Back for the finale!
Oh, Top Chef. You disappoint me severely. No, not in your choice of Top Chef, because I can see where you're coming from with that, but in the decision to do a live finale. I know you were just trying to prevent leaks, as happened last season, but it's just so… Apprentice. Thank goodness you realized that the live sections always suck, and are boring filler, and included as little of them as possible.
Still, though, between the completely useless live portions and the gratuitous celebrity sous-chefs, I found the finale dissatisfying. I miss the days when Top Chef used to be a simpler show, all about food and drama. For some reason, they don't trust the intrinsic drama anymore, and they had to throw a fourth course at them an hour before service. And if they're going to rip off Project Runway, they could at least include a visit from Tim Gunn, because there is no one, sadly, that lovable on Top Chef, with the exception of occasional judge Ted Allen (see below).
They've told us for weeks that Hung is the robot chef with no heart and no soul to his food – but now, suddenly, either he got soul or the fact that he didn't have one wasn't such a big deal anymore. Maybe it was because, for the first time, Hung was given no restrictions. Some people become more creative when they have to adhere to a set of rules, but Hung was clearly not one of those people, because it was only while cooking his final dishes that he seemed happy and free – well, except for that Quickfire where he made a little Smurf village. Which I dare him to place on the menu of his restaurant. So, anyway, having found and displayed his soul, or not, the culinary redemption of Hung is complete, and he is now the Top Chef. As I've said before, he is the most technically proficient of all the chefs, so the title is richly deserved. I just didn't want the show to give him another reason to be full of himself.
Best moment of the night, for me: Dale, on the fourth course curveball delivered by Tom: "I wanted to punch him in the face." You don't know how long I've waited for a chef to say that. Man, I am going to miss Dale so much.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Top Chef: Live finales are for Trumps
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Top Chef: It's already been broughten
I am so rooting for someone (probably Casey, the roll she's been on) to shut Hung up in the finale. The man has skills, there's no denying that. Considering the ease with which he breezed through this week's Quickfire, and his knowledge of food, and his knifework - except for that one time when he nearly stabbed Casey - it's clear that he's one of the most technically accomplished chefs they've ever had on Top Chef. And he knows it, too. He was all excited in the elimination challenge to show the other chefs "what technique is all about." I'm sure they appreciated the lesson. (Even more annoying: he actually did show them, because he won. Curse you and your refined palates, judges!) It may be true that Hung is better than the other chefs, but the more anyone tells you how awesome he is, the less awesome he actually becomes. Naturally, it's all going to come down to Hung and someone else, and now that CJ is gone, I've found myself in Camp Casey. She's the best non-Hung chef remaining, and I would love to see a woman win. I think it's time. Go, Casey, go!
Oh, and Padma, I just want you to know that you suck for making me think, for that terrible second, that my boy Dale was going home, before you announced that Sara was eliminated. Not cool, Lakshmi. What would I do without Dale in the finale? Who would regale me with classic lines like "Jesus' apostles of culinary greatness" or insist, bizarrely, that he knows when a chef has gotten his/her heart broken or gotten laid, just by tasting the food? I don't want Dale to ever leave me. I want him to do commentary on other shows when Top Chef has finished up. Better yet, I want him to come over and watch TV with me, and rip on everything while I make margaritas. I make an excellent margarita, Dale!
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Top Chef: One-hour layover
Let's face it: being on a plane is boring. You're just marking time as you go from one place to another. Sometimes you read, sometimes you sleep, but you're not doing anything productive. The same is true of this week's episode of Top Chef.
So what's worse than being awakened by a bounding, tickling, entirely too perky Padma at six in the morning? Having to do a Quickfire challenge minutes later in your jammies. The Quickfire was, quite simply, to make Padma breakfast. Based on her giddy behavior and what the chefs tell us about her taste for alcohol, I wonder if this challenge didn't spring from a bright idea of Padma's after a long night of partying. "I am sooo hungry! Hey, you know what would be AWESOME? If I had my CHEFS make me BREAKFAST! I'm gonna go wake them up right now!" After Hung won, playing to the judge by slipping Grand Marnier into her smoothie, Padma distributed them all plane tickets to an exciting mystery destination! Could it be Paris? Tokyo?
Yeah, it was Newark. The chefs were all excited to go to New York, but suffered yet another bitter disappointment when they were told they would have to earn their way to Manhattan. Until then, they were stuck at the Newark airport, cooking business-class airline food for Continental. Anthony Bourdain was there, and he and Tom got along like gangbusters, griping constantly like Statler and Waldorf about the dishes that were set in front of them.
