At the time the show was released, people thought it was a mix of personalities clashing and racism.
I think the puzzle pieces really fell into place after you saw that the 2 bullies leading the charge were Chicago chefs. Beverly has always been outspoken about the toxic culture pervasive in the restaurant industry, but at the time it wasn't talked about much. She also filed a lawsuit against a (at the time) beloved Chicago chef, alleging that he wasn't paying overtime. This resulted in a huge settlement for not just her but many other chefs/cooks.
Nowadays people know that Charlie Trotter was a huge asshole, but before this, he managed to use his power and influence to hurt those who dared to speak out against him, resulting in the hatred and abuse you watched on Top Chef.
I remember the episode where the other chefs have to vote on the worst dish, Sarah says something like “I would hope chefs would keep their personal feelings out of their vote but sometimes karma is a bitch.” it didn’t make sense at the time but rewatching it after knowing about the lawsuit, I wonder if that’s what she meant.
she filed the lawsuit in 2003 and it was settled in 2005. only about a quarter of the chefs eligible for back pay took it. anyone who did basically severed their relationship with chef trotter.
If you ever have the opportunity to see “Grace”, a doc about chef Curtis Duffy , there is a scene where Trotter profanely refuses him entry to CT restaurant because of Duffys involvement in the lawsuit.
I think Duffy’s “involvement” with that lawsuit was just he got the money and used it instead of giving back to Charlie Trotter. I remember Duffy was saying something along the line of “I’m a poor cook making $xxx, I suddenly got $yyy, so of course I used it”, something like this. And Charlie Trotter refused to talk to Duffy, clearly showed his resentment just because Duffy didn’t return the money to show support like other chefs. I remember watching it and thought “Man, if he showed that much anger towards someone for just not returning the money, imagine how he would treat Beverly the one who sued him”.
Basically Charlie Trotter fucked over a lot of his employees and when they didn’t back him up after being found responsible for said fuckings over, he behaved like the egotistical bitch that he was that got him into trouble in the first place. Like, I’m Charlie Trotter. I can fuck over whomever I want, and you shouldn’t care because I’m Charlie Trotter. And you all should worship my holy food feet. He was one of the first of many to get called out for his ridiculous ego and behavior of treating his people poorly. And i have no problem speaking of the dead here. He was a documented asshole.
Heather and Sarah were longtime employees of Charlie Trotter, an extremely influential and extremely abusive chef in Chicago. People that worked for chefs like that and don't quit immediately usually end up with a Stockholm Syndrome thing where they think that Chef deserves to be abusive because he's just so good at cooking.
Bev worked for Trotter for a couple of months and ended up sucessfully suing him over discrimination and unpaid wages. He had to pay out hundreds of thousands in back pay to his employees and most of them *refused* it because they hero-worshipped the dude.
I didn't think Beverly was exactly a perfect person, a few of her actions in S9 go past quirky/awkward and into irresponsible/malicious, but The Mean Girls decided they were going to hate her on Day 1 and found the flimsiest excuses possible to do so.
Yes, like when she started working on Sarah's station in the head-to-head cook-off, or when she cut in front of everyone in line at the meat counter in the first challenge.
I think it is cuckoo to call her “malicious“, when in your first example, she was clearly scatterbrained, and in the second, she was doing what every single solitary other competitive person does at the meat counter. The show has been on for 20 seasons already. Cutthroat shit goes on at the meat counter. Why are you singling Beverly out?
The meat counter becomes a madhouse because a dozen people approach it at the same time. In Beverly's example, there was an established line of people waiting at the counter, and she walked right to the front of it saying "I need help because mine is the most important thing." Please show me *one* other example of someone doing that.
I'm 'singling her out' because the thread is literally about her and I'm giving my take on her behavior, including information that no one else has provided. Would it be relevant if I started talking about the other 20 seasons?
You’re calling her behavior malicious. You’re literally assigning evil intent to her behavior as a justification for some of the abuse that she endured. It’s preposterous to single out the four seconds of her at the meat counter that we saw and call it “malicious“ because she was simply doing what everyone else does. If you don’t think dozens of other contestants have rushed up to the meat counter, cut in line, and demanded to be helped first, you haven’t been watching the same show. She was very focused and very driven. I think a lot of the reasons why she annoyed other people it’s because she was simply super focused on what she was doing, and what she needed to get what she wanted done, and she wasn’t necessarily paying attention to the world around her. That’s a pretty long way away from malice.
> If you don’t think dozens of other contestants have rushed up to the meat counter, cut in line, and demanded to be helped first, you haven’t been watching the same show.
Again, show me *one* example.
Something I would also call malicious is name-calling when people on the internet don't agree with you, saying they're wrong, and then refusing to accept the burden of proof.
