Season 3 of Top Chef is set in Miami. We know this because the first episode kicks off with establishing shots of beach scenes and bikini crotches, set to “tonka tonka tonka” meringue music. Whenever TV shows are set in Miami, they make a big deal about it being “spicy” and “sexy,” like the second you cross city lines you’re given a silk shirt and forced to join a conga line. Whenever I’ve been in Miami, all I’ve seen are pasty sock-and-sandal-wearing tourists, drunken college students, and the elderly.

The show immediately launches into a flurry of introductions of the competitors. At the start of any of these reality shows, I think it’s important to identify who you’re rooting for. In other words, who’s hot or gay (and best of all, both).

Fortunately, we have help, thanks to some advance word from former Queer Eye food guru and soon-to-be guest judge Ted Allen. In his recent AfterElton interview, Ted said that Dale from Chicago is “someone that our community will come to know and love very well.” This was his very polite way of saying that Dale is a big ‘mo – meaning he has a pretty unfortunate mini-mohawk that makes him look like he’s on his way to a costume party dressed as a paintbrush.

Even though no one makes mention of his “community” in this first episode, you’d probably guess it easily enough by his three seconds in the opening credits where he’s wearing an interesting shirt and does a little dance with his hands on his hips.

Also, on the official website, his bio says, “He loves the fact that the other contestants could be ‘out-cooked by a queer’." While I appreciate the fact that he’s so openly out and proud, the sentiment seems a bit off here. At this point, gay guys have won or gotten pretty far in reality shows where they have to do things like wield machetes and kick the crap out of people, so it’s not going to be much of a shock if one can cook, you know what I mean? Unless it’s a show about who can bed the most women the fastest, or who can vote for the most Republicans, it’s not going to be a surprise if the gay guy does any better than anyone else. But I don’t want to be tough on Dale because he seems like a decent guy and I’d like him to go very, very far in this game.

Ted also mentions that a guy named Tre from Dallas is the hottest, and Ted, I am with you on this one. Also hot, some guy named Brian from San Diego. We don’t get to know him very well in this episode, but I still hope he gets very far in this game because I want to see him take his shirt off. Tre doesn’t take his shirt off but does roll up his sleeve to reveal a boring tattoo that says, “You gotta have passion.” Bizarrely, the clip of the tattoo is clearly from his audition tape, as if the producers were too shy to ask him to show it on camera again. He talks with a lot of confidence but somehow doesn’t come across as obnoxious …

… unlike Hung, from Las Vegas, who self-identifies as a “CPA … Certified Professional A-hole” – and boy is that truth in advertising. He spends much of the episode spouting macho, Machiavellian b.s. about not being there to make friends and being there to win it and crowing about how brilliant he is and blah blah I’m completely full of myself blah blah my ego is bigger than a Viking stove blah blah. The worst part is that he seems to be right about all this, which means he’ll deprive me the satisfaction of seeing a jerkwad like him eliminated anytime soon…

… unless we get lucky and see Joey from New York sent packing. Ted mentions Joey as having been given the nickname Joey “Pickles,” which I think was his polite way of saying Joey is a prick. Joey takes great pride in being a “New Yawker,” and talks like he’s in Guys and Dolls. “This is Saturday night, New York city, rock and roll,” he says during one competition, like he’s suddenly channeling Billy Joel. He also says that if he wins, he’s giving the money to his mother, and that he’s a “big motherf-er,” a statement that pretty much contradicts the first one if you think about it. At one point, he gets all enraged because he sees a contestant being kind to a fellow competitor, which apparently makes you a pussy in his book. Nice.

That kindly contestant is named Micah, and even though she’s shown trying to comfort a guy named Clay, I don’t like her either. She yammers on pretentiously about food being art and Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, and when everybody else is told to make two dishes, she makes a big deal of making three. Basically, she comes across as the kind of goody-two-shoes who sits in the front row with her hand perpetually raised. In other words, she’s me in junior high school, and I hated me in junior high school.

The guy she tries to calm down is named Clay. He’s from the South and you can tell the producers are trying to portray him as some redneck doofus, but I thought he seemed kind of sweet. He’s clearly out of his element here, having never gone to culinary school, but he has this false sense of his own abilities, insisting he can win and be a great chef and make his father proud. His father, he tells us, was done in by the restaurant industry and committed suicide, and I really don’t know what to make of that information. There’s something very Blanche DuBois about the whole thing that, as you’ll see, gets only sadder as the episode goes on.

Well, that’s pretty much everybody. Oh, there’s also a bunch of other people, I guess, but they barely register, which is good for them, since the people who do register are inevitably the ones singled out by the judges for crappy food.

