foods’ significant histories and arguable importance as traditional foods. 
This paper examines the paradox created by Top Chef, a mainstream television program, 
as it creates value judgments about traditional foods by reframing them as trends. The 
program’s judgments about taste and class are considered, and an examination of the 
concept of “omnivorousness” as a potential explanation for this paradox is offered.

Top Chef and Cultural Relevance

Food shows have been a part of the television landscape since the early days of 
broadcasting, with larger-than-life personalities like James Beard appearing in cooking 
segments on daytime variety shows in the 1940s, home economists and cooks on local 
programs through the 1950s, and iconic figures like Julia Child emerging in the 1960s. By 
the time the Food Network launched in the 1990s, food and cooking had long been part 
of the programming lineup for the Public Broadcasting Service, and cooking segments 
were popular on morning and late-night talk shows alike (Collins 2009). While procedural 
cooking shows had been around for decades already, it was likely the Food Network’s 
introduction of the Japanese series Iron Chef in the early 1990s that introduced the 
element of competition to cooking on TV, despite the fact that food competitions—in 
the form of harvest competitions at fairs, not to mention cook-offs—had been going on 
nationwide for many decades and were not unfamiliar to Americans (Saltzman 2014). 
For whatever reason, though, it was likely this Japanese influence—combined with the 
introduction of popular reality show competitions like Survivor and high-stakes game shows 
like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? at roughly the same time—that led food competition 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
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shows to explode in popularity. Today, the Food Network alone lists well over a dozen 
competition shows on its comprehensive program guide, including Chopped, Cutthroat 
Kitchen, Iron Chef America, and Beat Bobby Flay (Food Network 2014). However, it is the 
Bravo cable network’s Top Chef that is arguably the most popular; it has been renewed 
for twelve seasons, it has spawned several spin-offs and a line of products available for 
purchase online, and its ratings regularly top a million viewers per episode (Nededog 2014).

The structure of each episode of Top Chef follows a particular pattern. Each program 
begins with a “Quickfire” challenge, followed by a main or primary challenge. Quickfire 
challenges are generally fast-paced, with one hour or less on the clock; typically, the 
winner will receive some sort of advantage in the main challenge. More rarely, a 
competitor is eliminated for losing a Quickfire challenge. However, main challenges, which 
can last hours or even days, always result in the elimination of at least one cheftestant.

It is important to note that Top Chef actually shows a great deal of respect (indeed, 
almost reverence) for food. Everything about the show is designed to showcase food: 
the gleaming kitchen, the lovingly crafted displays of ingredients and the chefs’ white 
jackets, which symbolize cleanliness (Jackets and Toques 2010). Consider the set of Top 
Chef, a kitchen specially built for television and designed to direct focus towards food 
preparation. It is outfitted with top-of-the-line, restaurant-quality workstations, sinks, 
stoves and ranges, not to mention that it is beautifully lit, spotlessly clean, and features 
a number of decorative touches (stylized doors, particular paint colors) that evoke New 
Orleans, the location for the most recent season. As Alison Pearlman might say, this 
studio set is a true “temple of gastronomy” (2013:2)—this is a television-ready kitchen 
that was made with glamour in mind. Top Chef’s production values echo a popular 
design trend present in many restaurants today—the open, or display, kitchen. Pearlman 
explains that open kitchens allow the chefs in restaurants to perform; they also allow 
restaurant patrons to form a psychological connection with the preparation of their meals. 
However, display kitchens—including the one that the Top Chef competitors use—rarely 
reveal the full story. Restaurants use their back-of-the-house or basement kitchens to 
hide the messy, bloody, or otherwise visually unappealing grunt work that goes into 
prepping and stocking the display kitchen. The same is true of the Top Chef kitchen; 
while there are indeed plenty of shots of havoc in the kitchen alongside depictions of 
often-sloppy food prep, all of the mess and debris simply vanishes when it comes time 
to present the plate. Nothing remains of the prep or the gore that went into making it.