For no apparent reason, other than the fact that nothing else really happened this week, the editors were straining to create some drama between Hung and CJ. They hate each other! Really! Look, CJ is blaming Hung for spilling the truffle oil in front of Padma! And there's Hung, not helping CJ finish up when he's already done! How dare he? Honestly, it all came to nothing, but they had to pretend that something happened this week. But as annoying as Hung can be sometimes, and probably as irritating as he gets to the other chefs, they tolerate him much better than I would have expected. The mentality of this season is much different from last season's schoolyard bullying of Marcel. Everyone pretty much leaves Hung alone; either they've found better ways of dealing with their frustration, or they just keep it bottled up inside.
This week's elimination was based mostly on one of those bizarre, irrational, all-consuming hatreds that the judges sometimes get for a particular dish (like Tre's salmon dish of a few weeks back, the one that earned Ted's unforgiving wrath). This time it was CJ's broccolini, and as Tom and Anthony kept telling each other how much they hated the broccolini, fanning the flames of their hate, it became more and more apparent that poor CJ was going to get the boot, especially after Tom called it the worst dish they'd had in all three seasons. So with CJ gone, I think Hung may very well be the winner of this season, unless Dale can pull out a dark horse victory. Dale is quiet, and not too flashy, but he does consistently well, and I think he could easily make it to the final. For now, so long, CJ, and I hope you eventually got your slice of New York pizza, because they owe you. And make them take you to a club, because they owe you that, too.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Top Chef: Every party has a pooper
Previously on Top Chef, Sara feared that everyone would start asking awkward questions about her prodigious chopping skills, acquired while she was a child chef for the mob. The secret love of Casey and Howie remained very, very secret. Hung got amnesia and forgot that he was better than everyone else. CJ continued cooking to make his parents happy, even though his real dream was to join the Harlem Globetrotters. Dale, due to an accident involving sweet and sour pork, developed split personalities: one friendly and smiling, the other bitchy and awesome. Brian confessed his addiction to uppers, weeping to Zack that he was "so excited… so scared!" Tre discovered Gail's evil plan for world domination, but she shut him up for good by dropping IQF blocks of capellini and alfredo sauce on him. Ted had a meeting with the mysterious Blog Lady. And Tom ran upstairs two at a time, flung open the door, and shouted, "Ha ha! Caught you, Padma!"
Or none of that happened, and we got a week off after Tre was cut.
We started out this week with what was probably the most entertaining Quickfire Challenge ever. It was also the most needlessly complicated Quickfire ever, as the chefs were all charged to make dishes using items in only one aisle of the supermarket, with $10 and a small selection of items from the pantry. But whatever, the rules didn't really matter – it was what the chefs created that was the point, and what they created was hilarity. Brian had a Spam epiphany (no, for real) and won the challenge, making a "Spam believer" out of the guest judge. CJ cracked everyone up when he mentioned that he'd sweetened his dish with salt. And then there was Hung, who completely let himself go and made what Dale called a "Smurf village" out of food. It was truly amazing. Unfortunately, Howie ruined all the fun by not making anything at all. Boo. It was all going so lovely, too.
The Elimination Challenge challenged the chefs to cater a party on a yacht, using the tiny yacht kitchen. Before you ask, it was indeed high enough to accommodate CJ, but that didn't stop him from banging his head on the ceiling a few times just to prove a point. The chefs made a wide variety of hors d'oeuvres, which was both good and bad: they were scarfed up almost as soon as they left the kitchen, but Tom complained because the appetizers were all average, and he wanted them to do three really well. And if they had done three, Tom, you would have complained about the lack of variety. Your job is to find fault.
However, I can't fault the judges for finding the hors d'oeuvres uninspiring, for the most part. I've actually made one of them – Hung's salmon cream cheese spritz on a cucumber, to be exact – myself. And I can't cook worth a damn. That is how mindless that particular appetizer was. So, even though the judges always seem to be disappointed in the contestants, I think they had some justification this week. And anyway, it was only Hung, Dale and his runny yogurt, Brian the team leader, and Howie and his two gross-looking appetizers who were really in trouble. Casey, for making the hors d'oeuvre that pleased the judges the most, won the challenge and was rewarded with a laptop. How bad must the chefs who won wine and books be feeling right now?
As for the one who went home – it wasn't Brian, who I feared it would be after he interviewed about how much he missed home. Noooo, Brian! Interview and ye shall receive! Instead – well, here's the thing. One of the storylines this week was "Howie becomes a team player, finally." Howie made an effort to work with everyone else, didn't complain so much or make as many difficulties, and felt so much a part of the team that he decided to quit to save Brian. Of course, the judges don't like having the power of elimination taken away from them, so they denied him. And then they ended up eliminating him anyway. The judges' point: their word is law!
