Top Chef

Top Chef Season 6: Will Natalie Portman Make Up for the Lack of Chicago Cheftestants?

Bravo’s announced the lineup for season 6 of their perennially champion brain-suck Top Chef, which is super exciting to us, but there’s nary a Chicago name in the bunch, which is not. Among the far-flung cheftestants (Haiti! San Francisco! Philadelphia!) perhaps the closest to home is Eve Aronoff, a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is the chef-owner at an eponymous restaurant. At least we can be distracted from the lack of culinary civic representation by this season’s glittering array of guest judges (some of whom you’ll recognize from the currently-airing Top Chef Masters): Wolfgang Puck, Todd English, Natalie Portman, Daniel Boulud, Penn & Teller, Hubert Keller, Laurent Tourondel, Tim Love, Michelle Bernstein, Tyler Florence, Charlie Palmer, Paul Bartolotta, Nigella Lawson, and Jerome Bocuse will all be working overtime to try to overcome the black hole of scripted annoyance that is Toby Young (yes, he’s back).You can check out a complete rundown of cheftestants over at our sibling blog Grub Street New York, where they go into way more detail than we are currently capable of wrapping our brain around. [Grub Street NY]

[Photos courtesy Bravo]

Top Chef Season 6: Will Natalie Portman Make Up for the Lack of Chicago