I don’t know if you’ve watched Next Level Chef before, but it’s not exactly Real Housewives or even Big Brother. The judges are honest when the dishes are bad, but it’s almost always framed as a well-intentioned critique to help them become better chefs. There’s the occasional snarky confessional over the time tokens, elimination cookoff choices or two chefs trying to grab the same ingredient, but overall, pretty much every contestant gets a positive journey-style edit. The show wants us to root for them all, except for some reason, one of the chefs this season, who out of nowhere, has started getting a villain edit.
Christian Alquiza has been one of the frontrunners throughout the entire competition. He’s a social media chef featured on First We Feast, and for the first ten or so episodes of the season, he got pretty good content from the edit. We saw him making a lot of fun dishes, bonding with his fellow contestants and generally being one of the more talented and likeable contestants. The last two episodes, however, have gone out of their way to make him seem really unlikeable.
It started two weeks ago during episode 11 (“The In-Season Tournament”). We got several shots of Christian being pretty aggressive at the platform during grabs, and both times were followed by confessionals that made him look worse. The first time the show cut to him talking to the camera and saying, ‘If you need it, I need it more.” The second time featured a confessional from Danielle calling him a brat and complaining about how aggressive he was.
Article continues belowInitially, I didn’t really think a ton of it because occasionally there’s those dust-ups over an ingredient, but the negativity continued later in the episode when during the deliberations, he was shown telling the other contestants they do not want to go down to the basement to cook for their lives. He wasn’t wrong, but the lecture felt off-tone because he clearly had one of the best dishes and didn’t seem in any personal danger. It came off like he was trying to make the people actually in danger feel bad.
I thought the whole thing was strange but didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. Then I watched episode 12 (“Use Your Noodle”), and YIKES. Christian got a nice little confessional at the beginning of the episode about how much he loves noodles that even included some social media clips, but after that, the negativity oven got turned up to broil.
First, the chefs were asked who they would use the time token penalty on if they got it, and Danielle just blurted out Christian. Then, we got an extended scene where Gordon asked Christian, Connor and Darian what they were hoping to cook. Connor said he was hoping to do something Taiwanese, and Darian said he was hoping to cook some kind of Peruvian dish, hopefully with duck. Well, what did Christian end up making? A Taiwanese and Peruvian duck dish.
That sequence of events would have been bad enough, but the show decided to fully lean into it as a plotline. We got confessionals from Darian confusedly asking why Christian would make the dish he was planning to, and we got confessionals from Christian admitting that he was listening to what the other chefs were saying and it affected what ingredients he grabbed. We also got a confessional where he straight up said he was going to cook the duck better than Darian would.
Once again, if this were another reality show that’s typically more cutthroat or features traditional villains, none of this would be particularly weird. The Amazing Race is literally in a lawsuit with a former contestant right now over the villain edit he got. If we were getting snarky confessionals and sabotage plotlines from Next Level Chef all the time, this behavior from Christian might even seem like fun gamesmanship. It would certainly feel like good television. Instead, it feels like he’s playing a different game than everyone else.
And the thing is, this stealing ideas plotline isn’t the only negative content Christian got. The edit also dunked on him by dropping in a bunch of confessionals where he bragged about how good his dish was and how he was going to get the time token for winning the week’s episode. Only, he didn’t have a good dish at all. He ended up in the bottom three and had to cook to survive in the competition. He wound up narrowly making it through, but even that cook-off featured other contestants whispering about his decision to make a broccoli puree.
The whole thing made him look villainous and kind of buffoonish to the audience, to the point where we’re now seeing Reddit threads and social media posts about his behavior and attitude. I’m not surprised either. He somehow got both a villain edit and an over-confident dunce edit in the same episode. Fans never react well to that, even on shows like Survivor where the audience has a love-hate relationship with some of its more famous players who are typically edited as villains.
I have no idea what happened here. Maybe Christian is such a huge villain behind the scenes and in all of his confessionals that there was just no way they could cut around it anymore. Maybe the show just wanted to feature this stolen dish plotline so badly that they decided to go more negative than they’re normally comfortable with. Maybe Christian just decided once the individual portion of the competition started that he was going to be using mindgames and intentionally leaning into a villain persona. Maybe the show encouraged him to have a little more fun with his confessionals because it makes compelling TV. I don’t know.
Next Level Chef loves some friendly bantler between the hosts and sometimes the contestants. Gordon Ramsay, Richard Blais and Nyesha Arrington are regularly shown teasing each other and being competitive. Sometimes the contestants even get in on it. That almost always feels lighthearted and fun though. This has felt more traditionally villainous. I’m fascinated to see whether we’ll look back on this edit as an unusual two episode arc or just the type of content Christian is going to get moving forward.
You can catch new episodes of Next Level Chef, either on Thursdays on FOX or you can stream via Hulu.