The Tournament Of Champions VII Twist Didn’t Work, And We All Should Have Seen It Coming

We’re now four episodes into Tournament Of Champions VII, and as per usual, I’m loving it. The talent is elite. The randomizer is somehow getting weirder. The chefs are doing things you can't try at home. The roughly thirty minute battles are just enough time to keep the momentum up but also tell a coherent story and show off some cool techniques. It’s all fantastic, except, of course, this season’s big twist which turned out to be a well-intentioned mess.

Instead of slotting in experienced performers with long track records of success, this season the Tournament Of Champions producers decided to save all the one seeds for culinary icons. The identities of all four were hidden from the bracket reveal until it was time for them to do battle. They were each slotted against a winner of the play-in tournament, which featured chefs that either had lower profiles or a less than ideal track record on Tournament Of Champions. Pretty cool, right? Well, sort of.

Three of the four iconic chefs lost to the lowest ranking competitors during the first round, and it wasn’t exactly because their opponents surprised with lifetime best cooks. Jonathan Waxman, Aarón Sánchez and Ming Tsai all took an L, and their scores were low enough that they would have lost to every single other winner in their respective brackets. Lorena Garcia was the only icon who won, and her score was only good enough to tie for third out of eight chefs in her bracket.

I wish I could say these losses were surprising, but the truth is the culinary icons were at a huge disadvantage no matter what ingredients they got. None of them had ever conceived a dish based on the randomizer, which often takes new players a few times to get the hang of. None are at the point in their careers where they’re regularly competing in cooking competitions, and all are in their 50s, 60s or 70s, which is a disadvantage for a frantic cook that involves making numerous components in under thirty minutes.

I love the idea of icons competing in Tournament Of Champions. I am not here to say the basic premise was bad. It was a joy to see Aarón, Jonathan, Ming and Lorena and get to watch them do their things in the kitchen. Their wealth of experience and passion for cooking really shined through in their talking head segments and interactions with hosts Tiffani Faison, Justin Warner and of course, Food Network staple Guy Fieri too. It just sorta seems like they were put into a bad situation by producers who should have seen this coming.

If you’re a one seed in a tournament, there is a pressure and expectation that you are going to win. Tournament Of Champions built up that expectation even further by giving us numerous interviews with their opponents talking about how they’re huge underdogs in battles against these legends. They even did loud social media reveals for each icon, but once it got down to the actual cooking, it was obvious that wasn’t the case at all. The so-called underdogs were more comfortable playing to the randomizer, less rusty and better equipped to scramble around the kitchen doing fifty things at once.

I want Tournament Of Champions to continue making room for legends. If someone with an epic resume wants to compete, I want to see them get their shot. Let’s just not build them up like unstoppable one seed juggernauts when they’ve never played the game and probably aren’t doing multiple cooking competitions every year like most of the others in the field.