There's More to Wisconsin Than Beer and Cheese, Top Chef

It’s rare for Bravo’s Top Chef to dedicate a whole season to a particular state, with the majority of its 21 seasons being filmed in perpetually trendy foodie-famous cities (like Boston or New York or Miami or Los Angeles). It’s easier to capture the food scene of one city through the show’s usual lineup of thematic challenges than it is to do that for an entire state — something that Season 21 proves in its trip to Wisconsin.

That’s not to say this season of the long-running reality show, which is just about half over now, has been a disaster, because it hasn’t. But it also doesn’t seem to embrace the spirit of a season that’s being billed as Top Chef: Wisconsin.

The show could do Wisconsin-themed challenges anywhere, and it probably would’ve been easier (Top Chef can only do so much in a state with just three Whole Foods locations), so it’s a waste of a somewhat unique setting — if there’s a way to say that without it sounding condescending — that the show doesn’t seem to have put a ton of thought into what makes this Top Chef: Wisconsin beyond filming in the Dairy State. 

Of course, if Wisconsin is known for one thing, it’s cheese. If it’s known for a second thing, it’s beer. So it was hardly surprising that Top Chef’s second episode this season was about beer and cooking with hops, and the third episode was about putting on a cheese festival. The cheese episode was odd for a couple of reasons, mainly because a lot of the chefs didn’t know what to do with cheese. It’s as if it didn’t occur to them that Top Chef in Wisconsin might involve a cheese challenge, leading to the most utterances of the word “croquette” in the span of one hour in the history of television.

Also, as briefly pointed out by contestant Dan Jacobs (who lives in Wisconsin), Milwaukee doesn’t have a cheese festival and so, in his mind, it makes sense for Top Chef to be putting one together. But, in pointing that out, he listed off a handful of annual festivals that Milwaukee does have (Germanfest, Festa Italiana, Summerfest), any one of which could’ve inspired a challenge that would at least be a little more thoughtful than “I dunno, let’s do cheese.”

This disconnect between real Wisconsin and Top Chef’s version of Wisconsin became more apparent in the show’s recent two-episode trip out west to Madison. The challenge inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright was smart, and the kind of thing the show should be doing more of (though real ones know that Wisconsin’s more interesting architect was famous weirdo Alex Jordan Jr., creator of the iconic House On The Rock tourist trap and the bearer of a lifelong one-sided rivalry with Wright), but it was otherwise a poor sampling of what the state capitol has to offer. 

The chefs were given a Quickfire Challenge that involved buying ingredients at Madison’s Dane County Farmers Market, and while Top Chef made a passing reference to the weekly event’s popularity (it is the largest producer-only farmers market in the country), the show made it seem like a much more casual affair than it typically is. Worse than that, one of the chef’s joking that the people of Madison were “in for quite a surprise” when the Top Chef crew hit the streets that morning was one of the few times the show came across as overly condescending toward the state it’s calling home this season.

20,000 people pack into Madison’s Capitol Square every week, ambling from booth to booth and effectively making a whole day of it — not because it’s a relaxing way to spend a Saturday (though the show oddly implied a few times that it happens on Sundays), but because it takes all day to walk the whole thing and to get through all the crowds. Top Chef is a big deal, sure, but it presumably didn’t come to Wisconsin so it could show itself to the state, it wanted to show the state to Top Chef viewers.

Either way, the Dane County Farmers Market is a perfect setting for a Top Chef Quickfire, because it’s such a hectic, food-based environment, and if it weren’t a logistical nightmare, Top Chef could’ve/should’ve just dropped a handful of tables into the Capitol Square and drawn some natural drama from the environment. Instead, after the chefs bought ingredients from local vendors, they were brought to a nearby rooftop to cook. While they got a great view, it created a pretty literal delineation between Top Chef’s depiction of Wisconsin and the actual state of Wisconsin.

There’s still plenty of time for Top Chef: Wisconsin to course-correct, and maybe it will now that the boring, obvious stuff (cheese and beer) has already been covered. Let’s get a challenge based on Wisconsin’s history of horrible gerrymandering, or have the chefs prepare a meal while going down one of Wisconsin Dells’ many waterslides, or task them with creating a version of the Culvers Curderburger that actually tastes good. That would end up being another cheese challenge, but alright… people in Wisconsin do love cheese.

New episodes of Top Chef: Wisconsin air Wednesdays at 9:00 P.M. ET on Bravo. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Sam Barsanti has written about pop culture for 10 years. He canonically exists in the Arrowverse.