“Tournament Of Champions: All-Star Christmas” Is Fun Times

HOLLYWOOD-When this series first premiered several years back it was one of my favorites because it took the best chefs in the country and forced them to compete against one another in a bracket style tournament. The first season was amazing because you saw titans of chefs being knocked out by underdogs. With that said, Guy Fieri’s “Tournament of Champions” started to get a bit stale as we entered season 5, and season 6 was just dreadful. Why? It was some of the worst editing I had witnessed that made it so obvious who was winning each round and the judging just wasn’t great for me. NOTE TO FOOD NETWORK: please work on your editing because some of those battles made it so clear who was winning it took the fun out of things. What does that mean? I shouldn’t know the winner before the judging even takes place. With that said, we had something unexpected with “Tournament of Champions: All-Star Champions” that witnessed some top tier candidates’ ones that we have not seen in the competition in a long time like Alex Guarnaschelli, Aaron Sanchez, Marcus Samuelsson, Shirley Chung, the Voltaggio brothers, Marcel Vigneron, Damaris Phillips and Aarti Sequiera return to the foray. Those were some faces we haven’t seen compete in a while. We did get our usual competitors in Mei Lin and Nini Nyguen, Jet Tila, Lee Anne Wong, Tobias Dorzon, Adam Sobel, Britt Rescigno, Kevin Lee, Sara Bradley, Amanda Freitag, Maneet Chauhan, Stephanie Izard and Antonia Lofaso. However, things are different this time around is two dishes have to be made. One is sweet, the other is savory. So, we have esteemed pastry chefs like Sherry Yard and Zac Young competing alongside titans. Yeah, it is damn fun to witness, but I’m about to go off on one of the battles that was so obvious WHO WON and WHO SHOULD HAVE WON, only for them to win against to titans of chefs that didn’t bring their best. Aarti and Christa should have won that battle against Antonia and Alex. I mean we had a tied score, not to mention the plating on Aarti and Christa’s dishes just looked stellar in my opinion. It feels like “Tournament of Champions” is in this era where they don’t want to have the upsets they had in the first 2-3 seasons of the series. Hey, that is what made the series so much fun. If it becomes obvious; it is not so much fun anymore if you ask me. I loved some of the combinations in the battles so far at this point that just seemed crazy. However, I think it’s time for the series to mix things up even more at this point. There needs to be another layer of mayhem to the game to make it more unpredictable because it has gotten a bit stale at this point and it’s not as exciting as it has been before in the past. How about a top seed GETTING to choose who they battle after a victory or such. Shake up things in a way that the competitors and audience do not see it coming. New episodes air Wednesdays at 8 p. m. on The Food Network.
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