So did Howie really become part of the Top Chef team? Probably, He certainly seemed to work better with everyone else this week. But he also wasn't really into the competition anymore – he looked listless and couldn't have been too interested in winning anymore if he was willing to quit. I think his change of heart had everything to do with losing his competitive drive. He didn't have to be a jerk anymore, he didn't have to finish the Quickfire if he didn't want to, and he could make up his past behavior by trying to do something nice for the others before he left. It seemed to be Howie's intention all along to leave.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Top Chef: Restaurant Wars Episode II: Attack of the Ciccone
Previously on Top Chef: the judges were extremely disappointed in all of the contestants, a blogger and her snippy friend ragged on the chefs' slapdash restaurants, and no one went home, because the judges wanted them all to do it again, but right this time, dammit!
The great Top Chef do-over started out with a mise en place relay Quickfire, in which each team member was assigned a different prep task, and the team that completed all of its tasks first won. Shockingly enough, it was The Garage, or, as Dale called them, "The Bad News Bears," who pulled out a victory, thoroughly trouncing the other team with their lightning-fast knife and whip skills. It only helped The Garage that Casey is a very slow chopper. Comparatively, of course; she'd still smoke me in an onion-chopping contest, but both Sara and Hung were finished with their tasks by the time she finished chopping her four onions. The Bad News Bears were rewarded with extra shopping money and the help of a mystery sommelier.
And who was the Super-Secret Mystery Sommelier? I'll give you one guess, because if you didn't know it was Stephen from season one the minute they first mentioned the word "sommelier," you clearly have not received enough Top Chef conditioning. Stephen only showed up long enough to have one, maybe two, montages of "blah blah blah Stephen won't stop talking," and he also sabred a champagne bottle. Okay! Thanks for coming, Stephen! Bye!
Meanwhile, everyone got the help – whether they wanted it or not – of interior designer Christopher Ciccone, the blogger's snippy friend of the night before and brother of Madonna. Dale called him one of the most annoying people he's ever met – and think about the people he's met on this show. Not naming names, just saying. It was probably wise of the chefs to just let Christopher do whatever he wanted to their restaurants and not argue. After all, they had to worry about the food, and not getting eliminated.
Of course you know that Tom Colicchio keeps telling the contestants that he's not their mentor or their mom. We finally learned what he is this week: their babysitter. He decided he had to stay in the kitchen and keep an eye on the teams during service. I don't really know why, because he's never felt like he had to watch them before, and he didn't really do much tattling - that we saw - to the rest of the judges about what the chefs did in the kitchen. However, staying in the kitchen did mean that Tom had to sample the teams' dishes alone, sitting in a corner. We couldn't hear it, but I'm sure that there was a single violin playing very sadly just for him as he ate.
Just like in every sports movie ever, the misfit band of underdogs – in this case, the chefs of The Garage, now Quatre – won. Sara, the executive chef, was the individual winner, with the judges praising her decisiveness. She did do one thing I've seen executive chefs do on TV before, sending back meat that she considered rare (although without yelling "It's raw! You're going to [bleep]ing kill someone!" as Gordon Ramsay likes to do). Restaurant April, on the other hand, got dinged for not taking enough of the criticism from their soft opening to heart and thereby doing worse the second time around.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Top Chef: Restaurant Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Incense
Finally, it has arrived! One of the most hotly anticipated (by Brian) episodes of the Top Chef season: Restaurant Wars! Convert a garage into a slapdash restaurant, whip up a gourmet meal, and don't forget to serve the judges with a smile, because if you're not happy, they'll complain about that, too! It's a real-world version of Diner Dash, but much less fun. For them. It's still lots of fun for us.
At the Quickfire, Padma dropped a bomb on the unsuspecting chefs: no more immunity for a QF win. Of course, it was bound to happen, but there were still eight chefs left and I thought that immunity was usually taken away later than this. Either the competition is extremely cutthroat or the judges just want to be able to strike the fear of elimination into everyone. Knowing Tom, it's probably the latter. This Quickfire challenged the chefs to create interesting new burgers, which six of the eight chefs interpreted to mean, "burgers with some form of seafood in them." The winner out of this bunch of conforming nonconformists was CJ, who earned the right to choose his own restaurant staff.
CJ, no dummy, chose himself a great team: Tre, Brian, and Casey. They would open up Restaurant April. This left Dale, Hung, Howie, and Sara M. as the operators of The Garage. Poor Dale. Bravo had set me up for all kinds of fireworks between Sara M. (oh, actually, we can just call her Sara now, huh?) and Howie by showing snippets of their dysfunctional work together during the pasta challenge in the previouslies. Not only that, but making Sara the executive chef and Howie her sous chef was sure to be a disaster, I thought. But there was nothing. Way to psych me up for nothing, Bravo editors.
