Cheftestant Showdown: Top Chef Recap, 6/16 Episode

Top Chef is, hands down, my favorite reality show.  Before I delve any further into this season's premiere, I would like to pose three questions:

1. Where did Eric Ripert come from?  And more importantly, where have I been?  I pride myself on staying up-to-date with all the major food blogs, and I don't recall reading about him joining the judges' table.  No matter; welcome, chef.
2. What happened to the Glad family of products?  I'm not sure why they dropped out and Dial jumped in.  What does body wash have to do with cooking?
3. The Bachelor?  Stick to your own reality show.

Now for the recap.  I've created a set of criteria to determine the frontrunners of the season.  Let's see how our cheftestants are faring after episode #1 (all on a scale of 1-5):

• Angelo
• Innovation: 4 - The man made pasta out of potatoes that wasn't gnocci during the quickfire
• Drool Factor: 3 
• Chef Likability: 2 - Loses major points for extreme cockiness and excessive name dropping.  The only reason he didn't get a zero in this category is because his food backed it all up.
• Kenny
• Innovation: 3 - Cinnamon and coffee would not cross my mind as a rub for trout, but it looked yummy.
• Drool Factor: 3 
• Chef Likability: 4 - Not only did he seem nice and talented, the man was a downright machine during the quickfire.
• Kevin
• Innovation: 1 - Nothing new
• Drool Factor: 1
• Chef Likability: 2 - His restaurant is called Rat's.  In my experience, rats are the one thing you don't want in a restaurant.
• Arnold
• Innovation: 3 - Not sure if that cake was sweet or savory, but it looked yummy
• Drool Factor: 2
• Chef Likability: 0 - You may think his crazy dancing is funny.  I happen to find him incredibly annoying.  
• Alex
• Innovation: 5 - I'm very intrigued by deconstructed dishes and this one had that wow factor.
• Drool Factor: 4 - I drool over unique stuff
• Chef Likability: 1 - I don't dislike him, just don't know anything about him

In future episodes, I'll touch on more chefs, but since this was only the first episode and there are 17 chefs, I was a little too overwhelmed to talk about every dish/chef.  

Aaaand now I'm hungry.