For its fifteenth edition, “Top Chef” is pulling out all the stops. To find the successor to Hugo Riboulet, the young 23-year-old chef who won in 2023, two brigades, of eight candidates each, will compete this year. One will be under the leadership of Philippe Etchebest, Paul Pairet and Glenn Viel, who have seven Michelin stars between them. The other will be coached by a female trio with eight stars: Hélène Darroze, Dominique Crenn (first woman with three stars in the United States) and Stéphanie Le Quellec (who won the second season of the show, in 2011).
The M6 culinary competition, still presented by Stéphane Rotenberg, intends to continue to capture the audience of gastronomy lovers (in 2023, “Top Chef” attracted no less than 2.7 million viewers each evening). To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary, fifty candidates from past seasons will meet during an “event test” at the Château de Ferrières (Seine-et-Marne). The “black box”, the test which consists of tasting a dish in the dark before recreating it, will be relocated to the Grandes Ecuries of the Château de Chantilly. Another legendary place: the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, on board which the candidates will have to cook, under the eye of the official chef of the train dear to Agatha Christie, Jean Imbert, winner of the third season.
A vegan challenge: the “trompe-l’oeil” test becomes a “trompe-palate” where the competitors will have to redouble their ingenuity to make a meat dish with vegetables as the only ingredients. Will they manage to deceive the palace of Basque chef Andoni Aduriz (two stars), who gave the candidates of the thirteenth season a hard time?
A message of resilience
The icing on the cake: Pierre Gagnaire will take the helm of “Top Chef: the hidden brigade”, which appeared in 2023 and was then directed by Hélène Darroze. This second show, broadcast in the wake of the first, at the end of the evening, aims to offer a second chance to those eliminated from “Top Chef”.
The three-Michelin-starred restaurant on rue Balzac in Paris, supported by culinary critic François-Régis Gaudry, will therefore pick up each week the losing candidate from the main show, who will face the one from the previous week. Objective: to allow the best of them to re-enter “Top Chef” from the quarter-finals.
A weekly catch-up session which had allowed, in 2023, Danny Khezzar, eliminated during the second week, to win all his duels to reach the doors of the grand final, which he lost, which did not help him prevented from immediately opening Quai 96, a “festive guinguette” at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
Giving a second chance to losers pleases Pierre Gagnaire, who recalls that he himself had, in real life, “lost everything in 1996”, after his bankruptcy in Saint-Etienne. “I got up, rebuilt, challenged myself. » A message of resilience that the man who was crowned best chef in the world in 2015 intends to convey to his apprentice chefs.
“It’s a great human experience, that’s what I like about this show,” says this long-time “Top Chef” companion. He says he is “amazed by these kids”, in whom he sees the succession of great chefs of whom he remains, at 73, one of the leading figures. “Me, I’m a Michelin kid; today, we can speak of a “Top Chef generation”. »