How ‘Top Chef’ turned the limitations of COVID-19 into instant-classic reality TV

Though far from specific to the cooking competition, now nearing the end of its 18th season, the expression is so common in its kitchens it has become integral to the series’ soundscape.

Hemmed in by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oregon-set season has emerged as an instant classic not least because it has embraced the limitations of health and safety protocols, and in turn drawn out the series’ strengths: a seriousness about food that only infrequently blurs into snobbery; a dedication to multiculturalism that’s deepened over its run; a belief that “Top Chef” is a community unto itself, one with a shared sense of purpose.

Several of “Top Chef’s” adaptations this season are already stalwart features of COVID-era culture, including one drive-in challenge and another to feed frontline medical workers.

But the most effective change is a greater stroke of genius than any technical workaround.

And the result, unspooling at long, gorgeously appointed tables on the “Top Chef” set, in acclaimed restaurants and under the northwestern sky, has been a grace note of kinship as playful and warmhearted as family supper.

Carving out room for the contestants’ vulnerability, “Top Chef” under these conditions is subtler and more complex than ever, as richly layered as the team-effort hot pot that symbolized Kokosón, this year’s “Restaurant Wars” champ.

In this, “Top Chef” has edged closer to “The Great British Baking Show,” in which the enemy is not a rival on the line, or even a judge’s testy palate, but the chef’s own battered psyche.

Like chefs sequestered on a reality series, separated from family members and isolated from ordinary routines, the crucible of the past 15 months has made many of us more intimate than ever with the space between our ears.

By the time livewire contestant Jamie Tran tries to sacrifice herself to save friend and competitor Maria Mazon in the season’s 11th episode, in which the chefs cook from ingredients in a family care package, the series renders this confrontation with the self, and what we might learn from it, poignantly literal.

Matt Brennan joined the Los Angeles Times as television editor in 2019.

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