I love watching Top Chef, even though the food doesn’t appeal to me. I think I’m just a TV junkie and I’ll watch pretty much anything.  After seeing the previews for last night’s episode, I was super excited because I know that Natalie Portman is a vegetarian and I was pretty sure the challenge was a vegetarian one.  Yippee!!  I’ve been waiting for them to do a vegetarian challenge.

The episode was a major disappointment, though.  The contestants were quite obviously out of their comfort zone and the idea of cooking something vegetarian clearly rattled most of them.  Seriously, though, coming up with a vegetarian dish is a cake walk, especially if you are an accomplished chef.  A real challenge would have been to make them come up with a vegan meal.  In fact, I sort of though Natalie Portman was vegan, but I guess not.  Actually, it says here that she went vegan in 2009 after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals. And here is an article that she wrote about her reasons for going vegan.

In defense of the contestants, the twist that the meal was to be vegetarian was revealed at the last minute.  They were not allowed any time to come up with a concept for their dish and they were stuck using whatever was stocked in the restaurants’ kitchen already.

Now, I’ve been in the situation where I’ve gone to a restaurant to find that they didn’t even offer one vegetarian dish, let alone vegan.  In that instance, I had called ahead the day before (since I had no control over the choice in restaurants) and spoke with the chef who told me they would accommodate me.  Pasta.  With mushrooms.  And it wasn’t that good, but at least I had something to eat.

I guess I was hoping that this episode may change peoples’ perspective of what vegetarians actually eat, but was disappointed that the chefs themselves were unclear.  They seem to think that all we eat is vegetables, judging from the dishes they produced and what they said during their interviews.  For the most part, the only food group represented was vegetables.  What happened to beans and legumes or grains?  One person made a dish with lentils and one other person used garbanzo beans.  Disappointing.