Top Chef: Destination Canada is here. Can it capture our national cuisine?

It's an interesting time for the American show Top Chef to dig into Canada's cuisine.

Season 22 of the popular Bravo cooking competition, dubbed Top Chef: Destination Canada, features 15 new chefs (one of whom is Canadian) as well as host Kristen Kish and judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons. But amidst this current U.S.-Canada cultural tension, can the show do justice to our country's food scene?

Today on Commotion, culture writers Niko Stratis and Ivy Knight join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about whether the season succeeds at representing Canada — and whether the unique theme is enough to keep the longstanding series feeling fresh amongst newer food competition favourites.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Niko, how are you feeling about this season of Top Chef so far?

Niko: Good. Next question. No, it's good. When you hear, "Top Chef America is coming to Canada," in these, let's say, interesting times for the Canadian-American relationship, you never really know. But I was surprisingly excited about it. When I was watching, I was like, "Oh, they're doing a better job than I thought they would." Because when you hear somebody else is doing Canada, you're like, "Oh, this is going to be really bad. This is going to be like the Disneyland version of Canada that people tend to often do." And this time, at least, it felt a little bit more rounded out and robust…. I have a "Let's see where this goes," feeling, which I wasn't expecting to have.

Elamin: Ivy, you were at the premiere in Toronto last Thursday. Tell me about the vibe of the premiere of the show. What were people talking about? 

Ivy: The vibe was hyped up. Everyone was super excited. Olivia Chow kicked things off by very adamantly stating that we are not the 51st state…. And then Tom Colicchio made a point of saying that Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America, and that he didn't vote for Trump. And Gail Simmons said it was impeccable timing for the show to come to Canada, given the political conversation that's happening right now.

Elamin: The idea that Top Chef: Destination Canada is launching … it is this interesting time to sort of look at how Canada is represented through American media, and also having a big American show come to the country. How do you feel about the way that they represented Canada in the show, Ivy? 

Ivy: I was thrilled because, like Niko said, I didn't want to see the Disney version — poutine and maple syrup too heavily represented. The humble lentil got a shining moment. Dale Mackay from Saskatchewan was there to present the lentil. Poor guy, I was like, "Ugh, the lentil. How lame." And then it ended up really shining, and getting roasted and ground and turned into this cracker that looked fantastic, that everybody was raving about. So that was cool. 

Elamin: You know what you don't hear very often are the words "the humble lentil," Niko.

Niko: The humble but mighty lentil. 

Elamin: Yeah. I mean, like, shout out lentils. Having said this, I do think that there's something about the way that you think about the representation of Canada, or what an American audience might expect to see when they see a show that is set in Canada. You know, 15 chefs enter the kitchen. They walk by a wall of maple syrup bottles outlined by a gigantic maple leaf. When you see that, do you go, "Oh no, this will go in a bad way." Or do you kind of go, "I trust Top Chef. They know what they're doing. This will go OK"? 

Niko: I mean, yeah, that extremely subtle motif of the maple leaf holding maple syrup? Like, you might as well have had a Mountie there pointing and saying, "See?" But I will say that they made a point to be like, "We are going to showcase these five regions of the country." They highlighted the North, which when people talk about Canada and— this happens in Toronto all the time: when people say "the North," they're talking about North Ontario, because they never think of anything beyond that barrier. 

I was a little bit thrown off when I saw the maple leaf holding the syrup and I was like, "Oh, this is going to go badly." But I think they then immediately were setting the table … and I think they did a good job of being like, "OK, we're going to do more. We're going to showcase the North. We've got a chef from Nunavut here. We're going to do these things that show the country as a more robust version of itself." And this is the time to really do that, right? Because so often the outside perception of Canada is like, "Oh, the place that has Toronto, Montreal and maybe Vancouver." But they forget that the prairies exist. They forget that there is eastern Canada. They forget the North almost entirely, you know? So it's really nice to see that those areas not only got attention, but the most love in the show.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Nikky Manfredi.