I can't believe it.

It must be some "War of the Worlds" type hoax. Any second now, Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio are going to step forward and say it was all just a joke. That Hung did not win.

Say it ain't so, Padma?

But it is so. 29 year-old Hung Huynh is the winner of Top Chef. The often arrogant Hung beat out Casey Thompson and Dale Levitski to win the third season of Bravo's hit show.

I think I have a little indigestion. Call it a Hung hangover.

Not that I don't think Hung's a good chef. He is, obviously, just to make it on the show in the first place. And I won't try to over analyze the finale -- plenty of bloggers out there are doing that today. When asked to prepare "the best meal you've ever cooked in your life," Hung's prawns and duck bested Casey's pork belly and Dale's foie gras. I accept that.

What bothers me is that, for the second year in a row, I think the winner of Top Chef was clearly not the best chef. Last year, Ilan Hall beat out Marcel Vigneron in the finals, and we all know that Sam was the best chef of the final four and of the whole season. This year, based on his performance over the entire season, there's no way in my mind that Hung deserved to win.

Hung was portrayed from the start as the "villain" of the bunch. The overly arrogant, unapologetic, take-no-prisoners, "I'm here to cook not make friends" guy of the house. This year's Marcel (who, by the way, is good friends with Hung). But after a few weeks, it became apparent that Hung was a bit of paper tiger. He rarely won elimination challenges, and was sometimes in the bottom three. Over the weeks, we saw much better chefs like Tre and CJ get their walking papers for taking chances, while Hung hung out in the middle of the pack.

It's disappointing to me, because Top Chef has really distinguished itself as the premiere cooking competition on television today. It has overtaken Iron Chef, and any true foodie knows that FOX's Hell's Kitchen is a made-for-TV farce.

Top Chef is actually about cooking! These contestants really have to know their stuff. The judges are extremely harsh. I'm quite certain that Tom Colicchio's definition of "inedible" is something most people would shell out $20 or $30 buck for in a fancy pants restaurant.

But of course, this week's finale reminds me that Top Chef is a TV show, and its primary goal is entertainment, ratings, and selling commercials, not actually picking the best chef in the bunch. If finding the most talented chef was really the goal, we wouldn't have silly challenges where you have to cook over a campfire, or use rattlesnake as your protein. And then we wouldn't have a TV show, would we?

So, congratulations Hung. Even though I don't think he deserves it, he was a classy winner: he was grateful and genuinely laudatory of his fellow chefs. Hung walks away with $100,000, a feature in Food & Wine magazine, an appearance at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado, and a vacation to Europe.

For anyone hankering for "seconds" of this season's Top Chef, there's a reunion special on Bravo next Wednesday at 10 pm (ET).

Ethan Morris: "Not always right, but never in doubt." Go ahead and write me.

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