Throng

7:30pm - Thursday, May 7 on TV 3

There's something special on the menu this week when the remaining three Top Chef chefs battle it out to cook the best meal of their lives and earn the prestigious title of Top Chef: New York. Top Chef crowns its fifth season winner on Thursday, May 7th on 7:30pm on 3.

Now in its fifth season Top Chef is one of the most popular reality series on television, but what did world-class chef and Top Chef head judge Tom Colicchio think of the popular series when he was first approached to do it?

"Two years before the first season, I got a call from a producer who wanted me to do a show called Faking It," Colicchio recalls to newyorkrestaurantinsider.com of his first introduction to a reality cooking series. "Essentially, I was supposed to teach someone how to cook in like one week, and they were gonna come in and run a kitchen. I told him 'not interested.'"

But someone out there knew that Colicchio was meant to be on television, even if the chef was reluctant to partake.

"Then I got a call from the producer of Project Runway, and she asked if I had heard of it and I said, 'Yeah, I'm familiar with it.' And she said 'Well, we're doing the same thing with food, and we really think you're the right guy to do this.' I said, 'Whatever.'

"So they sent someone over to interview me on video, and she said 'Can you do a screen test?' I said, 'No, I'm not doing a screen test!' She was like, 'Do you want this?' I said 'Not really!'

Even though Colicchio refused to partake in the screen test, the producers still knew they wanted him from his previous work.

"I said, 'This is what I'll do, I'll send you a DVD of something I did.' ABC News had done a production of the opening of Craft [restaurant], and it was supposed to air on Nightline [American]. After 9/11, they killed it, and it aired on PBS. So I said, 'I'll send you something, and you tell me what you think.' So I sent them the DVD, and they called back and said, 'We want you.'"

When the producers told Colicchio how the show was going to work, how serious they and the contestants were, and how Colicchio would get to be the authority, he couldn't resist. And when top-class chefs like Eric Ripert began ringing after the first season to ask how to get on the show, he knew he had done the right thing.

Now wrapping up the show's fifth season, the chef has become a household name and one of the more influential figures in the culinary industry. But who will Colicchio choose - Carla Hall, Hosea Rosenberg and Stefan Richter - to take home the grand prize of; $100,000 in seed money to help open a restaurant; a feature in Food & Wine magazine; a showcase at the Annual Food & Wine Classic in Aspen; and the title of Top Chef: New York?

Find out when the winner is announced on Top Chef, screening Thursday, May 7th on 7:30pm on 3.