Both teams chose a form of "contemporary American" cuisine for their restaurants, which I assume is the culinary equivalent of "eclectic" interior design. You create the dishes that you want, and then you say, "Eh, I'm an American living in the present day, it's contemporary American." And, standard procedure for Restaurant Wars, the judges grumbled about everything, right down to the dusty bread plates. First you don't get plates. Now your plates are dusty. Will you never be happy, judges?
To assist them in their deliberations, the judges enlisted the services of an "undercover blogger" to give her reviews of both restaurants. Well, of course she's undercover, she's a blogger. If I ran up to you on the street and kicked you in the shins, would you know who I am? No, because I'm a blogger. We are like anonymous, snarky ninjas. But aside from hating the black tablecloths at one of the restaurants because they gave her Billy Idol flashbacks, the blogger made pretty much the same points as the judges.
The judges' myriad complaints boiled down to a few key grievances. The heavy food at The Garage. Howie's bad risotto. Tre's potatoes, left in the smoker too long. The overpowering scented candles, unchecked by Dale and his weak sense of smell. Brian's flustered, sweaty service. Neither team looked like a winner, so when the judges brought out the two servers, Brian and Dale, for the final deliberation, it seemed like both would be asked to leave.
But in the end, this entire episode was useless – useless! – because the judges decided not to send anyone home. Instead, they'd be redoing the challenge the next night, and that will be next week's episode. Useless! Oh, all right, I suppose that we, and the chefs, did learn a few things from this week. Don't use scented candles. Don't oversmoke potatoes. No one likes a sweaty crazy guy. And the most important lesson of all: if everyone sucks together, no one sucks all the way home.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Top Chef: This isn't 'Top Clubber'
I wonder if the contestants of a reality show have ever mutinied against the producers? There must be some sort of anti-mutiny clause in the contract that they all have to sign, because I'm sure if the contestants of any show were to do it, it would have been the ones from Top Chef Miami, and it would have been this week, due to all of the jerking around that the show subjected them to. After softening up the chefs with an ice cream-based Quickfire – which demonstrated that a couple of chefs didn't learn from Marcel's avocado and bacon ice cream of yore – Padma told them nothing about the Elimination Challenge, just that they would be going clubbing that night. But guess who was there at the club, with the guest judge and a couple of catering vans, when the Hummer limo pulled up? Buzzkill Padma.
The chefs – particularly the primped-out women – were all upset by this development, and a few of them interviewed their surprise about getting a challenge instead of a night out. Surprise? Really? Remember the party for the designers of season two of Project Runway, when they were forced to cut up their own clothes, and Andrae lost it all over the runway? Yeah, Bravo apparently thinks it's fun to ruin parties. So, already grumpy from being denied their clubbing time, the chefs are split into two teams and told to come up with bar food for a crowd of drunken revelers (all the while thinking, "Man! Those drunken idiots could be US!"). This while they were staying up all night, becoming more sleep-deprived by the moment, and while they watched Dale, the Quickfire winner, do nothing but go out to dinner. Sounds like fun, right? Why has Top Chef become, this season, a string of unpleasant surprises? Is it any wonder that the chefs were demoralized?
So, no surprise: the lack of sleep only augmented the existing crabbiness of the chefs, and the judging became extremely emotional. I think I've figured something out, and if Bravo has realized this too, then we'll be seeing it happen a lot more, because: drama! My hypothesis: when Bravo ruins a party, there will be crying at judging. It happened to Andrae, and it happened to Sara N., too. While she and her losing team were defending themselves to the judges, Howie called Sara "the baby of the house," which doesn't sound so bad, until you factor in the sleep deprivation, stress, and the fact of being slammed to your face. Luckily, she managed to mostly hold it in in front of the judges, because I guarantee you that Tom, for one, would not have been sympathetic, and probably would have informed her that the show wasn't Top Crier. And although crying in the pantry really didn't do anything to disprove Howie's accusation, the other chefs were mostly on her side, glaring at Howie like – well, like a big jerk who just made a nice girl cry – while Howie trotted out the old standby, "I'm not here to…, I'm here to win." He chose to put "hurt anybody's feelings" in the blank, an interesting choice. In the end, though, it was Sara who went home for her listless cooking. I'll miss her; she was a good, kind of snarky interviewer, and it was always fun to hear her take on things.
And while we're talking about this week's episode, a question: is Brian ever off? He was running around all episode, playing with the catering truck and screaming at the customers, and he never seemed to wind down. Is it his natural energy or does he take performance-enhancing stimulants like coffee?
