Top Chef Recap
By Jason Lee
June 18, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
After six seasons taking place in cities like Los Angeles, Vegas, and Chicago, Top Chef finally comes to our nation’s capital. As a current resident of D.C., I’m eager to try and recognize all of the places / landmarks that the cheftestants visit. The cheftestants start arriving and our first girl, Tiffany, proclaims that she would love to be the first African-American winner of Top Chef, especially IN BARACK OBAMA CITY!!! WOOHOO!!!
Oh my lord. This girl has some real gusto, doesn’t she? My one hope for this season is that the women turn out to be stronger than last season, when my beloved Jen was the only girl who proved worthy of even being in the finale.
The cheftestants congregate atop the D.C. Newseum, a museum dedicated to the history of news reporting (I still need to visit this place). Seventeen chefs mill around, enjoying a fruit and cheese platter, talking amongst themselves. There’s a lot of passive-aggressive boasting going on, the type of subterranean machismo that you’d expect at a frat party. This is NOT an event I’d enjoy attending. The undercurrent of “I’m better than you, but you just don’t know it yet” is a little tiresome.
I idly wonder if we’re going to see any talent on the level of the Voltaggio brothers from any of these cheftestants.
Padma and Tom enter and the noise immediately quiets down. As a welcome to Top Chef, we’re going to kick things off with a mise en place tournament (a competition of vegetable preparation). All 17 chefs will have to peel ten potatoes. The 12 fastest go on to brunoise (finely chop) ten cups of onion. The top 8 go on to break down four chickens, and the last four get to compete for $20,000, as this is a High Stakes Quickfire.
The cheftestants start to drool at the idea of winning $20,000.
Not two minutes into the first task of peeling potatoes does one of the cheftestants slice her palm open. Ewwwwwwwwww, this is the part about Top Chef that I hate. The part with blood.
Angelo, an extremely attractive NY chef, immediately notices that an African-American chef, Kenny, is slicing potatoes quicker than anyone. Indeed, he outpaces everyone and sits back as he waits for 11 other chefs to join him in the next round.
Eventually, five chefs are cut and we’re onto onions. Again, Kenny whups everyone, much to the consternation of Hot Angelo. I think we’re seeing a rivalry develop here.
The chickens are up next and I start to get really nervous that we’re about to see another sliced palm or cut wrist. Those knives are moving WAY too fast for my comfort.
Finally, we have our four finalists for this Quickfire… aaaaaaand, they’re all men. Sigh. Ladies, you really need to step things up. Competing for the $20,000, we have Supa Fast Kenny, Hot Angelo, Kevin and Timothy. They each need to make a dish out of their chicken, potatoes and onions in 30 minutes. Meanwhile, the rejected cheftestants get to watch their superiors at work, gnawing on their own liver in envy.
In the end, Angelo creates a roasted chicken wing with curried onion jam and potato noodles, Kevin has a boneless chicken wing with hot and sour broth, Tim has a potato garlic roasted chicken with onions and cherries, and Kenny has a duo of chicken with Moroccan spices and onion confit. I gotta say, Kenny’s dish looks pretty tasty.
Tom picks Tim and Kevin as disappointments, saying that Tim had too much cream in the dish and Kevin’s broth was way too salty. On the other hand, Kenny had good spice on the roasted potato and Angelo had great flavors and an interesting use of the potato.
I’m predicting that Hot Angelo wins over Supa Fast Kenny and I’m right. Angelo smirks and says that he’s happy to set the pace. Kenny exclaims, “What the fk,” and says that he doesn’t see Angelo as a threat. Sigh. So much machismo and posing.
Now that the Quickfire is over, we’re onto the Elimination Challenge. Padma notes that in Washington D.C., every part of the country is represented. Thus, they want the cheftestans to create a dish that represents where they’re from. They’ll be serving 300 hungry Washingtonians at an event celebrating the cherry blossom festival (the time of the year when D.C. looks BEAUTIFUL).
Chefs will be competing in four groups: the best chef in each group will be up for the win, the worst in each group will be eligible for elimination. This is a pretty typical opening round challenge for Top Chef, but the changeup is that the four finalists in the Quickfire get to choose their teams. I don’t think this is very fair - the finalists did not get to watch their competitors very much during the Quickfire, and so they’ll be basing their decisions on physical appearance and any conversations prior to the Quickfire. Bleh.
The chefs get $300 to shop at Whole Foods and then four hours to prep. Then, on the day of the challenge, they have one hour to set up. I wish I could eat at one of these events.
