LAmag.com

Watching Top Chef is fun. Trying to shop for groceries when Top Chef Masters is being filmed in your local market? Not so fun. Every episode of the Bravo reality show involves a juicy plug for Whole Foods in which the competing chefs are given a fixed budget and a fixed amount of time to race through the market and stock up on comestibles for an upcoming challenge.

My family and I were in the produce section at the Whole Foods in Pasadena Sunday afternoon when a black-shirted TV crew—multiple cameras, soundmen, and other personnel—marched through the entrance and fanned out like commandos taking a redoubt. As half the crew marched off to other precincts of the store, a cameraman ducked behind a stack of yams, his camera pointed at the doorway. If we were puzzled at first as to what was so compelling about those tubers, it all became a little clearer when a betoqued fellow with gray hair dashed into the market.

 “It’s Top Chef,” I told my seven-year-old daughter, Corey, who has taken a shine to watching chefs struggle under pressure on television (“Why do they keep making that beeping noise when they talk, Daddy?”). Moments later, the fellow was in the seafood section, where my wife and other daughter, Riley, were shunted aside so that the crew could get an uninterrupted shot of the chef placing his order for every last scallop in the house.

Short on time, my family abandoned the salmon order and headed for less trammeled turf upstairs, where we were intercepted by Susan Feniger (Street) trotting hurriedly for the camera into the bread section. Once we were finally given clearance to lob our pricey organic sandwich bread into the cart, we trundled to the butcher’s section, where were held at bay once more as a ponytailed chef (the crew wouldn’t let us get close enough to read his name tag) was looking surprised to hear that his meat would cost $52.

“Is this for Top Chef?” I asked one guy looking on from his post by the rice cakes with a clipboard in hand. “Uh, close,” he said with a thousand-mile stare. “What’s it for, then?” I asked, doing my best attempt at cheerfulness. Without lowering his gaze from the action before him, he broke it to me gently. “I…I can’t really say.”(Apparently, adding the word “Masters” to the end of the title would have blown their cover.) On the bright side, with so much action at the meat counter, we were able to get a clear shot at the fish monger downstairs.

Our basket full, we circumnavigated chef Rick Moonen (RM Seafood) scrambling before the lens with a pen sticking from his maw, and installed ourselves in the only short checkout line available. “This lane’s closed,” a guy with sunglasses and a two-way radio told us, gesturing to the chefs in line ahead of us. “Excuse me?” “This is closed,” he said again with the authority of someone who wears sunglasses and two-way radios indoors.

“They’re kind of rude,” my wife told the bag boy. “They’ve been here two weeks,” he said back, giving a knowing look. “I’m just rude right back to them.” Perhaps it’s time for Padma to tell the crew, “Please pack your cameras and go.”