I Dined at Restaurant Wars on ‘Top Chef’ and This Is What It Was Really Like

The following contains spoilers for Episode 8, “Restaurant Wars” of Top Chef: Destination Canada.

I’m eating dinner inside a warehouse in Toronto tonight, admittedly a weird place to go for a meal. At the center of an expansive white room, I face a pink wall and a green wall, behind each a different restaurant. Or more appropriately, I should say “restaurant”: To get here, I had to walk down a long dark hallway and navigate around a control-center of screens, each with a worker in front of it. With concentrated faces, they watch food from all different angles while timers tick down. At the moment I enter, there are 2 hours and 40 minutes until service ends, and with it, these “restaurants.”

After 22 seasons of watching Bravo’s Top Chef, I am fulfilling my superfan dream: I am peeking behind the temporarily erected walls as a diner at Restaurant Wars. The iconic midseason challenge is why I patiently excuse the goofy challenges fueled by heavyhanded product placement, like a recent one in which contestants fulfill a Finish dish detergent sponsorship by making dishes inspired by crusty food stains.

I love Restaurant Wars because it feels like the show’s fairest test of skill. The episode forces teams of chef contestants to conceptualize and construct a restaurant in 24 hours — then actually serve the dining public. It compels chefs who have been fending for themselves to collaborate, with the potential for clashing egos. Crucially, it is also the challenge that most closely maps onto the contestants’ day-to-day jobs. A Finish-themed challenge is fantasy dreamed up in a sales meeting; Restaurant Wars is the closest thing to real life.

The parameters of the challenge — the number of required menu options, the designation of roles, etc. — change depending on the season, and heavily influence how the week plays out. In this episode, contestants must work in two teams to create three-course menus with two options per course. They must also assign the executive chef, front of house lead, and line cooks.

But as a Restaurant Wars diner eagerly awaiting either a delicious meal or a disastrous one, I know nothing about the parameters of this challenge, nor any of the chefs in this season. Without the familiar narrative constructs of a Top Chef episode to guide me, all I have to go on is the food and the service. In that way, it’s like a real restaurant. At a restaurant, though, I never really know what went on in the kitchen. While I leave Toronto with this real-life experience (thanks NBC Universal and Destination Canada!), it’s months later, only after the episode has aired that I understand what really happened: when I have the bizarre opportunity to let reality TV reshape my understanding of reality.

Being a Restaurant Wars diner involves a lot of waiting. After a tour of the set, I — and the rest of the media visitors, including Eater’s editor-in-chief Stephanie Wu — am corralled to a tent in the parking lot. Some diners know people who are working on the production, others are members of the local restaurant scene. Orange Yeti coolers sit predictably filled with blue bottles of Saratoga, Top Chef’s current water sponsor.

After 30 minutes, at 5:15 p.m., we’re called back to dine with around 16 other people. Half of the media contingent will be going to Nonna Pipón (a “granny chic” Mexican Italian concept; the pink wall), the other half to Phlora + Phauna (a “vegetable-forward” concept; the green wall). My group of four will be in Phlora + Phauna at the same time as the judges: Kristen Kish, Gail Simmons, Tom Colicchio, former Top Chef contestant Nina Compton, and Janet Zuccarini, the Toronto restaurateur. I weigh the pros and cons of this. The team could be reserving their best efforts for this service — or they could focus too much on the judges’ table, to the detriment of every other diner. I’ve seen the latter fate befall Restaurant Wars teams before.

Right off the bat, I feel both awkward and like I’m getting exactly what I came here for as I experience a Restaurant Wars cliche in real time: The person at the host stand can’t find our reservation and apologizes for the wait. We haven’t been given a set reservation time, and I begin to worry. Restaurant Wars can be miserable. The chefs butt heads, the kitchen devolves into chaos, the service team bears the brunt of their bad mood, and the diners draw the short straw. I wonder how honest I should be if the camera comes to me as a talking head: Surely I won’t make it on TV if I say something milquetoast, but do I really want to be on Bravo bashing service delays? We’re seated at 5:35 p.m. Another 10 minutes later, water.

When drinks are offered, I decide Prosecco sounds good. It becomes clear that it’s not smooth sailing for team Phlora + Phauna, at least not in the front of house. The flushed server tells us that they’ve run out of Prosecco. “Sorry, they keep changing the script,” this server mumbles. After they walk away, a second server comes over. This server takes a deep breath, but then realizes their redundancy. “Someone has greeted you already,” they say. We later notice that other tables have rosé, which wasn’t offered to us. VIPs or another miscommunication?

For all Restaurant Wars’ comforting repetitiveness, the episode as I watched it eight months later has one huge unexpected narrative arc. During prep the day before, contestant Tristen Epps, considered a front-runner with three challenge wins, learns that his father has had a stroke and is in a coma; by the following morning, he learns that his father has died. In honor of his father’s support for his culinary aspirations, Epps decides to continue with the competition. His teammates all resolve to succeed in order to make Epps’s sacrifice worthwhile. Epps, in a show of both culinary chops and resilience, leads the kitchen anyway, having taken on the role of executive chef.

