While enjoying matzoh pizza for dinner last week, I started to riff on how it would be very funny if "Top Chef," the erstwhile beloved show of my apartment, had a special Passover episode. After thinking about it further, it's still pretty funny. Here's why:
The idea of creating fashionable cuisine without leavened bread is genuinely challenging. The show's producers would have to awkwardly stage the episode to suggest it coincided with Passover, even though it was filmed months in advance. (The same has happened with other holiday-themed shows.) They would also try to make a seder seem exciting, with a melodramatic but cheesy explanation of the Passover story -- though the story is already pretty dramatic without embellishment -- a fancy table setting, great lighting that no dining room would ever have, and lots of fast camera cuts to make things seem action-packed. Maybe there would even be lots of bickering, as there is at my house.
There would be an overbearing mother, worried about turning her kitchen over to contestants. Chefs reinterpreting the classics with "contemporary flair," such as a matzoh ball soup shooter or chopped liver tartare. A couple of Jewish competitors staying true to tradition, trying to make a brisket just like their bubby's and telling the camera in those confessional interviews that this challenge was "just a little more meaningful than the others because it's about my heritage." Then, there's the possibility of watching Padma eat gefilte fish. What a treat! I'd definitely watch this, maybe even multiple times. Bravo, call me.
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