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Top Chef: The Cooking Bee
Well, why not? America seems to love the spelling and singing varieties, so surely a cooking bee is the next step? That was this week's Quickfire Challenge on Top Chef: a competition presided over by Padma and Rocco DiSpirito challenging chefs to identify foods and utensils by sight and taste. (Not the utensils by taste. Not that we saw, anyway.) I wonder if we can now expect The Culinary Bee, hosted by Rocco DiSpirito, coming this fall to NBC?
The Elimination Challenge this week required the chefs to pair up to create frozen pasta dinners, and I'm guessing that the episode was super-sized just to contain all the drama, because that's what you get any time you require the chefs to work together. Oh, sure, a couple of teams – CJ and Tre and Casey and Dale – worked perfectly together, and ended up in the top two at judging because of it. But the most time was spent on the bottom two teams – Hung and Joey and Sara M. and Howie – because they got along so spectacularly badly. Things got so bad that judging turned into one big argument – more so than usual, that is. Brian and Sara N., the last pair, had style differences, but worked through them, because you can't stop Brian when he gets a full head of steam. If you heard his recitation of all that he did while Sara N. was cutting peppers, you know that either Sara cuts peppers really slowly or Brian is stuck on fast-forward.
Everything came down to IQF, individually quick freezing, which is apparently obvious enough to have an acronym, but not so obvious that any team but CJ and Tre, not coincidentally the winners, did it. Hung thought about doing it, but didn't. (It was a bad week for Hung all around, what with the mushy pasta, being chosen among the worst, and getting eliminated from the cooking bee due to hubris.) His partner Joey, who had ironically interviewed at the beginning of the episode about throwing people under buses and over balconies, got tossed over the balcony himself. Not because he didn't listen to Hung, because Hung got blamed for that, but I guess the judges thought that the Italian guy should have done better with the Italian challenge.
By the way, if any of you should ever end up cooking for Tom Colicchio, please note that he's not keen on tinned artichokes. He only mentioned it about three times and got all up in Dale's and Casey's grills about it at judging, even though they were there for doing well. So, you know, keep that in mind, if he should show up on your doorstep expecting dinner.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Top Chef: Hey, I didn't order a reunion show!
It hardly seems possible that we've reached that point of the Top Chef season where a reunion show is warranted, but we apparently have. Actually, we can probably expect a season three reunion later on, but to, I don't know, stretch out the season, we got a reunion show with the first few bootees from s3, a smattering of chefs from s1 and s2, the judges, and some guy to read the questions. Don't worry; to make up for this little casserole of leftovers, they're giving us a supersized episode next week.
There were plenty of inane questions, awkward segues, and montages, including one of Padma's Hotness. It seems that Padma wears revealing clothes on occasion, you see. I know, I was shocked, too. But in the middle of all of this, and completely separate from the blandest host in the land (for real, Andy Cohen makes Ryan Seacrest look edgy), there were some unforgettable moments.
- Learned quite a bit about Tom: in the first montage, we saw that he's dainty with cutlery and says "finger pointing" a lot. And doesn't that speak volumes about the difference between Top Chef and Project Runway, that Tom is all about "finger pointing" and Tim is all about "making it work" and "caucusing"? Anyway. Perhaps more than we needed to know about Tom, however, was that he's an inexplicable sex symbol and an "icon of the bear community" – that is, gay men who appreciate burly men. Tom showed his appreciation by immediately mentioning his wife.
- Mike did/does not have herpes. He just wanted to put that out there. Thanks, dude.
- Seems that on the night of the attempted headshaving in season two, the chefs did a parody of a Quickfire challenge and the judges' table. Elia, cast as Padma, nailed the role, perfectly skewering Padma's habit of stressing random syllables. Hilarious.
- Marcel was not there, and the excuse was that he was on a "fishing trip." Fishing? Marcel? …Fishing? I mean, it's so strange that it just might be true – which is not to say that it's not still code for "didn't really feel like hanging out with the people who nearly scalped me, thanks."
- And in the greatest moment of the evening, Tim Gunn asked, "Was Stephen from season one [ridiculously long pause]… real?" The answer, not that it really mattered, seemed to be yes.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Top Chef: You gotta have friends
After their rocky start, it's truly heartwarming to see how quickly Howie and Joey have become friends. Heartwarming, that is, unless you're Casey, whose incompetence last week created that bond between them. But the guys are now big fans of each other's food (Howie couldn't stop eating Joey's dish during the elimination challenge), and when they were chosen as the top two, the judges' panel turned into one big lovefest. Howie won, and earned what was arguably the lamest prize in Top Chef history: a bottle of Argentinean wine. That was all. Other chefs won books or knives or invitations to go somewhere and cook – Howie won a bottle of wine that the guest judge might easily have picked up at Trader Joe's on the way there. And he immediately gave it to Joey anyway, so you can tell how much he appreciated it. That's okay, though. Howie won a much better prize this week: Joey's friendship. Awww.