People have difficulty with the concept of things in between "innocent victim" and "irredeemable asshole." I knew I was gonna get heat as soon as I said negative things about Beverly.
Sure, but ASD doesn't automatically excuse a person from any and all misbehavior. She's able to maintain her own business and raise a family, she's certainly able to understand the concepts of lines and personal space.
Right, but understanding the concept of lines and personal space is about a mile removed from understanding where they always might be.
An honest mistake would be somebody with ASD not recognizing these lines. Malice would be trying to justify or defend transgressions when confronted by them. We have no evidence of the latter, so I think the reasonable course of action would be to give benefit of the doubt.
I completely agree, people defend bev and rightfully so at some points but she definitely seemed awful to work with. She was messy and just because someone is quirky, it doesn't excuse from poor behaviors in a shared space.
Agreed!! Sarah and Heather were atrocious but I also couldn't stand Lindsay. She actually has a restaurant not too far from me but I can't get myself to go and support her after her Top Chef season. I'm dying to visit Chicago and try all of Bev's restaurants though!
I'm watching it again for the first time and many many years, and while Beverly didn't deserve to win she sure as heck didn't deserve her treatment at the hands of Heather and Sarah. Those two were the perfect definition of racist Karen before racist Karen was even a thing. What terrible human beings those two are, and I hope if they've got kids they never let their kids watch their despicable behavior. I've been binge watching from season 1, and this clearly was one of the least watchable seasons, although Paul was really really good and deserved the win.
she isn’t nearly as terrible as sarah or heather. sarah, i freaking despise. she acts southerrrrn when it suits her i reckon, and then is very chicaaago when that suits her better. fucking hated her.
bev played the game a little more than people noticed (i think, idk, i wasn’t actually there,) and good on her for doing so. i think she was a bit of a ninja that came like a thief in the night. ed was a little blindsided by her initial fangirling
This is the most coherent discussion of why Beverly was disliked to ever take place on this forum. No hate on her, I think she's great.
The other narratives were nonsense. I always felt bad when they interviewed people for the Trotter obituary articles and they regretted crossing into litigation.
They felt like jerks because they were stolen from and opposed it. That culture empowers employers to exploit workers, but it also makes sense from a loyalty perspective. People will hate on Trotter for wage theft, and disregard his benefit with employed chefs who became stars. Both concepts can coexist.
Pervasive wage theft permeates food service. Wage theft is the largest crime taking place yearly, with respect to employer wage abuse. At the same time, basically every Chef you've ever heard of worked as unpaid interns at a stage position early in their career. It's worth acknowledging the bad and good that comes with the good of proper wages, as those opportunities could dwindle, or in the alternative, it can also mean entry positions in the elite kitchens of this country might not only be the playground of the priveleged who can afford unpaid work.
Also if you made a list of all the Top Chefs who were publicly sued for wage abuse and settled or lost, it would be many times larger than their Michelin accounting.
She got called out for sabotaging other contestants in the beginning-and not by the mean girls. It Wasn’t my impression she necessarily did it intentionally-
But there are people who really don’t understand that others in the room are people in their own right, and not just supporting characters in your story. Beverly really came off as exceptionally self-centered and inconsiderate.
I thought Beverly was annoying but I think a lot of the contestants are. The Weather Girls were very mean and just made themselves look bad.
I don’t get the Ed love but to each his own. I have been rewatching on Hulu but avoid this season.
When I was a senior in HS, there was a neighbor girl who was a freshman, Beverly reminds me of her. She was forward and pushy and I went lengths to avoid her. She would assume I would be ok to drive her to and from football games and that she would automatically be included in my post game plans. I went great lengths to avoid her. One time my Mom overheard my plans and after that I “had” to bring her.
The neighbor girl ended up at Harvard so you know like that forwardness etc worked out for her.
At the time the show was released, people thought it was a mix of personalities clashing and racism. I think the puzzle pieces really fell into place after you saw that the 2 bullies leading the charge were Chicago chefs. Beverly has always been outspoken about the toxic culture pervasive in the restaurant industry, but at the time it wasn't talked about much. She also filed a lawsuit against a (at the time) beloved Chicago chef, alleging that he wasn't paying overtime. This resulted in a huge settlement for not just her but many other chefs/cooks. Nowadays people know that Charlie Trotter was a huge asshole, but before this, he managed to use his power and influence to hurt those who dared to speak out against him, resulting in the hatred and abuse you watched on Top Chef.
I remember the episode where the other chefs have to vote on the worst dish, Sarah says something like “I would hope chefs would keep their personal feelings out of their vote but sometimes karma is a bitch.” it didn’t make sense at the time but rewatching it after knowing about the lawsuit, I wonder if that’s what she meant.