The editing of the program hides another type of gore—specifically, the jibes, crudeness, 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

violence, and overt sexuality that plague many other reality television programs. While 
reality TV is often guilty of flaunting “all kinds of cultural ills” (Donvan and Demchuk 
2001), Top Chef keeps personal antics to a minimum. Most cheftestants show a great deal 
of focus as they work on any given challenge; chit-chat is minimal, though the action 
is often interspersed with “confessional” cut-aways, transitional segments that allow 
them to share their true thoughts with home viewers. Virtually all of the commentary 
focuses on the food, with an occasional complaint about the challenge’s difficulty 
or the methods that other cheftestants employ. Even Padma Lakshmi’s presence as 
the show’s host is tame; with her modest attire and professional demeanor, a viewer 
could be forgiven for not knowing that she is a former model who has appeared in 
Playboy, among other publications. The food is what is sexy here; the presence of 
a successful model only enhances that theme. Indeed, when food is judged on Top 
Chef, each dish literally gets its own close-up. Every chef’s finished product is shown 
in a cut-away shot that features a slow-motion pan of the food as well as a dissolve to 
at least one detail on the plate. Each of these mini-montages includes a lower-third 
screen caption that identifies the chef that prepared the dish and includes a menu-
style description of the completed dish. In a typical Quickfire challenge, the judges 
will taste each dish and offer minimal feedback although in some cases, dishes are 
sampled with no comment at all, and in rare instances, sound effects and close-up 
of grimacing faces are added to emphasize the judges’ displeasure with a particular 
dish. These types of reactions are rare, however; more typically, the judges will 
conclude the Quickfire with praise for a range of chefs before announcing the winner.

Media scholar Raymond Williams noted that pieces of art could be analyzed to reveal 
“the communication of certain values by certain artistic means” (1998:50). When this 
sort of analysis is applied to Top Chef, it is clear that the producers are expressing 
reverence or respect for food as a value. Williams goes on to say that such an analysis 
is incomplete without consideration given to the society that produced the particular 
piece of art. Such a consideration of American culture reveals a sort of obsession with 
food—the slow food movement, for example, has never been more popular; organic foods 
are the subject of ongoing discussion; school lunches, community gardens, and local 
food pantries routinely make the news cycle; and food-related media has never been 
more available on either TV or the Internet. Top Chef has tapped into a mainstream 
cultural interest and put food—the prepared plate—atop a pedestal, transforming it 
into art. Dan-Ben Amos noted that folklore is “an artistic action… a social interaction 
via the art media” (1972:9). This suggests that Top Chef is much more than a reality 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
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competition show. It can also be seen as a folkloristic vehicle that conveys and 
amplifies a deeply valued element of American culture—namely, a passion for food.

Trend or Tradition?

In the third episode of the eleventh season of Top Chef, the cheftestants enter the 
kitchen to find out about that episode’s Quickfire challenge. Two judges are waiting for 
them: Padma Lakshmi, a former model turned recipe book author, and Emeril Lagasse, 
a well-known television chef and restaurateur but relatively recent addition to the Top 
Chef family. Dana Cowin, the editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine, joins them as the 
guest judge for the Quickfire challenge. Lakshmi describes Cowin as “the person who 
has to know it all” about the food world, and turns the floor over to her. Cowin declares 
that chefs can have “unhealthy relationships” with particular fads, and she identifies 
four “trends” that are allegedly past their prime: topping dishes with an egg, kale salad 
or chips, smoked foods, and bacon as an ingredient. The challenge is for the cheftestants 
to create dishes that will ostensibly persuade the judges “why [these trends] still have 
a place on menus.” After the cheftestants draw labeled knives from a block in order to 
reveal who will work on what trend, Lakshmi ups the ante when she reveals that one 
cheftestant will be eliminated based on his or her performance during this challenge. 
With only thirty minutes to work, the cheftestants scramble to complete the challenge.

Once time has been called and the judges have tasted all of the dishes, Cowin proclaims 
that some “succeeded in making me feel these trends should be brought back, and some 
made me feel like they should be buried.” Shirley Chung, who prepared a rice congee 
with a shirred egg on top, wins the challenge; Nina Compton’s dish, a Scotch-style quail 
egg atop confit potatoes, is also praised, as is Stephanie Cmar’s candied bacon pasta 
with flash-fried sweet potatoes. The judges then single out three dishes as less than 
desirable. First, Bret Pelaggi is criticized for topping his gazpacho soup with a kale salad, 
even after Cowin had warned the competitors to avoid making either kale salad or kale 
chips. On the other hand, Louis Maldonado’s smoked trout is panned for not being smoky 
enough, seemingly a contradiction. However, it is Aaron Cuschieri’s offering of crispy kale 
chips—fried and then dredged in a concoction made from mirin, rice vinegar, and soy 
sauce—that sends him home, as the judges indicate that the dish was too salty to eat.