The challenge was to cater a Latin meal for the cast and crew of Dame Chocolate, as well as a few other Telemundo personalities. But while the chefs were feeling pretty good about the three hours they had to cook, suddenly Tom appeared and told them that they'd "gotten a call" from the set and the chefs' time was now cut in half. Suuuuure you did, Tom. Since the judges wouldn't stop talking about the time crunch and how the chefs' plans changed, I'm sure that the challenge was really meant to test how well the chefs responded to pressure and were able to adapt. For the most part, though, I think it ended up being a non-issue. Howie, who got sneered at by Tom for still choosing to braise his pork instead of roast it, was the winner, and Sara N., who had a backup plan of store-bought tortillas, was chosen in the bottom four. Just like every week, it all came down to the flavors.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to train myself to predict the winner and loser from the first few minutes of the episode, based on who gets the first interviews and what they interview about. Joey interviewed about stepping up and being the grey horse that no one sees coming, so when he won the Quickfire, it wasn't a surprise. Lia got the very first interview of the episode, about Camille leaving, and she was the one who left at the end. So here's the deal, I think – interview about proving yourself, and you will. Interview about your "grace, finesse, style, and elegance," and you will fall flat on your face, like Hung. Interview about something anyone could have talked about, at the very beginning of the episode, and the editors are looking for a way to squeeze you in, because you're going home. See, I'm on to you, editors. I know your game.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Top Chef: Hello, goodbye
Ah, trios. I hadn't even seen a culinary trio before I started watching Top Chef, and now they're old friends. Seems like someone does a trio of something every week, and that must have been the inspiration for this week's challenge: the chefs split into teams of three to create trios. I really, really hope that the show came up with this challenge to poke fun at the chefs for their penchant for trios. That would make my week. Anyway, it was Lia, who I originally thought was getting the loser edit, who walked away with the victory. On the losing side, the judges put a "guilt blanket" (her words) over on Casey, who had immunity but made the worst dish, thereby putting her teammates, Joey and Howie, in danger. But Casey needn't have been smothered under the guilt blanket, because the judges sent Camille home. Wait, who?
Poor Camille. I still don't know who she is. At least now I know why they never showed any interviews with her before: because she delivered them in an expressionless monotone that was just painful to sit through. Honestly, I probably could have guessed from the editing that Camille was going home, because she had more interviews in this episode than every other episode combined. However, I didn't listen to her interviews, because they bored me senseless. She's probably just one of those people who doesn't do well on camera. Or else she's a robot. Either way, Camille: we didn't know ye. At all.
One thing I'm really loving about this season of Top Chef (and far more than I should, I know): the guest judges. A few weeks ago, there was Dick Van Patten lookalike Norm Van Aken, and this week, for the Quickfire, there was Jamie Walker, mixologist for Bombay Sapphire, who looked like Dave Foley playing season one's Stephen in Sommelier: The Movie. It didn't hurt at all that Jamie was pretty funny, too. The first thing he said to CJ was "You're very tall," both a remarkably astute observation and probably the first thing I would say to CJ too, if I were ever confronted with him.
Meanwhile, I'm getting really annoyed by Hung. Every time he doesn't win something or his dish gets criticized, he has to tell us about how the judge "didn't get it" or was "confused." Partly I'm annoyed with the show, which has to show these complainterviews with him all the time, even though I've reached the point where I can pretty much assume that if something is happening, Hung doesn't like it. (Dessert? Who needs it! Hard alcohol? Doesn't like it! He's like Mikey!) Didn't he learn anything from his pal Marcel's experience last season? Marcel was positively cute compared to Hung, certainly much more excitable and happy to be there, and the other contestants still hated him. Perhaps Hung only saves his bitching for the audience and is otherwise pleasant. I feel so privileged.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Food TV: Different shows, different flavor profiles
It's true that there's no shortage of cooking shows out there this summer. The third seasons of Top Chef, Hell's Kitchen, and The Next Food Network Star are all airing now, and, if you've seen them, you know that there's no way you could confuse them if you happened to catch just the tiniest snippet of them while channel-surfing. Because aside from the clear differences – Hell's Kitchen's Mr. Obvious narrator, the Graphics That Spell Check Forgot on Top Chef, and the cute little star graphics on The Next Food Network Star – and the fact that they all claim to be looking for the next great chef, they all test very different chefly abilities.