Everyone rushes into Whole Foods and grabs as much food as they can. After that, they head to the DC Hilton where - HEY! THEY’RE COOKING AT THE HILTON RIGHT BY MY APARTMENT! I can’t believe it. The cheftestants were cooking not more than two blocks from my apt this whole time. I’m brokenhearted that I never saw any of them
Anyhow, the cooking finally starts and as usual in these early episodes, there are too many chefs to really hone in on who’s doing what. The camera seems to be focused on two struggling chefs: John and Jacqueline. John is a big, tall hippie with long, dirty dreadlocks from Michigan, “where the maple runs through the trees,” he tells us. As such, he’s making a maple syrup-flavored dessert. He looks a little bit like a kook and I’m wondering if he’s going to turn out to be adorable like Carla was, or weird like Hector was. He manages to burn his macadamia nuts because he got his oven settings mixed up.
As for Jacqueline, she comes off like one of those overly frail, worrysome chefs who get themselves into trouble in the kitchen and then agonize over every detail of their dish. These types of chefs rarely last into the second month of a season and I’m thinking she’ll be the same way. She’s trying to make chicken liver mousse but omits the butter to make it “lighter,” then runs out of time and can’t strain the mousse before bringing to the convention center, where she finds it to be too grainy. Thus, she cooks it further so that it’ll smooth out. Lordy. This woman is too much drama.
As the diners enter, we see Padma, Gail, Eric Ripert and Tom come in from one of the entrances. They’ll be the judges this season. They go around, sampling the four dishes from each group, and frankly, it would be a waste of time for me to go over EVERY dish from EVERY group. Suffice to say that:
* Group 1 was weak, with only Kevin presenting a good dish (Pennsylvania lamb)
* Group 2 was not much better, with the judges only having kind words for Supa Fast Kenny’s black bean mole and cinnamon-coffee rubbed trout
* Group 3 was pretty good, with no bombs
* Group 4 was strong as well, with Hot Angelo easily the top in his group
For the most part, the winner of each group was obvious, and called before the judges, we have Kevin, Kenny, Hot Angelo and Alex from Group 3. Yup, four men on top. The ladies must be weak again. At least last season, we had Jen in the top four in the first challenge.
Anyhow, the four men get their feedback from the judges. Alex honored his mother with a great deconstructed borscht, which kept all the flavors of the original dish according to Tom. Kevin had a simple dish, but some complex flavors. Gail was worried that Kenny’s dish lacked editing, but upon trying it, found it very well balanced. Hot Angelo really brought out the chili and acid in his dish, and Eric Ripert liked the bacon foam.
So three of the four finalists in the Quickfire make it to the top in the Elimination Challenge, though it seems like only Kenny or Angelo could win this thing. I’m thinking Angelo wins here - and I’m right. Angelo is the first cheftestant to sweep the Quickfire and Elimination Challenge in the opening episode since Stefan did the same in Season 5.
Now the fun begins. Stephen, John, Jacqueline and Tim (fourth finalist from the Quickfire) get called before the judges as the weakest dishes in their respective groups. Stephen cut his ribeye steak way too thin and it was consequently overcooked. Eric Ripert compares them to chicken nuggets. Ouch.
Gail was absolutely flabbergasted that Jacqueline tried to serve a “low fat” chicken liver mousse. “It’s CHICKEN LIVER,” she tells Jacqueline, “I don’t think anyone’s looking for a low fat version.” Jacqueline says that she’s served this dish a hundred times before, but that this is the first time she’s made it without the recipe.
“Wait, you’ve served this a hundred times or made this a hundred times?” Tom asks pointedly.
“When I tasted it, I thought it was under seasoned,” she tries to explain before getting cut off by Tom again.
“That’s not what I asked you. Did you SERVE this a hundred times or MAKE this a hundred times?” he asks again.
“I made it,” she says quietly. She looks at him in total shame, “but it’s not memorized.”
Oh, lord.
John is criticized for not having enough maple syrup flavor in the dish (“All I taste is sugar, sugar, sugar,” Tom had commented earlier). He also gets knocked for using pre-made puff pastry. He tries to argue that the puff pastry was only the instrument for delivering his maple syrup Napoleon to the diners’ mouths, but Gail points out that with there only being three components to his dish, he’s discounting a third of what they ate.
As for the only Quickfire finalist to not have won his group, Tim faces criticism for keeping the thick skin on his rockfish, making it chewy when eaten. Frankly, I think the fact that he’s on the bottom of his group is due more to the fact that his group was strong than for any big failure on his part.
The person going home is almost certainly going to be Jacqueline or John. It’s a choice between a good idea with bad execution (Jacqueline) or a bad execution with pre-made ingredients (John). I think it’s obvious who’s going home.
Yup, our hippie, dreadlock John is packing his knives. It’s kind of a shame, really. He could have been a fun, kooky presence on the show. Alas, his dish let him down and he’ll leave before we get to know him.