Getting eliminated is rarely the goal on reality competition shows, but since Season 9 of Top Chef, the acclaimed cooking competition has lessened the impact by offering chefs a path to return. I’m not sure what the expectation was when Last Chance Kitchen first launched, but over the last decade plus, it has produced three winners and several other players who made really deep runs after returning. Current host Kristen Kish is one of those winners, and she’s pretty sure she knows why so many others who took the same path have been so successful.
Kish sat down with Deadline as part of the Contenders series to talk about her Emmy nomination and the show’s Season 23 success. Not surprisingly, the subject of Last Chance Kitchen came up, given Rhoda Magbitang was eliminated and returned via the behind-the-scenes competition to win the whole thing. Kish offered a fun little observation, partially from personal experience and partially from being around the show, as to why so many chefs do so well after coming back…
You have a little extra oomph. I don’t ever want to say you had a break to reset, but there is some kind of mental load reset. The worst thing has happened, which is [they] got already got kicked off. So, you relieve yourself of that pressure.
As a Top Chef superfan who has seen every single episode, this feels incredibly accurate. Kristen, Rhoda and Joe Flamm all returned and dominated en route to victories, but there have also been a ton of chefs who returned and showed, at least for a few episodes, their true potential. In all these cases, the chefs have seemed to cook more aggressively and without a desire to play it safe. It’s, as Kristen put it, like they already went through an elimination and no longer were playing scared.
Now, to be clear, I would not say going through Last Chance Kitchen is the ideal scenario. An overwhelming majority of chefs who have been eliminated have stayed eliminated and of those who have returned, only three have won. It would be a crazy move to actually seek out that outcome, but if you do come out, there is definitely an advantage of playing with total freedom.
Last Chance Kitchen was obviously huge for Rhoda, Joe and Kirsten’s careers as well as for many of the other chefs who returned, but it’s also provided a nice opportunity for many chefs who didn’t get back in the game. Nyesha Arrington is a good example. She was eliminated in eleventh place during Season 9 thanks to a flukey double boot, but she rolled off four consecutive wins in Last Chance Kitchen in pretty dominating fashion. She eventually lost a close battle to Michelin-starred chef Beverly Kim, but fans were blown away by how good she was and how enjoyable she was to watch on television. She, of course, has since gone on to be one of the three permanent judges on Fox's fun cooking show Next Level Chef alongside Gordon Ramsay and Top Chef winner Richard Blais.
As for Kish, she’s obviously found plenty of television success too. She stepped in for longtime host Padma Lakshmi three seasons ago, and fans embraced her immediately. She’s brought a different perspective and energy to the long-running competition, balancing a really empathetic spirit with a willingness to speak her mind. It’s resulted in three consecutive Emmy nominations and even a role as a player on the most recent season of Traitors. Not bad for a contestant who was originally eliminated in seventh place.
