As good as ever and set in New York, one of my favourite cities in the world. The producers of Hell's Kitchen must look at Top Chef and weep. This is how to make reality TV. This is how to make a TV food programme. Close to perfection.

If you're not familiar with Top Chef, the idea is simple: take 17 pro chefs, put them together in a house, each week has a quick fire challenge which gives one person immunity, follow that with the main challenge, after which one person loses and leaves.

Unlike the dreaded Ramsay programmes, this is not about some famous chef's ego or about abusing people. It's all about giving chefs the opportunity to show how good (or bad) they are. The skill levels range from someone still in the CIA (no not that CIA) to someone with twenty years experience.

Some are fantastic chefs, some are awful, some are great under pressure, others crumble. Some are terribly annoying people, others are sweethearts. They genuinely seem to try and get as wide  a sweep as possible. This is in total contrast to a show like Big Brother where the aim is to get as many ratings-growing lunatics as possible into a house.

The Top Chef approach gives them longevity. No hype, no nonsense (ok some of the tasks are silly), just great TV.

They kicked off with a bang. The very first challenge, before they even moved into the house, was to peel a bunch of apples. The loser would go home.

I was shocked to see pro chefs who clearly had no clue how to do this simple task. After peeling, the slowest did a face-off off on dicing and then finally the last few had to cook a simple dish with apple. Bye bye one of the mouthy ones.

The main task was to cook ethnic food. They were split into pairs to compete against each other with regional cuisine like Russian, Middle Easter etc. Most made a good job of it, a few screwed up totally but no-one was totally incompetent.

Because Tom Colicchio is the head judge, he has acess to genuine superstars to do the judging with him. These are no B-list "celebs", these are some of the greatest chefs in America who come on as guest judges. You can see the competitors quake.

There are clear signs, as always, of some real superstars and some probable donkeys. Looking forward to some great TV this winter!