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June 2023
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What happend to gabe2/12/2023 ![]() ![]() So what happened after all this came out? Bravo handled this imbroglio terribly by basically not addressing it at all. Gabe mostly stuck to his tried-and-true mole. Shota’s food was unquestionably imaginative. ![]() In my opinion, Dawn was the superior chef her dishes were innovative yet approachable, complicated without being ostentatious. The season came down to three chefs: Latino chef Gabe Erales from Austin, Dawn Burrell, a Black woman and a former Olympian who cheffed in Houston, and Japanese-American chef Shota Nakajima, who split his time between Tokyo and Seattle. While there were no shots of host Padma Lakshmi in a bikini or contestants talking about how they wanted her to put their sausage in her mouth, the show’s wokening was forced, weird, and cheap, and completely undermined by its winner. There was lots of honoring of native lands and cuisines, perhaps to make up for 17 seasons of being weird about Nigerian food and gushing over white men who make their own pasta. It was the Covid season, and there was an excess of somber reflection about the havoc our friend the virus wreaked on the restaurant industry. The entire season, set in Portland, was more or less a disaster. ![]() In December 2020, while Top Chef Season 18 was still in production, Austin360 reported that Erales had been fired from his Austin-based restaurant, Comedor, for “behavior in conflict with values.” Shortly after he was crowned the victor, Reddit threads started unspooling his alleged sexual misdeeds in his kitchens: sleeping with an employee and retaliating against that worker after their relationship ended fucking around on his wife while presenting himself as a stand-up family man. Gabe Erales, the sex pest, didn’t have to win, and his win is especially galling because Bravo likely knew he was a sex pest. ![]() However, Top Chef is in a weird place, with a very large unresolved issue: last season’s winner was revealed as a sex pest, and Bravo has never acknowledged it. Season 19 of Top Chef premieres tomorrow, which is great news because I love to see those little James Beard award nominees whip up their veloutés and espumas. ![]()
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