‘Top Chef: Charleston’: We share our pick for season 14 winner
On Bravo tomorrow night, the latest season of “Top Chef” will premiere on Bravo; while we were hesitant about the whole newbies vs. returning chefs premise at the center of it, we’ve enjoyed watching some of the trailers and previews and feel like the essence of the show you know and love is still very much there.
What we’re also doing as we ramp up our coverage for this season is something that we’ve never done before, and that is pinpointing a specific person who we think has what it takes to rise to another level, and really emerge as a significant threat to win this entire series. We’ve done winner picks over the years with “Survivor” and many other series, but it’s a little bit of a fun experiment to try that here and see how exactly that shapes out.
Before revealing the name, let’s get into our thought process here for a minute. Obviously, we weren’t going to pick someone who was a newbie, given that these people all are entering the game with enormous disadvantages that will be incredibly difficult to overcome. Meanwhile, we’re also not going to pick someone who received somewhat of a pot-stirrer edit the first time around, given that we feel like these people were cast to fulfill a similar role.
We’re not going to pick someone who was eliminated too early the first time around, and we’re going to pick someone who we thought was probably going to win her previous season. Odds are, you know who we’re picking at this point.
Brooke Williamson is our winner pick for season 14.
If you go back to “Top Chef: Seattle,” we had a hard time envisioning a way for her to lose that season. She was dominant in several challenges, and in particular won three of them in a row moving into the end of the road. What she did not expect as to run into the “Last Chance Kitchen” steamroller known as Kristen Kish, who pulled off the biggest underdog story in the history of the show.
Brooke’s been as active in food as ever in the past few years since the show, and we definitely don’t think she’d subject herself to this madness again unless she was incredibly confident that she could pull this out again. Basically, there’s zero reason to doubt that she could do this. The only issue she may run into is that she could be viewed as a threat and targeted in some way because of it. Luckily, that doesn’t always happen on this show, mostly because there aren’t always opportunities that present themselves for this sort of thing to happen.
We’ll see how Brooke fares over the coming weeks, but for now we feel good about it since we know she’s got the total package and few discernible weaknesses. Her story almost could be comparable to Richard Blais before All-Stars, and we know how that turned out.
Do you have a winner pick for this season of “Top Chef”? Be sure to share in the comments, and be sure to head over here to get some other news related to the new season. (Photo: Bravo.)