Maybe I've just become more appreciative of what happens in a restaurant kitchen since seeing Ratatouille – not that I'm saying that's the definitive word on the subject – but here's how I see them. Each has its own specialty, and is searching for a specific quality from its contestants. Top Chef is all about creation and innovation. The chefs create dishes using exotic ingredients or by putting a twist on an old standard. Hell's Kitchen is about working in a kitchen. Communication, pushing out dishes, doing prep work, et cetera. For the most part, Chef Ramsay doesn't care if you can create. He wants to know if you can do, and if you can cry, that's just a bonus. For The Next Food Network Star, it's about selling your dish, and yourself. Those chefs get to create dishes too, but mostly the judges want to know how you'll come across on TV, and whether you can refrain from calling Darryl "Chocolate Thunder" Dawkins "Chocolate Passion," as one hapless contestant did.
None of the shows is looking for a great all-around chef, then; one who can thrive in a restaurant kitchen and create innovative new flavors (although, ironically, the overwrought Hell's Kitchen may come closest). So let's say, for fun, that you threw the winners of all three shows into Kitchen Stadium for an ultimate cooking fight. Who would come out on top? If it's strictly based on cooking, the winners of Top Chef would have the edge, but if it's testing ability under pressure, or if it all suddenly turns into a knife fight, don't count out the winners of Hell's Kitchen.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Top Chef: Ted! You came back to us!
Praise Ted! Finally, the prodigal judge (can a judge be prodigal if he only appeared in the prelude to the season?) returned to us. Although I notice that he was sitting in Gail's seat, so perhaps he and Gail will be tag-teaming it this season. If the previews for next week can be believed, Ted will be on the panel then, too, and that can only mean good things. No offense to Gail, but Ted is a little more articulate and considered in his food opinions, whereas Gail agrees with other people a lot.
This week's challenge: update classic family-style dishes. I thought this was a pretty cool and creative idea, until I remembered the TGI Friday's challenge from last year, from which this challenge only differed in that the chefs were given a set menu of dishes to recreate, and they were required to make them lower in cholesterol. Also, the dishes were served to Elks, not firefighters.
As soon as I saw the previouslies, which were all about Howie, his fight with Joey, and his bottom-feeding in the first couple of challenges, I knew that one of two things would be happening this week: either Howie was going to redeem himself or he was going to go home. The latter was true; Howie won with his pork chops, while Micah went home for disrespecting meatloaf. Seriously. I mean, I'm no meatloaf defender, I could happily spend the rest of my life not eating meatloaf. But even I – like the judges – was a little offended by Micah's attitude toward meatloaf, which she treats like some gross foreign food that those nutty Americans glomp ketchup all over.
By the way, I know Keckler addresses the terrible spelling in Bravo's graphics quite a bit, but as I'm an editor, too, those spelling errors hurt me just as much. This week's offense: "Sloppy Joe's." See, some people just can't spell, and that's okay. But if you don't have a copy editor handy, then Google and the dictionary are your friends. Especially if you're writing something for work, and even more especially if it's going to be shown to a national audience.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Top Chef: Have you seen Ted?
Oh, Bravo. What the hell? You promised me Ted Allen. I distinctly remember being promised Ted Allen this season. He showed up in the season one vs. season two challenge, but since then, where's he gone? Instead of my favorite Queer Eye guy, instead I get the same old: chirpy Gail, "I'm not your mommy" Tom, Lady Padma, and the guest judge, who I believe this week was a young Dick Van Patten.
This week's barbecue challenge was pretty cool. I like that the show has managed to come up with unique challenges so far; now that Top Chef is in its third season, there is every danger that it'll start to repeat itself. But with some smart challenges, it's managed to avoid that, and I like to think that it's because of Lee Anne's influence behind the camera. Nice job, Lee Anne! The editors will also be getting props from me this week, because of their giant fake-out concerning Sara N. For the entire episode, they showed nothing but what made Sara look incompetent: her stumbling introduction of her Quickfire dish, her fuzzy math at the meat counter, and her problems getting the grill started. And then she turns out to be in the top three! You win this round, editors.
By the way, I thought I had a handle on who all the chefs were, and then suddenly in the Elimination Challenge, they cut to this brunette who started interviewing like she was a contestant. Camille? Who's Camille? How long has she been here? Check her credentials!
Friday, June 15, 2007
Top Chef: Bite-sized thoughts
Just a few random thoughts about the Top Chef season premiere:
- Sandee Birdsong? Any relation to Mary Birdsong?
- My favorite chef right now: CJ. He's funny, he's competent, and he's very tall. I think he could easily turn the tables on Tom Colicchio during one of his walkthroughs and intimidate him, because CJ's probably got a foot on him, and Tom's got it coming.
- Loved the first challenge, the exotic surf and turf. Loved even more that they had geoduck. Thanks to Mike Rowe, I have a healthy appreciation for the mollusk, and I know how to pronounce it.
