Stephanie kicks everyone's butt!

Finally, a Top Chef winner that I can emphatically agree with -- and she's also a woman! Last night, Stephanie Izard took home the prize over evil, self-absorbed Lisa "who turned off my rice?!" Fernandes and creative but scattered Richard "I choked" Blaise. The Onion A.V. Club has a morning-after interview with Stephanie, in which she remains as cool and classy as she had been during the course of the show. It's a good read, and it's their #1 emailed article right now.

While the introduction to the interview mentions that Stephanie is the first female winner of Top Chef, they don't ask her to comment on that at all, and I'm struggling to figure out why there's such a glaring omission in the article. As this October 2007 New York magazine article makes abundantly clear, there aren't a whole lot of lady chefs running kitchens, and it's very acutely still a man's world behind the stove. When it takes four tries to find a qualified woman from an evenly gendered batch of contestants at the beginning of each season, and it's apparent that the profession skews male -- no matter how many women they feature on the program -- it makes a person scratch their head a little.

I suppose the fact that three women made it to the final rounds of competition this time is an encouraging sign, seeing as no one would have batted an eyelash if the genders had been flipped, as they were last season when Casey was the only woman to make it to the finale. Perhaps we're just supposed to chalk it up to the mix of contestants? Hmm... I've got just a little bit of trouble swallowing that one whole.

Still, the best part about Stephanie winning has nothing to do with her being a woman. It's because she was definitely the chef who deserved the prize above all the others. In the penultimate episode when Dale left her meat out overnight and ruined it, she didn't whine or blame or scream, she simply reworked her meal and ended up doing well enough for second place in the elimination challenge. She was always humble, and seemed genuinely surprised that she was the winner when Padma announced her name. When someone so classy gets to take home the prize, you can't help but be happy for them, no matter what gender they are.