Bravo’s Top Chef, you may have heard, has set its current season in Texas – namely rotating between the cities of San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin.  This is a departure from previous seasons which were each centered on a single city: San Francisco, Las Vegas, and New York among them.
The excuse for the change of pace is that Texas is just “too big” to have its season confined to one spot, but in reality the state tourism office paid Top Chef‘s production company $600,000 to feature San Antonio plus two other Texas cities. That money, however, didn’t teach Bravo how to differentiate between these locations.
A few weeks ago I was watching an episode and noticed that an exterior establishing shot of the Dallas skyline was used before cutting to a scene of the cheftestants in the house they occupied in San Antonio. An amusing one-time flub, I thought.
But during last night’s episode (full recap on SideDish), the final show of the season filmed in San Antonio, they did it again. Twice. The very first shot of the week’s new footage was the image you see above. Â Then halfway through the episode, coming back from commercial, they used the shot you see below. They must really love the Mercantile Building.
I went to school at Trinity University, which sits atop a hill overlooking downtown San Antonio. Dallas doesn’t look like downtown San Antonio. This is downtown San Antonio.