Everyone’s brought to the former Versace mansion for this giant Bar Mitzvah appetizer buffet, and could they have picked a more disturbing location? What, the Charlie Manson massacre house was booked? Everyone starts scarfing down the food and champagne, but then Tom Colicchio comes in. Let me say right now that I find Colicchio incredibly sexy. Let me also say that I plan on saying something highly complimentary of him in every recap with the hope he’ll give me free food the next time I’m in one of his restaurants. Padma is with him, and she’s also almost unbearably sexy. If I was keeping some kind of list of women I’d sleep with, she’d be on it.

Padma and Tom announce that the first Quickfire Challenge is about to begin! Competitors need to create an amuse bouche – a small starter appetizer – using whatever’s left on the buffet table in just 10 minutes. Everyone gasps, and it’s supposed to be like those seasons of Survivor where the cast got thrown off a boat in formal wear. Joey makes this sexist comment about the girls being forced to cook in high heels, like the only way anyone can cook is in ugly clogs wearing a starchy white shirt. Plus, I don’t think this is really cooking – it’s arranging food on plates creatively. And it confirms my worst suspicions about restaurants, that they’re carefully collecting all uneaten food, disguising it, and re-serving it to unsuspecting customers. Think about that the next time you order chicken salad.

Long story short, given that I hate her, Micah of course is singled out as the best. And given that I like them, Tre, Dale, and Clay are all singled out as the worst.

So the three of them go into the Elimination Challenge at a pretty big disadvantage. And I giggle like Beavis and Butthead every time I hear the phrase “Elimination Challenge,” like it’s a contest to see who can go to the bathroom the fastest. After they eat some of the dishes we see prepared, I think any one of the judges might win that one.

The contestants are shown a table of exotic ingredients they need to use in a surf and turf dish, and the ingredients are basically a sampling from the Miami Zoo – ostrich, kangaroo, alligator, snakes, and some nasty stuff from the ocean that looks like special effects from the Alien movies. The whole thing reminds me just how revolting most cooking shows are. And they keep referring to the ingredients as the “proteins,” like this is some kind of crazy Atkins plan. Maybe it should be, because if monkfish liver and rattlesnake were all I could eat, I’d lose weight faster than spoiled socialites get out of jail.

The judges, in addition to Padma and Tom, include Gail Simmons, the Food & Wine editor who strikes me as typical of many of the women I see in New York restaurants, the ones always changing tables or sending food back. They’re joined by celebrity guest judge Anthony “I’ll Eat Anything As Long As I Can Get Drunk at the Same Time” Bourdain. He’s worked really hard cultivating this bad boy chef image that’s clearly phony, really irritating, and incredibly sexy. (But no worries, Tom! He’s not even in your league.)

Anyway, long story short – Tre and Hung are picked as the best. Tre says he’s pretty certain that the two of them will be the final two, but he’s also really complimentary of Hung so he doesn’t sound like a total jerk. And I think he just might be right about his prediction, although I wonder if the editors would tip their hand this way when they could have so easily edited out that comment. Unless they know that we know that they want us to think that and … actually, I don’t care.

What I do care about is that Brian lives to take off his shirt another day. But for a while, it looks like he’s in serious trouble, as he’s picked as among the worst. His dish incorporates a snake and an eel, and it leads to hilarious comments from the judges, like Padma saying, “You could fry my toe and it would be tasty” (I so believe you Padma!), and Bourdain saying, “I did not want to see him fry that rattlesnake” (neither did I, believe you me).

Among the bad boys called to the cooking school principal’s office, Dale appears to be in trouble as well. After the contestants had to “draw knives” to determine the order they could select ingredients, he was last and forced to work with two ingredients he’d never even tasted. That just plain sucks and couldn’t have been easy for him. When he’s presenting his food to the judges, he makes a point of mentioning that he was forced to pick last . I think it probably wasn’t the smartest move, given the judges likely already know this and it just comes across as whiney. It’s also exactly the thing I would have done in that situation, except I also would have stamped my feet and shrieked “not fair” before storming off to pout in a corner. Anyway, even though his food is lousy, the judges apparently appreciate his eloquent explanation for why it’s lousy and he skirts by.

The big loser comes down to a battle between Clay, whose food the judges kindly refer to as “prison chow,” and some guy named Howie who ran out of time and didn’t put his second dish on the plate. So it becomes a philosophical debate between which is worse – bad food put on a plate or good food left off of a plate. The judges decide to eliminate Clay, and I really question that choice since at least he was able to get both his dishes on the freakin’ plate on time. I just don’t think an incomplete like Howie’s should count as a pass, you know? And I think Clay was pretty much made a patsy here by the producers. From the beginning, it was clear he had no place in this competition, the only one with no formal training (which the judges then criticize him for) among a highly professional group. The whole thing comes across as sad and mean, and it left a really bad taste, which for a cooking show is definitely not a good thing.

Next week: Knives! Hissy fits! Micah gets on Joey’s nerves! They both get on mine! Dale demands, DEMANDS!, to know who has pastry experience! Ted tastes food and does not look pleased!