- Tre's prize for winning the first challenge: an invitation to get "savage drunk" with Anthony Bourdain. That in itself is a little alarming, but then Bourdain hauls out a stack of his collected works, all signed, and suddenly I'm powerfully reminded of Gilderoy Lockhart. Not that I'm saying that Anthony Bourdain is skilled at memory charms and is taking credit for other people's food experiences.
- Where was Ted? Ted makes everything better. Sure, Bourdain is entertaining, claiming, as he does at one point, that he would have to be drunk to enjoy a chef's dish. (I'm sensing a theme to Bourdain.) But… I was promised Ted Allen, dammit.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Top Chef: Who's Better? The Answer May Not Surprise You
Season 3 of Top Chef is still a week away, but Bravo wants to make sure you don't go hungry with a little amuse bouche: a cook-off between the four best chefs from Seasons 1 and 2. Well, actually, that's a lie. While Bravo is content to take the top four contestants from Season 2 (especially as S2's top four consist entirely of Marcel and his would-be shavers), they make an exception for Season 1. Instead of Lee Anne, who they claim can't compete because she's now a culinary producer for the show, they bring back Stephen. Who also creates drama. Interesting how that works out, Bravo. Very interesting. Cooking for Season 1, then, we have Harold, Dave, Tiffani, and Stephen, and for Season 2, Ilan, Marcel, Elia, and Sam. Let's get ready to gelee!
The competition starts out with a Quickfire Challenge, and Dave complains because he thought he was done with this. (Dave complaining seems to be a theme, as he also complains, with many attendant bleeps, about how people are telling him how to cook and about the amateurish wait staff.) The challenge is to cook eggs, literally with one hand behind their backs. It's silly, but this competition is just for fun, charity, and bragging rights, so I have no problem with it. Tom and Padma choose winners for each season who will then be team captains. Marcel takes it for Team Season 2 with, of all things, a saffron foam. Bless his little molecular gastronomic heart. Stephen is apparently not entirely full of hot air when he calls his dish the "Perfect Omelette," because he wins for S1 and overall, earning his team an extra $100 shopping money. Two guesses what he spends it on.
The challenge itself: make a four-course meal with scallops, lobster, duck, and Kobe beef. Each chef gets assigned to a dish. Because there's really no drama outside of Marcel annoying the Season 1 contestants in what seems to be record time, Bravo has to manufacture some, like Ilan spilling Marcel's mango. Will they come to blows? No, they won't. And then Tom, making the rounds, makes an excellent, and hilarious, point. Stephen, naturally, bought wine to pair with his dishes. But each pair of dishes is going head-to-head, so what if the wine ends up pairing better with the other dish? Nothing comes of it, of course, but it's still funny.
The dishes are judged by the usual crowd, Tom, Padma, Gail, and new judge Ted Allen (yay! I love Ted!), as well as the entire cast of Season 3. The S3 chefs are all pretty anonymous at this point, except for Hung, who reveals that he knows Marcel. So make of that what you will. If you hate Marcel, you can use that as an excuse to get a head start on hating Hung. Anyway, Bravo is careful to show the diners saying good and bad things about each dish, so it's hard to tell, at this point, who's doing well. What we do know is that Marcel not only makes a lobster foam, he delivers it tableside, for what Ted later calls an "in-your-face foam." And when it comes to Ilan's hair, which now has weird patterns shaved into the sides, Ted has grave concerns. So do I; one side of his hair looks rather like a landscape, with jagged mountains and a little shaved crescent moon above them. I wouldn't be surprised if there was also a little coyote shaved in there. Disappointed, but not surprised. Ilan doesn't need to meet Season 3 of Top Chef as much as he needs to meet with the stylists of Shear Genius.
Oddly enough, my favorite part of the episode is the judging. It's really nice to watch a judging where the chefs feel free to talk back to the judges and blow them off, because most of them (basically, everyone but Ted) could stand to be taken down a peg or two and reminded that they don't actually have the power of life and death. Harold's impatient shrug says it all: "What are you going to do to me?" So the judges can talk all they want about what they didn't like about a dish, but they're much less mean about it than usual, and none of the chefs takes anything too much to heart. The judges decide that Elia beat out Dave on the scallop dish, Stephen's lobster was better than Marcel's, Harold was better on the duck than Ilan (so if you wanted to know who was the better Top Chef and you hadn't already decided it was Harold… it's Harold), and Tiffani won the Kobe beef round over Sam. So Season 1 defeats Marcel and the Shavers, winning $20,000 for the Susan G. Komen foundation. And while the episode was mostly marking time until the real thing begins next week, but it's nice to see that a good cause got some cash. And I suppose the episode did whet my appetite for next week. Bring on the main course! And more Ted over here!
