Top Chef

Great Kitchens: Design Ideas from America's Top Chefs
$27.95
This is a good book about kitchen design. It shows the kitchens of 26 famous and near-famous (or once-famous) chefs. Its three authors adopted a template for their interviews so that, after a few, they all start to sound alike. The formula: (1) the design challenge and how the chef solved it; (2) the space and the appliances; (3) what the chef would have done differently; (4) the chef's culinary background and influences; (5) the chef's restaurant(s). I am trying to design a kitchen and found (1)-(3), particularly (1), to be helpful. I skipped (4) and (5) and my hypothesis is that they are only in the book so the authors could grab some comp meals at some very expensive restaurants. Oddly, there is also a mish-mash collection of each chef's "favorite home recipe." Granola, anyone?

Strengths - Three things stand out:

1. The design process. These chefs are inventive people with great attention to detail. There is much value in reading about their visions and how they turned them into kitchen designs. This may be the hardest step, and it is helpful to see how creative people take it.
2. Floor plans. Too few kitchen design books provide them. They are helpful both to see the working space layout and to understand how the photos interrelate.
3. What to do differently. Sometimes you can only learn from mistakes and kitchen design mistakes are costly. Unfortunately some of these are very idiosyncratic: "I am a tall man and I should have placed the stove hood higher."

Annoyances

1. Impractical. Most of these kitchens were constructed without a budget. The chefs are affluent people who use their kitchens for classes and television productions, so they are financed by taxpayers in the form of deductions. The appliances are mostly "high-end" and beyond: Montague, Traulsen, Beko, La Cornue. There are wood-burning pizza ovens, specialty woks, custom designed rotisseries. This is nice to look at in a picture, but no help in designing my kitchen.
2. Outdated and overpriced. The book is ten years old now. Many of the restaurants that are described are long-gone. The precious children in the kitchen are pimply teenagers and probably some of the marriages are splits-ville. But, more significantly, in ten years there are lots of new products on the market and you might design a kitchen differently today. The book is too expensive for what value it still retains.
3. Homage to the chefs. Does anyone really care, when they're designing a kitchen, why a chef got interested in cooking, how they met their spouses, the names of their restaurants, and what year they won the "prestigious" James Beard Award? It would have been nice to reduce this repetitive and peripheral information to call-outs and save the space for practical advice.
4. Duplication. The captions for the photos are often verbatim excerpts from the text and add no value.

What's wrong with the book:

In the end, kitchen design is a series of practical decisions about appliances, counters, cabinets, floors, lighting, and fixtures. This book provides no systematic guidance on any of these topics. There are anecdotes and snippets that can be gleaned from the chefs' experiences, but the book cries out for separate chapters on each of these topics in which the authors reflect on what they've learned from interviewing these great chefs and how it can be applied by you and me.

There is a lot that the authors could have learned about, say, choosing appliances. Almost all these chefs chose ultra high-end ranges and refrigerators that are impractical or unaffordable in most kitchens. But these chefs didn't always own such high quality appliances and they could offer good advice about what to look for on a lower budget. This is what I was looking for in a book called "Great Kitchens", not a recipe for granola or a story about how a chef's father taught him to make pastry.

PS--Two months later, they got the message and cut the price of this book in half. At the new price, it's good value.

Top Chef: The Cookbook, Revised Edition: Original Interviews and Recipes from Bravo's hit show
$29.95
I had the same problem as the previous reviewer. There are two recipes from the other seasons, but the book is not fully updated. There are NO interviews with the contestants from seasons 4 or 5. If you love the show, then wait for a properly updated edition.

Think Like a Chef
$22.50
Think Like A Chef is a book any aspiring, or good chef can learn from. Not only are their good recipes and techniques but the book also accomplishes and fulfills its title by getting the reader to think more like a chef and to be more adventurous and trusting in the meals and dishes you create. I heartily recommend this book to all.

Top Chef: New York (Season 5)
$29.95
I just finished this series and I loved it. I can cook but I certainly am not a chef. Nevertheless, I adore watching these chefs in their competitions plus I am a creative person so I am learning. I will never be able to do the complex dishes but one learns that often the simpler dishes do better in the competitions. The mortal sin seems to be in undercooking or overcooking anything. If you can stay away from this flaw, you are actually in the running for being a heck of a cook. I began watching this show because I've enjoyed Project Runway so much. One thing that is better for the contestants with this show is that the contestants get great prizes all the way through. In season six this aspect improves even more. So everyone seems to go home with some really great prizes. The judges are really generous with their prizes for winners too. Project Runway is a lot stingier towards its contestants. Maybe chefs are just more generous people than fashion designers. It sure seems so. I applaud Top Chef for creating rewards for as many contestants as possible. No matter what your level of cooking skill, you will enjoy this show. I do not watch reality tv generally but I do like it where you can improve your own skill level by watching these competitions.