Hello, and welcome to Season 31 of Top Chef!
This year, we’ve reached out to some of the best chefs in the country, from veterans of the Gulf Coast’s finest bayou sushi restaurants to veterans of the California-Nevada water wars. They’ve strapped on their knives, bid a final farewell to their loved ones, and joined our host, Padma Lakshmi, and our panel of celebrity judges — Tom Colicchio, FIERIBOT-9200, and the tragic reanimated clone of a long-dead homeless schizophrenic who thought he was Eric Ripert — for the ultimate culinary showdown to prove who can plate the best dishes in food-insecure post-climate-change America! They’ll be competing for $250,000 from the American Association for Obsolete Currencies or two-thirds of a DogeCoin (winner’s choice), a trip to the Norwegian Survival Institute’s seed farm with full licking privileges, a number of appliances rendered largely useless when the Internet of Things stopped working in 2032, and of course, the title of Top Chef (and the associated title of Lord High Executioner of the Duchy of Oshkosh).
For our 2036 season, we’ll be bringing these highly competitive food preparation employees to glamorous Gainesville, Florida, named the Sunshine State’s top dining destination last summer when we lost Jacksonville to the Atlantic Ocean. Our “chef-testants” will be rooming together in a burned-out city bus outside of the Alachua County Courthouse and taking part in what Food & Synthetic Opoid magazine calls our most daunting series of challenges yet! Sixteen culinary masterminds and at least one werewolf will compete each week to avoid elimination, but only the best two chefs will join Padma and the judges offshore on the Caribbean Plastic Island to compete for the ultimate prize, which comes with a feature in Metal Shavings Monthly and a showcase in their annual Mountain Fruit Hoard in Vail. The winner will also learn the dreadful secret of how Padma manages to look so young after thirty years on air and a series of devastating radiation burns, while the runner-up will become part of that very same secret.
Let’s meet some of this year’s competitors!
PAUL D’AGOSTINO, executive chef, Nyberg Zombie Bunker, Las Vegas, Nevada: I didn’t come here to make friends. I came here to be the best chef in America, or what’s left of it, and everybody who’s underestimated me, put me down, or had me locked in a storage closet until my next shift begins is going to be really sorry after I bring home the big prize.
KERRY TARLETON, sous-chef, Muddy Pond Outside of an Abandoned Bomb Shelter, Inwood, Iowa: I might not be like some of the fancy big-city chefs who are here from five-star restaurants and glitzy big-name properties where the meat isn’t picked over by carrion birds before you get to it, but I’m here to prove that small town America still has some of the best cuisine and the lowest radiation fatality rates in the world.
MIKE “MARK” BOLIOT, owner & proprietor, Moderated Screams Catering Company, West Covina, California: I didn’t come here to make friends. In fact, I’m not exactly sure how I got here at all. But if these chefs don’t think that a caterer can roll with the big boys, I’m going to show them a thing or two about whatever it is I was just talking about. I need my medication.
JEANETTE COYLE, assistant chef, Merton’s Cabinet Aquatic Mineshaft Restaurant & Mineshaft, Portland, Maine: A lot of people might think a female chef can’t win on this show. A lot of those same people might think a chef with severe hebephrenia can’t win on this show. And a lot of people definitely thinking that a chef with a third but useless arm growing out of the center of her back can’t win on this show. Well, guess what, people? There’s a first time for everything, and if anyone combines those three characteristics perfectly, it’s me and my twin sister who I threw off a cliff when we were babies!
BEN CURTIS, head chef, Ben Curtis Head Chefs Inc., Baltimore, Maryland: I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll tell you one thing. I’LL TELL YOU ONE THING!
FRANCINE KUROJIMA, saucier, Colorado Soviet Food Bucket Assembly, Denver, Colorado: Well, I don’t know about anybody else, but I did com here to make friends. Making friends sounds fun! I like friends. I’m very lonely.
PADMA: For our first Quickfire challenge, you’ll each be tasked with preparing a delicious, low-calorie amuse-bouche out of a can of Chef Boyardee Mini Ravioli that we found under a drainage culvert outside of the I-81 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. We were not paid by Conagra to feature this product; it’s just the only thing we have in the pantry at the moment that didn’t fail a spectrographic analysis test for toxic spores. You have fifteen minutes, starting now, and the winner of this challenge will receive immunity from elimination and the antidote to the brucellosis you were injected with in your sleep by our production assistant.
PAUL: No way I’m going to lose this challenge. When I was a kid, all I ate was Chef Boyardee canned pasta and coyote meat from the box traps my dad kept on the roof.
KERRY: I just want to stay true to myself and cook my food. Luckily my food is exclusively tinned carbohydrates with varying degrees of radioactivity.
MARK “MIKE” PONITELLO, head chef, Hamilton-Bayes State Psychiatric Hospital, Charleston, South Carolina: Can someone help me? I was on season 29 and was cut in the sixth round but when I packed my knives to go I got lost in a hallway and have been living off of toilet mints and leftovers ever since. I tried growing mushrooms on the bath mat but they just keep yelling at me. I don’t want to be on TV anymore.
BEN: A lot of the other chefs are just in this for the glory, but I’m doing this for my kids. They barricade themselves in the house last September and refuse to let me back in, but I figure if I really hone my knife and fire skills, I can beat the little fuckers.