Steven Voyles

My wife is completely addicted to Top Chef, which more or less means I’m completely addicted to Top Chef as well.  One thing that perpetually frustrates me when we watch the show together is how many people get knocked out of the competition due to a simple lack of preparation.  I could understand the first season or two when people didn’t quite know what to expect from the show, but after five seasons it’s just crazy.  Hearing something like “I’ve just never had to prepare something under these time constraints before”, or “I’ve never cooked  Cajun food before” when the show is in New Orleans just drives me nuts!  That may or may not be an actual quote from that season, but something like that happens every year.  I honestly think they could do a season in Italy and someone will show up having never made lasagna before.  And don’t even get me started on the people that send food out without tasting it first…

Come on people!  You are going on a cooking show that is looking for the best new talent out there.  You know they are going to throw some crazy challenges at you.   Get some of your chef buddies together, have them toss random ingredients at you, give yourself 10 minutes to make something wonderful, then serve it to them and have them critique you into the ground to give you a head’s up about what you need to work on.  And please, please familiarize yourself with the local cuisine of the city the show will be taped in.  The people that are consistently successful aren’t the people who know how to cook every possible dish that might be thrown at them because that person doesn’t exist.  The successful people are the ones who have done the basic preparation to be ready for whatever gets thrown at them and have the ability to be flexible enough to deal with whatever that is.

It’s funny, but people do this all the time in our professional lives, too.  How many meetings have you been to that dragged on and on because the person that called it had no real agenda set out before you got started?  I’ll bet somebody at one of those meetings showed up without a pen and paper, then failed to follow up on whatever they were assigned as well.  Sometimes we just get caught up in the hectic nature of our work.  Sometimes we’re just plain lazy, but it doesn’t change the fact that basic preparation and knowledge of the situation you’re dealing with is a fundamental requirement for success.