‘Top Chef’ cooks up top competition

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

Track and field’s middle-distance events often feature a “rabbit” — a shot-out-of-the-blocks missile who sets a blistering tempo that the rest of the runners must chase from the start. “Top Chef” has its own version of the sprinting pace-setter: a Michelin star cook.

Bravo’s hit reality show, which began its seventh season Wednesday, has evolved unmistakably from its debut in 2006.

“Top Chef’s” earliest episodes were sometimes the culinary equivalent of “Wipeout,” in which trained cooks often looked like clumsy greenhorns, struggling with such basic gastronomic tasks as assembling a fruit plate or concocting an amuse-bouche smaller than a hand grenade.

In recent years, the more talented contestants have been plating dishes as good as — and, by appearances, occasionally better than — some of the meals prepared by “Top Chef’s” own celebrity chef judges.

Last year’s gifted winner, Michael Voltaggio of the Dining Room at the Langham Huntington hotel in Pasadena, Calif., established an epicurean standard that his rivals (including his brother, Bryan) forever were pursuing, turning out plates such as dashi-glazed rockfish.

This time around, with “Top Chef” moving from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C., there’s another “Top Chef” cook with a Michelin star under his toque: Angelo Sosa, who has cooked alongside Jean-Georges Vongerichten (Jean Georges), Alain Ducasse (Spoon, Food & Wine) and Stephen Starr (Buddakan) and currently cooks at New York’s Xie Xie.

Sosa is not shy about promising a lot. “I want to be the first contestant,” he says in the opening episode, “to win every single challenge.”

Tom Colicchio, the show’s head judge and co-host with Padma Lakshmi, says it’s an intentional progression.