The dishes created by the winning and losing chefs are worthy of further examination, 
particularly as it seems that the winning cheftestants may have simply modernized 
the traditional—in other words, the winning dishes simply highlighted the dreaded 

“trends” in a simple, appealing, and delicious way. Compton’s dish of confit potatoes 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

topped with a Scotch-style quail egg is praised by Cowin for being “simple” and for 
featuring “incredible flavor.” Likewise, Lagasse praises Chung for her preparation 
of rice congee, a dish with ancient Asian origins, calling it “homey.” Cmar’s dish, 
while perhaps the most unusual of the three, heavily featured bacon—her pasta 
was coated in bacon fat, and the dish was topped with a preparation of candied 
bacon. Indeed, Cowin says that her dish “reminded us why [bacon] became a 
trend in the first place” after admitting that she greatly enjoyed the plate.

While it is clear that all three of the top dishes were successful in embracing traditional 
ingredients and showcasing them in an appealing way, it is much less clear as to why 
two of the bottom three dishes were specifically singled out. It would seem that 
the judges correctly selected the most flawed dish as the loser; overseasoning food 
is a grievous sin in any gourmet kitchen, and even Cuschieri acknowledged that his 
fried-and-dredged kale chips were far too salty. However, the judges’ reasoning for 
selecting the remaining two losing dishes is inconsistent at best. Pelaggi’s dish, for 
example, was a bowl of gazpacho topped with a small kale salad as a garnish. The 
judges offer no feedback on his soup at all, instead complaining specifically that he 
chose to make a kale salad (this does not seem much different than complaining about 
a decorative sprig of parsley on a plate while ignoring the rest of the meal). Even 
more baffling: the third and final losing dish, Maldonado’s smoked trout, is criticized 
for not being smoky enough. The inconsistency is puzzling—the judges react poorly to 
Pelaggi’s dish simply because it attempted to approach a trend in a new way, while 
Maldonado’s plate is panned because it doesn’t sufficiently push the envelope.

In the end, the challenge could be seen as entirely artificial—nothing more than a 
construct fabricated by a cultural elite, enabled by the producers of a mainstream 
television program—particularly as the choice of “trends” is questionable at best. Two 
of the trends, kale and bacon, are simple ingredients that have been used by home 
cooks and chefs alike for centuries. Kale, for example, despite its recent spike in 
popularity among health food enthusiasts, has been cultivated for thousands of years; 
unlike Janet Jackson’s breast at the Super Bowl, it did not suddenly burst onto the 
cultural scene with no warning. Likewise, bacon has been a common foodstuff since 
at least the sixteenth century; it is popular because it is delicious, versatile, and 
relatively inexpensive. Topping foods with an egg has been going on even longer—certain 
traditional Asian preparations of rice congee (not at all dissimilar to the dish made by 
cheftestant Chung) have been topped with an egg for centuries, while on the other 
side of the globe, sausage-and-crumb-coated Scotch eggs have been common since at 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
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least the eighteenth century. The technique of smoking foods, the only non-ingredient 
trend, has been practiced ever since man learned how to control fire; it wouldn’t have 
taken long for primitive man to discover that smoke imparts flavor to meats and that it 
can be used as a preservation technique. It would seem that the only thing that these 
four “trends” have in common is a long history; otherwise, they seem to have been 
arbitrarily selected—fried foods, cheese curds, quinoa, and gluten-free preparations (or 
any other combination of four “popular” ingredients or preparations) might just as easily 
have been chosen. The choice of trends presented, along with the judges’ inconsistent 
treatment of the cheftestants’ “reimagination” of trends, raises a question: What is a 
trend, anyway, and where does the authority to decide what is “trendy” come from?

Trends vs. Taste

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2013) defines a trend as “the general course 
or prevailing tendency” of something; it also notes that trends typically denote popularity. 
Popularity requires critical mass, which makes the popular a product of mainstream 
tastes. John Storey describes popular culture as “the culture that is left over after we 
have decided what is high culture… in other words, it is a definition of popular culture 
as inferior culture” (2012:5-6). In so many words, trends, as elements of popular culture, 
are inferior phenomena to be rejected by the cultural elite. Pierre Bourdieu, in his 
seminal work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, concurs, arguing 
that education and socioeconomic status (i.e., the “habitus”) influence taste. These 
differences create stratifications between cultural elites and mainstream masses:

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, 
classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the 
distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the 
distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position the objective 
classifications is expressed or betrayed. (Bourdieu 1984:6)

Bourdieu is speaking primarily of the preference for “forms over function, of manner 
over matter” (1984:5) as an identifier of highbrow taste; indeed, he notes that

nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer 
aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even ‘common’… or the ability 
to apply the principles of a ‘pure’ aesthetic to the most everyday choices 
of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing, or decoration… (1984:5)

This passage speaks almost directly to the challenge in question from Top Chef. Dana 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

