When the judging is blind, women chefs win.

On women in the professional TV kitchen.

A friend, a successful restauranteur, told me a story:

When she was a restaurant GM in the 90’s, in her late 20’s, she had a meeting with her restaurant group’s other GMs and District Manager. They had dinner out and planned to head out to a bar. But the GMs and her boss had lined up the plans. They were going to a full nude strip club, the kind where no alcohol is served.

My friend, no shrinking violet, did what any educated, tough, unflappable woman would do in the 90’s. She went with it. The GMs wanted to see what she would do. It was a test, a hazing, a joke.

That’s when my friend met Tempest. Tempest was the most expensively-priced dancer in the club. They bonded.

“Want to make a bunch of money tonight, Tempest?” she asked her quietly while Temest grinded on her.

The GMs had paid for the lap dance to see how my friend would react. Maybe get a laugh out of making her feel uncomfortable.

Tempest winked. Strippers are expert at controlling and maneuvering around men, playing to their weaknesses. It’s part of the job description. My friend’s plan was diabolical. And Tempest was in.

My friend spent the night making the guys trek across the street to the liquor store to buy her and Tempest booze for cocktails and pretty much had Tempest grinding on her all night, while she stuffed her g-string with cash the men had to get from the club’s expensive, fee-driven ATM.

“I kept sending them back to the ATM,” she says laughing, “while Tempest gave me lap dances and we chatted about her kid and the work she was doing in nursing school. I loved her. I had the best night!”

The funniest part: My friend said that three of the five GMs withdrew so much money at the ATM, they got in trouble with their spouses.

This was the best comeuppance. And it’s also a story familiar to many Gen X / older millenial women.

In the 90’s, we constantly maneuvered around sexism and gross male behavior. We couldn’t call it out or cancel anyone. We didn’t have the unifying power of the internet. Who was going to listen? Our lives as women were doing whatever workarounds we had to do to get the job done while managing comments about our bodies, cat calls, people grabbing us, talking about us like we weren’t in the room, assaulting us in closed spaces, making passes. We were under-promoted, under-compensated and rarely seen as equals.

So, like my friend, we had to make transgressive moves to survive. And thrive.

Tournament of Champions, The Basics.

I thought about my friend’s story while watching Food Network’s Tournament of Champions. It’s a Guy Fieri-hosted TV competition in which the women win far more often than any other cooking show, from Top Chef to Chopped to Iron Chef.

The women are shining. And I wanted to know why.

The strangely addictive TOC is an unforgiving “sudden death” bracket competition. Two chefs go up against each other. One lives to cook again, one doesn’t. The show is in its 5th season and this last season is its fanciest. The show has gone from an audience of five people in metal folding chairs, some weird editing and a hole in the confession room wall to a more polished, seamless look. There is better lighting, better production values, bigger prize money, and a super-charged audience in actual seating. 

The show’s twist is The Randomizer. 

The randomizer creates mandatory, sometimes eccentric twists, say a protein selection or equipment choice. They might have to use a particular piece of equipment like a panini press or a potato ricer. And they might have to go for a particular effect or texture like buttery or crunchy.

Blind Judging.

What sets TOC apart is the blind judging. And…the preponderance of women winning the big prizes. 

The only other major cooking show that has blind judging (that I know of) is the iconic “Great British Bake-off” and that’s only partially blind. And even blind judging is fraught when a judge gets comfortable with the contestant’s styles.

"We did a blind tasting a few seasons ago, I think there were about 12 contestants left,” Tom Colliccio said, in an interview about Top Chef. 

“I was able to figure out who cooked what dish based on the style of cooking and plating."

But on TOC the judges don’t even know who is competing. It could be any chef from any walk of life, with any kind of cooking mastery.

This makes it very blind.

And very fair.

Subjectivity All Around.

On shows like Top Chef and Chopped, the judges are often privy to the reality-tv drama of kitchen disasters, missteps and panic-level cooking. They make their judgements in front of the anxious cooks.

Tom Colicchio often saunters through the Top Chef kitchens lifting pot lids and asking if they think the technique they are using will work or whether they chose the right dish for the challenge? Another reality TV plot-thickener, that hopefully bumps the chef into a tail spin.

This gets to the very heart of blind judging. When you know the contestants and have eaten plate after plate of their food, you get a sense of who they are and what their capabilities are. Unconscious bias is everywhere.

And this means that “likeability” becomes a factor. A thing that is tricky for women.

In an article for Eater, Tiffani Faison talked about how she learned quickly “that rising professionally meant that I needed to make myself more palatable; that adding charm, a little flirt, and occasionally pretending to not know what I was doing went a long way to keep myself in the category of acceptable and nonthreatening.”

And this became exacerabated when she went on TV.