Phlora + Phauna, despite the aforementioned service hiccups, triumphs: The judges are legitimately impressed with the cohesion and execution of the menu. Every chef gave them a dish they liked. The judges, who acknowledge Epps’s loss during Judges’ Table, filmed the next day, offer Epps words of encouragement. “He’s proud of you right now,” Compton says. The team members stand together in solidarity, with comforting pats on Epps’s shoulder.

Bravo

Bravo

Sitting at the Phlora + Phauna table, though, I would not have predicted this outcome. What else is there to do while waiting but to expect the worst? So often the show cuts from hungry diners to shots of the frantic kitchen, and I imagine that might be happening here. As we wait for our food, growing hungrier, we watch the cameras circling the food-filled judges’ table. I catch Kish taking a big look around the dining room. Is she simply charmed by the slick-haired man who’s commanding the front of house, or have the judges suspected that something’s off and are looking around the room for confirmation? I read drama into this, just as Top Chef has taught me.

Watching the episode back, it’s both and more. The judges find the slick-haired chef, Massimo Piedimonte of Montreal, a little much, his service too casual for the concept and somewhat uneven. Of course our server was confused about the Prosecco: Piedimonte had offered glasses to the judges as soon as they’d walked in. “But I noticed the group in front of us didn’t get that touch,” Colicchio says with a smirk.

By 6 p.m., food begins to hit all the tables, all at least one course behind the judges. For the first course, the collard greens consommé potlikker that’s served with smoked trout is poured tableside. As much as our table appreciates the showy touch, the broth’s temperature is confusing: not hot, but also not cold enough to count as chilled. The judges make no mention of this; they find the consommé “stunning.” The mushroom escovitch with Canadian bay scallop is delicious; the judges commend its subtlety. For the second course, the potato, celery root, and truffle pithivier is not particularly memorable. Colicchio shrugs that it’s “tasty.” The confit butternut squash with XO sauce and grilled pork is a stand-out, though the squash vastly outshines the pork. Zuccarini calls it the best squash she’s ever had. For dessert, there’s a corn crémeux with grilled blueberries and blueberry tuile, and a chocolate custard with parsnip puree and sherry vinegar; it’s easily our favorite course. The judges conclude that the entire meal was executed well.

There’s clearly a gap between our experience of the food and the judges’. The best dishes, like the squash and the desserts, were good, but I wouldn’t call them amazing: I’ve had better at most restaurants so surely the judges have, too. Some of it had to be the fact that the judges’ table got more attention than the rest of the diners. But while I’d previously — and now, I realize naively — assumed that the judges were offering earnest assessments, after this experience, I realize that they might have been hamming it up as much as Piedimonte during dinner. For television, it’s entirely on the judges to convey the quality of the food for diners who will never eat it — not just through words but also facial reactions. The dial on “praise” has to be turned up to prove to viewers that something was good. There’s likely some level of exaggeration to help tell the story.

By 6:50 p.m., comment cards hit the table. We know nothing about how these will factor into judging, if at all. Hoping not to tank anyone’s chances, our table mentions only that we really loved the desserts. And while I decide that the food tasted compelling, I don’t have enough context to understand whether it could be considered a definitive win. Later, we debrief with the Nonna Pipón crew and learn they’ve come to a similar conclusion.

I recognize now that I was bringing real restaurant expectations to the fake restaurant. In truth, everyone on the production end realizes that Restaurant Wars is its own weird world. “We’re not judging [that collard green dish] against every collard greens I have had in my life,” Colicchio tells me in an interview after shooting has ended. “I’m judging against the other team. It’s all on a scale.” Only when the competition is really close do they get to minutiae.

While watching the episode, I realize that I’d filtered my experience through the distorting lens of reality TV. I assumed a chaotic kitchen, an unclear leader. To an extent that was true, but ultimately, I expected interpersonal drama, because conflict is the Bravo way. Real life is nowhere near as heightened. The food is good, but it’s not necessarily memorable outside of the experience. People are tested by conflict, but they’re not all colluding against each other. If anything, the visit solidifies to me that Restaurant Wars is a true test of skill: It’s an unglamorous experience for all parties involved.

I’d come to Restaurant Wars to square reality and reality TV, knowing full well that sometimes knowing too much about something I love only makes me love it less. I’ve written about shows then stopped watching them entirely, all the magic gone. In this case, though, I needed the TV magic to help me reshape my perspective. The reality was more humanizing than my imagination. “Don’t ever feel like you have to be on,” Kish tells Epps during Judges’ Table. “This is real life too.” What will make this Restaurant Wars memorable — especially compared to the sea of 20+ similar episodes in this show’s lifetime — wasn’t the food, but the narrative arc. It was the four people who’d stepped up and supported each other — no TV egos, just actual empathy. And okay, one singular squash I’ll be thinking about for a long time.