Reality Roundup: Best Season Ever of Top Chef? Plus, SYTYCD Returns

We must discuss the dreamy Voltaggio brothers on Bravo's cooking competition, and the tap dominance on last night's installment of So You Think You Can Dance

Is anyone else enjoying this season of Top Chef as much as we are? Last night's French-cuisine challenge was just the latest highlight of this already delicious season—are you watching and drooling as much as we are?

Plus, So You Think You Can Dance returned for last night to brilliantly toy with our emotions!

We must discuss...

Top Chef

Credit for the massive appeal of this season of Top Chef goes to the contestants (and the ever badass Tom Colicchio, of course), but we think that four (and a half) good guys and one bad guy deserve particular credit.

The good guys are Jen, Kevin and the Volts. Jennifer Carroll is obviously a talented chef, but it was last week's efficient bossiness as executive chef on the Air Force challenge that won our hearts for good. We can't help but love a talented and capable woman who so effortlessly owns her own authority.

And then there's the Volts. Bryan and Michael Voltaggio are just a casting director's dream. When the Top Chef producers found out that there was not one, but two, tall, good-looking, blond, brooding, talented and hypercompetitive Volt brothers, they must have just about fallen out of their chairs. (BTW, is it just us or did any one else sense a little burgeoning chemistry between Jen and Michael V.? Between Jen's statement about how they don't need to talk in the kitchen, they just understand each other and always "feel" where the other is, and the way she was ever-so-subtly clutching the cuff of his chef's jacket while they were waiting for the results, it seems like they might be closer than we've realized.)

Our favorite Volt moment so far happened last week. Did you see how giddy Tom Colicchio got over Michael V.'s braised pork belly by way of slab bacon? Tom Colicchio does not get giddy, so you know there was something astonishing about that dish. Chef-crush!

Anyway, last but not least, we are crazy for this season because of adorable savant Kevin Gillespie and his sidekick Eli Kirshtein (that's the half-contestant above). Kevin is funny, sweet and self-effacing, not to mention a brilliant chef, and definitely our pick for season-six fan favorite unless one of the Volts suddenly becomes a chatty Cathy.

And who's the villain? Mike Isabella. God, what an utterly unctuous, arrogant, insecure, weasley jerk. Isabella is insufferable and totally unaware of how unappealing his snide attitude makes him. His food becomes beside the point, because you just want him to go down (hard) for being so unkind and smug. He's become little more than a pathetic Volt hanger-on, thanks to his previous work with one of brothers, but he should really stop that because he's getting his slime all over the pretty. Does anybody like Mike Isabella's stupid face? We're seriously interested to hear. Your reasoned defenses of Mike Isabella are welcome in the comments.

Isabella aside, though, there's serious star power on this season of Top Chef, not to mention ridiculously good-looking food, and we can't wait for next week!

So You Think You Can Dance

SYTYCD returned last night, for it's first-ever fall season, and it was the night of the tappers. Adam Shankman said that Ryan Kasprzak's (brother of season-fiver Evan) audition was the best in the history of the show, and we wouldn't go that far (we still have a spot in our hearts for William Wingfield's audition), but it was remarkable nonetheless. Tear-jerking, even.

But that wasn't all! We also got to see Ryan and Bianca Revels—whom we would call a perennial also-ran, if this weren't so obviously her year—in what we dance rubes would call a tap battle, but which tappers apparently call "trading." The educational side of SYTCYD auditions never fails to amaze.

And then to make things even more awesome another friend of Ryan's, Phillip Attmore, capped of the evening with an incredibly smooth tap audition.

We love 'em all, and wonder why Nigel has never had tap dance in the SYTYCD random-dance-assignment hat before. Tap's time has come.