Top Chef

Seasoned quality instantly gives Kish’s hosting debut a boost.

Top Chef is the best-produced of TV's many cooking competitions (with Emmy nominations to attest to that fact), and the D.C. edition is already capital entertainment.

Skilled chefs, great dishes, a few doomed nervous Nellies and lots of petty squabbles ahead? What more could a loyal Top Chef fan ask for?

Chef remains the model for cook-off competitions, balancing casual insight into culinary art with psychological snapshots of the aspiring chefs. This recipe can't be improved on.

We hope that there will be more rule shakeups this season on Top Chef, as the show had started to become a bit rote over its past half-a-dozen seasons or so. But with the change in when immunity is won, and the new perspective Kish gives as host, Season 21 is off to a good start.

Their tone remains generally civilized, but also awkward enough to make for entertaining television. Still, the more casual viewer may find that All-Stars seems to throw around a lot of "you had to be there" jokes and dramas. The food drill remains the same--contestants cook, judges assess--but the interplay among the chefs clearly is shaped in part by the back stories.

"Top Chef," though it appears to have a stable of good talent in the kitchen, so far doesn't really have much else going for it in the way of personalities.