Cowin, representing a “luxury-lifestyle [sic] authority” (Food & Wine 2012), serves 
as a voice for the bourgeoisie; she, along with the other judges, all of whom are 
celebrities in their own rights, are the arbiters of which dishes are distinguished 
and those that are just “banal or even ‘common’” (Bourdieu 1984:5). This rejection 
of the common—the popular—is precisely what Cowin, as an ambassador for the 
cultural cognoscenti, is doing when she states that certain food trends (more 
accurately described as popular methods of preparing and serving food, particularly 
in the restaurant environment) “should be buried.” This is exactly the sort of 
rejection of the mainstream that Bourdieu anticipates from cultural elites:

The denial of lower, course, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—
enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies 
an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with 
the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished 
pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural 
consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to 
fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences (1984:7).

By identifying and disparaging food trends, Cowin cements her position as a 
cultural elite; she and the judges further assert their authority as cultural elites 
by judging the value of the dishes prepared by the cheftestants, despite the fact 
that Cowin ultimately praises dishes that do the best job of highlighting the “trendy” 
ingredient or technique in question. In a certain respect, this makes Top Chef not 
so dissimilar from other display events like festivals and fairs that “dramatize and 
reinforce the existing social structure [while] they also insist often enough that 
such structure be ignored, or inverted, or flatly denied” (Abrahams 1981:304).

It is Cowin’s praise for the elevation of trends that demonstrates a certain paradox. 
While Cowin is indeed openly disparaging trends, she is simultaneously asserting 
herself and her fellow judges as trendsetters by challenging the cheftestants to 
elevate the common to a new level. While trendsetters need not necessarily be 
cultural elites, it certainly can’t hurt; Tadashi Suzuki and Joel Best note that 

“trendsetting requires resources—particularly leisure time to devote to [a given 
passion], disposable income, and [access to] communication networks” (2003:61). By 
way of example, consider Zygmunt Bauman’s examination of British “actor, wit, and 
raconteur” (2010:327) Stephen Fry as an elite who is also an undisputed trendsetter:

Stephen Fry is known to be a trend-setter, but he is also a most reliable 
spokesman for (and walking embodiment of) the trends set; he may be 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
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trusted to speak not just in his own name, but in the name of hundreds of 
thousands of card-carrying and millions of aspiring members of the ‘cultural 
elite’—people who know the difference between comme il faut and comme 
il ne faut pas, and are first to note the moment when that difference 
becomes different from what it used a moment earlier to be. (2010:328)

Cowin, as the representative of Food & Wine, is similarly positioned. With a few 
strokes of her pen, Cowin can define a trend and demote it to “common” status; 
likewise, she also holds the power to recover a trend and make it relevant, e.g., 
when she tells the cheftestants that “some [of their] dishes succeeded in making me 
feel these trends should be brought back, and some made me feel like they should 
be buried.” Lagasse is in a similar position of power, particularly as a cookbook 
author, television food star, and massively successful restaurateur. As one of the 
original stars created by the Food Network (everyone knows who “Emeril” is—David 
Letterman frequently asks, “When is that big Emeril guy going to go away?”), he runs 
his own food empire, effectively setting trends simply by offering them for sale.

Lakshmi, though respected as a television personality, does not wield the same kind of 
power as a food trendsetter. She undermines her own authority early in the challenge 
by proclaiming “I love kale! That’s not a trend to me!” She also holds significantly less 
clout as a food expert than either Emeril Lagasse or Dana Cowin. Though Lakshmi has 
authored two cookbooks, her renown derives primarily from her modeling career, her 
marriage to novelist Salman Rushdie, and her status as a television personality.

Beyond the cult of personality and the power wielded by celebrities, the complicating 
frame of television as the medium by which these trends are being critiqued and 
potentially reinvented demands consideration, as television is a direct distributor 
of mainstream, lowbrow culture to the masses, given that “higher education 
and income levels correspond with less TV usage” overall (Friedman 2013). Here 
we see a mainstream, popular television program elevating the idea of the 
cultural elite, despite the fact that the majority of the program’s viewers are not 
members of the cognoscenti. Top Chef may not be able to transcend its status 
as a product of mainstream television, but by associating itself with high culture 
markers (e.g., Food & Wine, revered chefs like Lagasse, respected restaurants), it 
certainly reinforces the divide between mainstream and highbrow culture.

