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closeThursday, Nov. 05, 2009
Five questions with ... Dan Cutforth, 'Top Chef’ executive producer
Cutforth
Dan Cutforth, 'Top Chef’ executive producer
Bravo’s hit reality series Top Chef and its new spinoff, Top Chef: Just Desserts, will hold a casting call 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday at Abacus, 4511 McKinney Ave. in Dallas. We chatted with Dan Cutforth, one of the show’s executive producers, about the show. Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz are the founders of Magical Elves, which has also developed such series as Project Runway and Last Comic Standing, so he knows something about reality-competition TV.
1How do you cast Top Chef when you’re meeting people without really tasting their cooking?
Very often, our casting team [does] get a chance to taste our chefs’ food. They’re pretty sophisticated diners. They know a lot about food at this point. You’re right, we don’t get to taste the food of all the people that come in, but we always have someone from our culinary department . . . [at] our finalist casting sessions. We also get résumés, and [head judge and co-host] Tom Colicchio goes through every single one of them. He’s hired so many chefs that he has a good sense, usually, from what people’s résumés look like as to what their cooking ability is going to be.
2How often do you receive applications or audition videos from people who just don’t get it?
People only really get to the video-application stage when we’ve already met them and assessed them. We don’t get very many video applications from people, that I’m aware of, that I’d liken to just a home cook. Not to say that a home cook couldn’t be on Top Chef, but that traditionally has not gone well. There’s a level of skill and training that a restaurant chef has that a home cook can’t have.
3Shows like American Idol and America’s Got Talent spend half their seasons with audition episodes that largely just mock people. Would you do that if you could?
With chefs, that’s really not what it’s about. What Top Chef is about really is a celebration of people’s skills and abilities. There’s nothing very interesting about bad food. We have had, in previous seasons, sometimes a few people who were really kind of behind the curve, and it wasn’t fun.
4What about a season like Season 6, when so many people are ahead of the curve?
The show’s about finding really amazing chefs and showing what they can do, and we got to do that in this season. I don’t think there was anything pathetic about people in this season. They were all really good. The standard now is so much higher than it was at the beginning.
5When you launched Top Chef, did you anticipate it becoming its own little empire, complete with spinoffs?
We didn’t think about it at all. I guess I think more that way now, because I’ve been through this experience more times, and I’ve seen how things can spin off, but at the time we were really more focused on making a really good food competition that didn’t feel like anything else on television.
For more information on this week’s Top Chef casting, and for an application, go to http://www.bravotv.com/casting.
— Robert Philpot
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