Hasta La Ideas

An ad for the new season of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters and the Chip Kidd-designed cover of A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs. (Photos: UnBeige and Macmillan)

Although we probably won’t be able to stomach Bravo’s newest reality show, Work of Art, we’ll never lose our taste for Top Chef. Wednesday saw the debut of the second season of the show’s popular “Masters” version, in which celebrity “chef-testants” endure challenges involving gas station grub, wacky themes, and evil twists (surprise! you’ll be serving this meal underwater!). Bravo knows its core audience and tends to bombard major cities with advertising when a season premiere is nigh. In New York City, buses and outdoor ads for Top Chef Masters featured a clever design concept that whetted our appetite for the show and seemed somehow familiar. Our brain immediately summoned the anthropomorphic fork dreamed up by Chip Kidd for the cover of A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs‘ 2008 memoir of his terrifying father. In other Kidd news, the designer (clad in fetching embroidered trousers, no less) made the front page of Sunday’s New York Times when the paper’s Motoko Rich reported that Kidd has teamed up with Preppy Handbook editor and co-author Lisa Birnbach on a preppy sequel due this September.

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