There are whole Reddit threads devoted to her lack of likeability in season one of Top Chef, and how she “redeemed herself” in later competitions by changing her personality and approach. Faison was not allowed to have the same banter, sarcasm, rough-around-the-edges fight-back, or even weaknesses, as her male counterparts. Instead of seeing her as someone who is hard working, talented, experienced and driven, she was “called a bitch and a snake on television, both epithets making it through final edits.”

This is how she sums up her first season on Top Chef.

As I look back on that period of my life, it feels like producers never had the intention of risking the success of a new franchise like Top Chef on a feisty, competitive woman winning the first season. The safer bet was a “good guy,” handsome and innocuous. In the years since being painted as Top Chef’s first villain, I’ve had to work overtime both professionally and personally to prove that I am not, in fact, the devil.

When there is subjectivity and a biased narrative to always fall back on, women wiill have to angle harder, make more subversive moves, shove twenties into Tempest’s g-string, and bob and weave to get the job done. This is exhausting, as they say. Hard on the brain, hard on the body, hard on the spirit. Hard.

This makes the blind judging ever so important.

Cooking TV Mirrors the Industry.

The early seasons of Top Chef had only one female winner (season four - Stephanie Izard). There wasn’t another until season 10 (Kristen Kish.) The reason? There were simply fewer women chefs working in the industry.

Sara Moultin recalls many male chefs felt “women could not work in the kitchen because they were too emotional, could not handle the pressure and high temperatures and were not able to lift heavy pots.” And Cat Cora, of Iron Chef fame, applied to upwards of 10 Michelin three-star restaurants after culinary school, and eight of them told her they didn’t employ women in their kitchens.

Later, #Metoo exposed and eradicated Mario Batali, Michael Chiarello, John Besh and others. Women started talking more openly about chronic sexual harrassment and mysogyny in professional kitchens. They talked about who had power. Who abused power. They talked about money, promotions, childcare, equity in parenting. All the things that impacted them on the job. Many women in food had remarkably similar experiences. #Metoo brought us a flood of abysmal stories of what women endure nightly/daily working in kitchens.

And as this happened, old cooking competition episodes became play-back memorials to our recent past.

Just look at the clip (if you can find it) of Mike Isabella on Top Chef looking over at Chef Jenn Carroll, who was neck and neck with him in an oyster shucking contest, and saying to the confession-camera: “No offense but a girl shouldn’t be at the same level I am.”

He was merely saying what many men in the industry secretly believed.

Some people might think #Metoo didn’t garner much in the way of change. There was no sweeping overhaul of the industry, even after the pandemic promised more of the same. But there has been some change, slow as it is.

Looking at TOC, I see that when you remove all the walls and barriers for women, they excel. Half of the competitors are women now. Brooke Williamson, Tiffani Faison, Maneet Chauhan, and Mei Lin represent four women who have dominated over five seasons. Maneet has won twice. All of it because the judging is blind. I’m also adding Antonia Lofaso to this list, who made it to the finale twice and was beaten by Lin and Chauhan. I am rooting for her to win season six. I can’t even tell you how lovely it is to see so many women battling it out and kicking ass.

Because there are no issues of likeability, who makes good TV, what judge has a bias, who has a heart-shattering storyline, who is a true asshole behind the scenes, there is a bias-free runway for women to take off.

We also see that the winners of TOC are diverse. Naturally. Maneet Chauhan, a two time champion, is Indian, while Mei Lin is Chinese. Tiffani Faison is LGBTQ+ as well as Brit Rescigno who started the competition as a challenger far down the bracket and impressively kept taking win after win from even the most experienced chefs. She is poised to win one. I feel it.

Blind judging means that differences, like being a woman, a particular ethnicity or transgender for example, are equalized and rendered not essential to playing the game and winning the game. That means more people play and more people just get to do what they do and be recognized for their cooking.

Which is the point. This is equity.

It also means that we still have a mysogyny problem. But while that is being addressed, we can tune into TOC and watch women kick a little ass. As they do.

One more thing….

There is a theory on Reddit that the belt that is given to each of the winners of TOC is so large, bulky and heavy - a lot like a boxing or wrestling belt - that it must’ve been designed with the idea that mostly men would win it. And wear it.

In the photo I used on the top of the page, they gave the women rings this season.

It’s just a theory. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s true.

Looking forward to season six. And more change.

_______________________________

END NOTES:

Lots of big personal changes for us Fosters this summer.

Lucy (right) just got a new motorcycle and is moving to Utah in August to attend college in Salt Lake City.

And Edie is doing a Spanish-language immersion program in Malaga Spain, and then in August she goes off to Munich, Germany to au pair for a lovely family there. By the Fall, we will be down to two kids at home.

Lots of change. Lots of excitement. Lots of love. Lots of nerves. Lots of everything. I’ll keep you posted.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Kim xo