I'm not quite sure what to make of Bravo's newest culinary competition series Chef Academy , which launches tonight. I'm a huge foodie and Top Chef might just be one of my life's main obsessions but I couldn't work up any appetite for the soggy and tasteless Chef Academy , which plays as a budget chain knock-off of the glossy and well-edited Top Chef . Chef Academy revolves around hotheaded French chef Jean Christophe Novelli, a Columbo -obsessed Michelin star winner who moves to Los Angeles with his pregnant fiancee to open up a West Coast outpost of his celebrated London-based Novelli Academy Cookery School. I could have perhaps gotten behind a docudrama that focuses on Novelli's efforts to get his Venice, California cooking academy off the ground but that's not the route that Chef Academy's producers go, instead transforming it into a reality competition series as Novelli selects nine students for his academy and attempts to transform them into chef...