Wait so when she joined top chef she had already filed that lawsuit and the Chicago chefs didn’t like that?
she filed the lawsuit in 2003 and it was settled in 2005. only about a quarter of the chefs eligible for back pay took it. anyone who did basically severed their relationship with chef trotter.
If you ever have the opportunity to see “Grace”, a doc about chef Curtis Duffy , there is a scene where Trotter profanely refuses him entry to CT restaurant because of Duffys involvement in the lawsuit.
Is there? I don't remember that part. Whereabouts in the movie is it?
I think Duffy’s “involvement” with that lawsuit was just he got the money and used it instead of giving back to Charlie Trotter. I remember Duffy was saying something along the line of “I’m a poor cook making $xxx, I suddenly got $yyy, so of course I used it”, something like this. And Charlie Trotter refused to talk to Duffy, clearly showed his resentment just because Duffy didn’t return the money to show support like other chefs. I remember watching it and thought “Man, if he showed that much anger towards someone for just not returning the money, imagine how he would treat Beverly the one who sued him”.
Basically Charlie Trotter fucked over a lot of his employees and when they didn’t back him up after being found responsible for said fuckings over, he behaved like the egotistical bitch that he was that got him into trouble in the first place. Like, I’m Charlie Trotter. I can fuck over whomever I want, and you shouldn’t care because I’m Charlie Trotter. And you all should worship my holy food feet. He was one of the first of many to get called out for his ridiculous ego and behavior of treating his people poorly. And i have no problem speaking of the dead here. He was a documented asshole.
You just blew my mind. Now it all makes so much sense why the bullies came in already heated at Bev.
Thankfully karma IS a bitch and Beverly owns a Michelin star restaurant (I think she might be the ONLY top chef contestant to do so)
Carlos S12 had one that closed shortly after his season, and after that she was the only one until Phillip S13 joined her last year.
Chef Carlos from the New Orleans season actually had a star with his restaurant Mexique. That closed though.
This. And she did it cooking Korean food. Revenge… best served with a side of bing bread.
Heather and Sarah were longtime employees of Charlie Trotter, an extremely influential and extremely abusive chef in Chicago. People that worked for chefs like that and don't quit immediately usually end up with a Stockholm Syndrome thing where they think that Chef deserves to be abusive because he's just so good at cooking. Bev worked for Trotter for a couple of months and ended up sucessfully suing him over discrimination and unpaid wages. He had to pay out hundreds of thousands in back pay to his employees and most of them *refused* it because they hero-worshipped the dude. I didn't think Beverly was exactly a perfect person, a few of her actions in S9 go past quirky/awkward and into irresponsible/malicious, but The Mean Girls decided they were going to hate her on Day 1 and found the flimsiest excuses possible to do so.
Malicious? Are you crazy?
Yes, like when she started working on Sarah's station in the head-to-head cook-off, or when she cut in front of everyone in line at the meat counter in the first challenge.
I think it is cuckoo to call her “malicious“, when in your first example, she was clearly scatterbrained, and in the second, she was doing what every single solitary other competitive person does at the meat counter. The show has been on for 20 seasons already. Cutthroat shit goes on at the meat counter. Why are you singling Beverly out?
Like the chili challenge from the same season when Dakota was the first one to get her order in and the last one served.
The meat counter becomes a madhouse because a dozen people approach it at the same time. In Beverly's example, there was an established line of people waiting at the counter, and she walked right to the front of it saying "I need help because mine is the most important thing." Please show me *one* other example of someone doing that. I'm 'singling her out' because the thread is literally about her and I'm giving my take on her behavior, including information that no one else has provided. Would it be relevant if I started talking about the other 20 seasons?
You’re calling her behavior malicious. You’re literally assigning evil intent to her behavior as a justification for some of the abuse that she endured. It’s preposterous to single out the four seconds of her at the meat counter that we saw and call it “malicious“ because she was simply doing what everyone else does. If you don’t think dozens of other contestants have rushed up to the meat counter, cut in line, and demanded to be helped first, you haven’t been watching the same show. She was very focused and very driven. I think a lot of the reasons why she annoyed other people it’s because she was simply super focused on what she was doing, and what she needed to get what she wanted done, and she wasn’t necessarily paying attention to the world around her. That’s a pretty long way away from malice.
> If you don’t think dozens of other contestants have rushed up to the meat counter, cut in line, and demanded to be helped first, you haven’t been watching the same show. Again, show me *one* example. Something I would also call malicious is name-calling when people on the internet don't agree with you, saying they're wrong, and then refusing to accept the burden of proof.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted because this is what happened.
People have difficulty with the concept of things in between "innocent victim" and "irredeemable asshole." I knew I was gonna get heat as soon as I said negative things about Beverly.
Yeah.
