Top Chef Masters is over, and Top Chef Minors has arrived. This is good, because baiting minor-league chefs in a live blog is much more fun than master-baiting. Let the minor-baiting begin!

Although I like to call it Top Chef Minors, the bores at Bravo actually call this show Top Chef: Las Vegas. The live blog takes place in the comments section below, where all are welcome to participate, and the show gets underway on Bravo at 10 pm Eastern.

That's 10 pm, by the way — not 9 pm like last week. On that score, I must commend Bravo's programmers for coming up with such a nifty idea: Airing the premiere episode an hour earlier than usual to trick as many potential viewers as possible into missing it. And by golly it worked! For the first time in Top Chef history, the premiere's total-audience number declined vs. that of the previous season. (Maybe next season they'll air the premiere at midnight. Just think how many viewers they could lose that way!)

Ah, but they didn't fool us … not we few, we lucky few, we band of live-bloggers! Oh no, we were there at 9 to cover the whole thing last week. Here are a few highlights:

  • We had fun coming up with names for dishes based on a personal vice (per the quickfire challenge). Examples included my own "Whore d'Oeuvres," la can's "Fried Greed Tomatoes," TedSez's "Vanilla Cheat Cake" and "Baked Stoned Crab," and (my personal favorite) Nice Beaver's "Masturbating to Thoughts of My First Cousin Rum Punch."
  • We heard this prawn-eating advice: "Don't forget to suck the head." I guess that's one way to honor the protein.
  • Commenter ronniedobbs worried that so many highly hair-gelled heads could pose a fire hazard — and also noted that there were enough tattoos on display to make the show look like Top Prison Chef.
  • We made a good start on the cheftestant nicknaming process with entries such as "Surplus" (from adiam7) "Heektor," (from PikaDar) and "Jersey Douche" (from katekate). Alas, one of the best nicknames — "Canyon Lobes" (from DahlELama) — can no longer be used now that ear-self-mutilating Jennifer Z. has packed her knives.

As for tonight, in addition to working further on the nickname front, I suggest we also bring back the "How Stoned Is Padma?" game we played last winter. (For those who don't remember the rules, I'll post them in comments.) Let's see if we can guess how much pot luck Padma had in Vegas!

The previews of tonight's episode, meanwhile, suggest that the show's producers will continue to mine ideas from shows of the past in their search for competition themes this season. After last week's quickfire borrowed a page from Let's Make a Deal, tonight's elimination challenge will feature a "battle of the sexes" theme similar to the one that debuted so many years ago on Survivor. (Remember Survivor? Does any body watch that show any more?)

Anyway, with that, this little pre-show tribal council over. Time to grab our torches and head back to camp — we've got a big night of live-blogging ahead of us.