Season 15, for instance, offered up a tie-in with Top Chef Junior where contestants could only use kid-sized cooking tools, as well as a challenge where the chefs spent a cold and snow-covered night camping in the mountains, creating meals using only camping equipment.
This season also threw an additional wrench in the works by changing up its Last Chance Kitchen format, though it ended up being negligible when Lee Anne Wong had to leave the competition.
Over the course of its run, the Top Chef judges and challenge-creators have put hundreds of contestants through the wringer and then some, and later seasons have randomly upped the ante on how weird and uncomfortable some of the meal concepts can be.