There is room here to criticize Bourdieu; his arguments suggest that it is solely the cultural 
elite who can confer status on objects or determine what is worthy of attention. This 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
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elitist view runs counter to the very notion of folklore, which concerns itself with—and 
finds value in—the banal, the everyday, and the commonplace. George Schoemaker 
explains that “folklore is part of the experiences and practice of our everyday life… we 
are all involved in the processes of performing folklore even though we may not always 
be aware of it” (2008:1). By condescending to the everyday, Bourdieu is dismissing an 
entire arena worthy of study and reinforcing the notion of the cultural elite. Bourdieu’s 
concepts are not in full force here, however—given that Cowin and the other Top Chef 
judges sit in a paradoxical position where cultural elitism is conveyed by a popular/
banal/mainstream television program, can the concept of “omnivorousness” help to 
explain why the commonplace is being increasingly embraced by the cognoscenti?

Omnivorousness

In her book Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in 
America, Alison Pearlman uses the idea of “omnivorousness” to explain the trend 
in restaurants away from stiff presentation, elaborate décor, and strict dress codes 
in favor of a more relaxed environment that highlights the food as the star of the 
show. As she explains, omnivorousness is “an elite appreciation of not simply formal 
‘high’ culture but rather a range of the ‘high’ and the ‘low’” (2013:4). An example 
of a restaurant that embodies the concept of omnivorousness might be Wolfgang 
Puck’s Spago, which was designed to simultaneously address demands for both quality 
cuisine and less formal (pretentious?) service, offering such menu items as gourmet 
wood-fired pizzas topped with relatively exotic ingredients (e.g., prosciutto, morel 
mushrooms) that a run-of-the-mill pizza parlor wouldn’t have on hand. The food is 
allowed to speak for itself in an environment that is free of snobbery—indeed, such 
establishments make gourmet food more accessible to a broader segment of the 
population that might typically avoid a fussy or frou-frou dining experience.

Richard Peterson and Roger Kern investigated the notion of omnivorousness and 
determined that elites have, in fact, broadened their proverbial palates; indeed, 

“highbrows are more omnivorous than others and… they have become increasingly 
omnivorous over time” (1996:900). Omnivorousness, they explain, “signifies an openness 
to appreciating everything. In this sense it is antithetical to snobbishness, which is based 
fundamentally on rigid rules of exclusion” (Peterson and Kern 1996:904). This drive 
towards omnivorousness may represent the broadening of common foodways, defined 
by Lucy Long as “the network of activities and beliefs surrounding food” (2009:256); 



< Eanes, S. Ryan. “Top Chef and Taste”  
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just as elites are opening themselves to the “common,” so are the masses opening 
themselves to “exotic” ingredients and preparations. Mainstream consumers now 
routinely purchase gourmet products, such as flavored coffees, elaborate syrups and 
other coffee embellishments; these affordable luxuries are no longer inaccessible, nor 
do the masses view them as out of reach (Roseberry 2002). At the same time, there may 
be some circularity at work, as examples abound of undesirable or peasant food being 
appropriated by the upper class—alpaca meat in Peru, for example, is now being marketed 
as a luxury to certain consumers (Markowitz 2012), just as offal and organ meats are 
proudly listed on many high-end restaurant menus. Even lobster, at one point in time, 
was considered a lowbrow food. Whether there is a relationship between the emergence 
of omnivorousness and the elevation of “low” cuisine remains to be seen, however.

While the precise reasons for the emergence of omnivorousness remain elusive, Peterson 
and Kern theorize that the pervasiveness of media may be a partial explanation, with 

“presentation of the arts via the media [making] elite aesthetic taste more accessible to 
wider segments of the population” (1996:905). Certainly this explanation seems to reflect 
what is going on in this Top Chef challenge; despite television’s reputation as a mainstream, 
lowbrow medium, it is conveying highbrow sensibilities into the mainstream. This also 
reflects a folkloristic understanding of television as a medium; Ben-Amos, as mentioned 
previously, noted that folklore is comprised of “real social and literary interchange 
between cultures and artistic media and channels of communication” (1972:14). Top 
Chef can aptly be characterized as a channel of communication that facilitates an 
interchange of food knowledge between chefs, food critics, and food fans alike. 

In just one small piece of one episode of a popular reality television program, so much 
is said about the value of food, the distinctions between high and low culture, and 
the changing tastes of elites and the mainstream alike. Further study could tease out 
these distinctions to an even greater extent, and could address additional questions 
regarding the interplay of old/traditional media forms (i.e., the magazine, embodied by 
Food & Wine’s association with the program, as well as the television program itself, as 
television is increasingly being considered a “traditional” media channel), new media 
forms (i.e., the Top Chef website, hosted on BravoTV.com, and its interactive components), 
and how class roles are involved in selection and use of these media channels. 

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Notes
1  A shirred egg is essentially a style of baked egg; typically a shirred egg is 
baked in a shallow dish called a shirrer, though any dish can be used.


