If Wednesday nights aren’t the same without Top Chef, NBC debuts The Chopping Block tonight at 8 to take up the slack. If you’ve seen the BBC’s Last Restaurant Standing, which makes my eyes glaze over, then I think you’ve seen The Chopping Block.
The premise is the same: teams of couples, including mother and daughter, take over an empty restaurant space, in this version in New York, and try to make a go of it. Retired chef Marco Pierre White, the first Briton to be awarded three Michelin stars, is the star and the one who decides who stays and who goes.
He’s better known in his native country and here’s the backstory: Gordon Ramsay was his protege but they’ve been on the outs for years. (If you want the backstory on that, start reading on page 3 of Bill Buford’s 2007 profile of Ramsay in The New Yorker.) White told The Independent, “If someone doesn’t enrich my life, I don’t want them to be part of my life. He has nothing to contribute to it.”
White is equally dismissive of Jamie Oliver’s efforts to improve Britain’s school lunches, calling it a cynical publicity stunt. Downing Street felt otherwise and promised an extra £280 million for lunches as a direct result.
NBC and Bravo, home of Top Chef, are both owned by NBC Universal. Here’s a preview of the opening episode (more are available at the program’s link above) and it’s not encouraging that some of the first words we hear are are the Top Cheffian cliches, “I’m not ready to go home” and “I’m in it to win it.”
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