Why Tournament of Champions is the best Food Network competition

The days of Food Network as a prime-time destination for culinary instruction are as distant a memory as TLC’s days of being a channel that features learning.

We are in the era of reality TV cooking competitions, which come in many different flavors, and Tournament of Champions is the best of what Food Network now has to offer, in several different ways.

As Tournament of Champions III immediately demonstrates, both it and its contestants excel at cooking competitions. This is the food reality TV competition for reality TV food competition competitors.

Tournament of Champions (Food Network, Sundays at 8) is outstanding television for many reasons, starting with its brilliantly and perfectly simple format: A bracketed competition; two chefs competing head-to-head; randomly selected ingredients, methods, and time; blind judging and numerical scoring.

Among talent competitions, it’s the most-fair, most-trustworthy structure I’m aware of. The judges don’t even know who is in the competition.

The format also produces excellent food and entertainment, from the randomizer’s curveballs to the suspense of the chefs watching their food be judged from their trailers (“This is nerve-wracking AF,” Eric Adjepong says).

While TOC 3 has doubled in size—32 chefs, not 16, are competing, now for $100,000 in cash (which sits on the set like Survivor: Borneo’s treasure chest)—its format remains unchanged.

Justin Warner and Simon Majumdar still take notes and present dishes to the judges; Hunter Fieri still roams backstage, searching for a place in his father’s shadow where his awkwardness in front of the camera and stilted delivery won’t be noticed.

Guy Fieri still hosts, of course, and as he does on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, he centers the talent, not himself, which I wish some other TV chef/hosts would do.

He’s the perfect MC for TOC; after all, he’s basically the face of the network during this era of competitions, and he even got his start on another Food Network competition, Food Network Star.

In the same way The Challenge keeps expanding to create a universe out of both its own players and people from other reality TV shows, Tournament of Champions has become the place for reality TV cheftestants to compete.

For years, Food Network ignored other networks’ cooking competitions, leaving it off the resumes of its judges and contestants, perhaps thinking that even mentioning another show would somehow give free advertising to its competitors and cause viewers to flee. But is finally and wisely acknowledging when contestants come from other shows, whether that’s Bravo’s Top Chef or Netflix’s Final Table.

Even the mere mention of other shows improves Tournament of Champions’ credibility, just because TOC becomes the place where other shows’ contestants—even winners!—want to compete.

It also allows for fun mini-competitions, such as a rematch between Top Chef 16 winner Kelsey Barnard Clark and runner-up Eric Adjepong in the first episode.

While Top Chef’s contestants are talented, they’re generally unknown. The opposite is true on Tournament of Champions, which has acclaimed chefs known to us because of their appearances on reality TV shows.

The bracket structure allows for those who are the least well-known chefs to become more well-known, whether that’s because of their personality in the kitchen or the judges’ evaluation of their food. In the two previous seasons, an eighth-seeded chef has upset a number-one seeded chef.

Last week’s Guy’s Grocery Games had a play-in competition between three chefs, with its winner getting to compete on TOC III, which served as both an advertisement for TOC and an opportunity. I think there’s additional opportunity to slot in a few winners of other championship-style shows, whether that’s Holiday Baking Championship, Chopped Champions, or Channel 4’s The Great British Bake-Off. But the current approach, doing so sparingly, is the best.

This casting means an outstanding, well-known chef goes home nearly every round, and the format guarantees multiple people win and lose in each episode. It’s an efficient show with very little filler.

Instead of producing season after season, Food Network has wisely stuck with one spring competition, making all of this special. If it was on weekly, like Guy’s Grocery Games or Chopped, it’d lose some of its strength.

Fieri introduces Tournament of Champions at the start of season three as “the greatest culinary competition in the world,” and I’m not yet convinced of that. But when Marcel Vigneron calls it “the biggest title in culinary competitions,” I think he’s on to something: among culinary competitions, it’s the only one with such a diverse slate of reality TV culinary competitors, and that makes winning a sort of meta-victory.

Watching Tournament of Champions III convinced me that Netflix’s forthcoming attempt to reboot Iron Chef is completely unnecessary. The stars of the food world already have TOC, a showcase where some of culinary reality TV’s best battle the best, on Food Networks’ best platform.

Tournament of Champions

Tournament of Champions is the best of Food Network competitions, and the food reality TV competition for reality TV food competition competitors. A

What works for me:

• The casting and match-ups
• The format, from the randomizer to the judging
• Basically everything

What could be better:

• A little less repetition of key facts about contestants
• Hunter Fieri