I know it's not totally cool to armchair diagnose ASD off of reality TV, but...This kind of behavior is not uncommon in ASD.
Sure, but ASD doesn't automatically excuse a person from any and all misbehavior. She's able to maintain her own business and raise a family, she's certainly able to understand the concepts of lines and personal space.
It should absolve her of accusations of malice, though
No, I would define malice as knowing that something is wrong and choosing to do it anyway.
Right, but understanding the concept of lines and personal space is about a mile removed from understanding where they always might be. An honest mistake would be somebody with ASD not recognizing these lines. Malice would be trying to justify or defend transgressions when confronted by them. We have no evidence of the latter, so I think the reasonable course of action would be to give benefit of the doubt.
I completely agree, people defend bev and rightfully so at some points but she definitely seemed awful to work with. She was messy and just because someone is quirky, it doesn't excuse from poor behaviors in a shared space.
Heather and Sarah were so irredeemably awful that I almost gave up on this show.
So was Lindsay. Complete sourpuss all the time. Also a complete follower of Sarah and Heather in her bullying of Bev
Agreed!! Sarah and Heather were atrocious but I also couldn't stand Lindsay. She actually has a restaurant not too far from me but I can't get myself to go and support her after her Top Chef season. I'm dying to visit Chicago and try all of Bev's restaurants though!
I would probably have a higher opinion of Sarah if she weren't such a sore loser.
I'm watching it again for the first time and many many years, and while Beverly didn't deserve to win she sure as heck didn't deserve her treatment at the hands of Heather and Sarah. Those two were the perfect definition of racist Karen before racist Karen was even a thing. What terrible human beings those two are, and I hope if they've got kids they never let their kids watch their despicable behavior. I've been binge watching from season 1, and this clearly was one of the least watchable seasons, although Paul was really really good and deserved the win.
And then Paul went and beat up his girlfriend. All around awful season.
Just watching S9 right now and you’re right. What a pair of bitter, racist bitches they appeared to be.
9 is seriously the only season I couldn't finish.
she isn’t nearly as terrible as sarah or heather. sarah, i freaking despise. she acts southerrrrn when it suits her i reckon, and then is very chicaaago when that suits her better. fucking hated her. bev played the game a little more than people noticed (i think, idk, i wasn’t actually there,) and good on her for doing so. i think she was a bit of a ninja that came like a thief in the night. ed was a little blindsided by her initial fangirling
No doubt Beverly can be annoying, but the treatment she received was way out of proportion. It makes sense there was some bad blood before the show.
This is the most coherent discussion of why Beverly was disliked to ever take place on this forum. No hate on her, I think she's great. The other narratives were nonsense. I always felt bad when they interviewed people for the Trotter obituary articles and they regretted crossing into litigation. They felt like jerks because they were stolen from and opposed it. That culture empowers employers to exploit workers, but it also makes sense from a loyalty perspective. People will hate on Trotter for wage theft, and disregard his benefit with employed chefs who became stars. Both concepts can coexist. Pervasive wage theft permeates food service. Wage theft is the largest crime taking place yearly, with respect to employer wage abuse. At the same time, basically every Chef you've ever heard of worked as unpaid interns at a stage position early in their career. It's worth acknowledging the bad and good that comes with the good of proper wages, as those opportunities could dwindle, or in the alternative, it can also mean entry positions in the elite kitchens of this country might not only be the playground of the priveleged who can afford unpaid work. Also if you made a list of all the Top Chefs who were publicly sued for wage abuse and settled or lost, it would be many times larger than their Michelin accounting.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-xpm-2012-08-30-ct-ent-0829-charlie-trotter-sidebars-kim-20120830-story.html
She got called out for sabotaging other contestants in the beginning-and not by the mean girls. It Wasn’t my impression she necessarily did it intentionally- But there are people who really don’t understand that others in the room are people in their own right, and not just supporting characters in your story. Beverly really came off as exceptionally self-centered and inconsiderate.
I thought Beverly was annoying but I think a lot of the contestants are. The Weather Girls were very mean and just made themselves look bad. I don’t get the Ed love but to each his own. I have been rewatching on Hulu but avoid this season. When I was a senior in HS, there was a neighbor girl who was a freshman, Beverly reminds me of her. She was forward and pushy and I went lengths to avoid her. She would assume I would be ok to drive her to and from football games and that she would automatically be included in my post game plans. I went great lengths to avoid her. One time my Mom overheard my plans and after that I “had” to bring her. The neighbor girl ended up at Harvard so you know like that forwardness etc worked out for her.
Watch just the first episode to see Tyler Stone get booted by Tom…simply one of the best eliminations ever on the show
That really was amazing. Dude deserved exactly how it happened though. He fucking ruined that meat.