Top Chef Boston Recap
By Jason Lee
November 3, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Wow, is this going to be the most argumentative cast since TC Season 2? I say “since TC Season 2” cause nothing will top Betty, Sam, and Ilan ripping Marcel a new one, each in separate episodes. Ah, that was a glorious season.
The producers cut to the next morning and we see that Aaron has found himself a buddy in the house: James. James says that he and Aaron have similar backgrounds, with tough childhoods and no glowing culinary resume (unlike some of the other cheftestants). Aaron discusses his general lack of discipline and a father figure growing up. He says that he became self-reliant and recognizes that others might see him as a cocky asshole (no argument there) but professes that he knows his strengths and weaknesses (I’m not so sure about the latter) and says he’ll work himself out on TC.
The Quickfire kicks off with Ming Tsai as the guest judge. And we have our second Sudden Death Quickfire of the season! Dougie commences an internal freak out.
The inspiration for the SDQ is the Boston Tea party. The cheftestants will get a random tea box and must make a dish that highlights whatever tea they get. Winner gets immunity; loser is up for immediate elimination. And… GO!
Immediately, some of the chefs start bitching about their teas. Aaron got gunpowder spearmint and he’s not happy. Rebecca wanted black tea but got lemongrass pomegranate. I’m wonder which Teavana got cleared out for this challenge, because these are certainly some specialty teas.
James is busy cooking his rainbow trout. Aaron shows that no one is safe from his disdain - not even his “buddy” - saying that James’s dish is dated. “80s, baby,” he remarks, drawing a parallel with James’s bizarre Patrick Swayze tattoo.
There’s other cooking going on, and none of it good. Ron has totally scorched his duck breast and has to rely on his backup. Aaron has “cooked the shit” out of his monkfish cheeks and hopes that the other ingredients on his dish are enough to keep him off the bottom (ah, like last week with Stacy’s chicken saving the day).
Out of the 13 SDQ dishes, Ming Tsai loved three most of all. Melissa cooked a delicious duck breast with toasted nut oolong tea - Ming loves the incorporation of rice flavor. Greg made a tuna crudo with strawberries and white tea that blew Ming away with its use of the fruit. Finally, Ron was super ballsy in making a mole (!!!) with crusted duck breast. Ming thought his mole was the best sauce of the round.
And the winner ends up being Greg with his perfect ratio of tuna to strawberry. Greg revels in his second win of the season… though his first “win” was in a team challenge, so it’s hard to know how much of the win to attribute to him.
On the bottom are the trio of Aaron (with his way overcooked monkfish cheeks), James (who put on way too much beurre blanc sauce), and Rebecca (who didn’t incorporate enough of the tea flavor in her “neutral” cake).
Aaron ends up as the loser of the challenge and smiles appear on all of the other chefs. This could be the moment when Aaron - hated, hated Aaron with his disdainful comments and condescending behavior - goes home. Blood is in the water and everyone knows it.
As part of the SDQ, Aaron gets to choose one chef to cook against, one-on-one. Keriann recalls his “I could cook you under the table!” comment from two episodes ago and is sure she’s gonna get picked. She’s ready. She wants to send him home.
In a moment showing that Aaron really can’t put his culinary money where his mouth is, he picks Katie for the totally unconvincing reason that she’s a culinary school instructor and wants to beat her to show that you don’t have to go to culinary school to be a great chef. Yeah, whatever.
The twist for the SDQ is that the only source of heat that Aaron and Katie can use is boiling water. Aaron decides to do a play on a spring roll while Katie decides to make pasta. Wow. They both have a few issues - the spring roll “wrapper” made out of shrimp is a bit thick, while Katie can’t get the KitchenAid Stand Mixer working to cut her pasta.
Meanwhile, on the sidelines, everyone is rooting for Katie to win. I’m pretty sure everyone at home is doing so, too.
Aaron serves up his “spring roll” with cucumber, carrot, mint, and raw peanuts wrapped in a wrapper made of shrimp. The judges show no reaction. Katie offers a saffron, hand-cut, pappardelle pasta with smoked mozzarella. Ming asks whether she salted her pasta. Ominous.
And yes, that ends up being the key. Aaron wins because his dish showed great technique, while Katie should have added more salt to her pasta and more sauce overall. The cheftestants are crestfallen. Aaron thinks that his win shows that he belongs there.
We move on to the Elimination Challenge. As baseball stadium vendors walk in while calling out, “Peanuts! Pretzels! Popcorn!” the chefetestants are informed that they’ll be cooking in the venerable Fenway Park, where they’ll be asked to take inspiration from a classic ballpark snack and make a fine dining dish.
Before we know it, the cheftestants are dashing through Whole Foods, trying to plan their dishes. Katie has great memories of going to baseball games with her father, who died of cancer. She wants to dedicate this dish to him. Meanwhile, Keriann wants to take tons of ballpark flavors and get them into a braised short rib dish. Doug is appalled - he has no idea how she thinks she’ll be able to braise short ribs in the time they’ve been given.
Back in the kitchen, Adam notes that he has no idea what type of kitchen equipment will be available in the stadium, and thus wants to poach his fish now so that tomorrow will be nothing more than “scoop and serve.” Rebecca is horrified - she notes that fish can overcook in a second. I’m horrified for a different reason - how on earth can “scoop and serve” be used to put together a fine dining dish?
Katie, at the other end of the kitchen, puts her “crème brûlée” into her cart for tomorrow. She notes that she won’t have any idea whether the mixture has set until tomorrow morning during the challenge. Telling last words?
The next morning, the TC producers treat us to another shot of James shirtless, making coffee, and Greg doing yoga. Greg feels like he has momentum and discusses his journey from chef, to drug addict, to recovering drug addict, to chef with all the momentum.
The Fenway kitchen is pretty small and stocked with only the bare minimum, thus the chefs will be cooking in groups of three. Katie is in the first group and learns that her crème brûlée has not set at all. She starts running around the kitchen madly, trying to do this and that to fix her dish. It’s wildly chaotic. Aaron notes that maybe “Miss Culinary Instructor bit off more than she can chew.” God, I hate him.
The three head over to the judges. Aaron serves his version of a pretzel dog with a pretzel encircling pork rillette. Ming criticizes it for having a soft and mushy flavor. Tom finds that the pretzel gives the dish some nice salt, but that it’s a bit bland other than that.
Ron serves a popcorn soup with a gigantic breaded fish croquet in the middle, which is supposed to resemble a baseball. And it does. In size. Ming finds that the soup has good popcorn flavor, but Tom says that sometimes a bowl of soup should be just a bowl of soup. Not one with a grapefruit-sized croquet in the middle.
Katie serves her dish while discussing everything that went wrong with it. After the initial catastrophe, it’s now a popcorn mouse with a blue cornmeal salted shortbread. The judges all love it and chide her for “dumping” on the dish prematurely. They think she should stand behind what she put out. Katie talks about how the dish was dedicated to her father and starts to cry.
The next three are up and Doug goes first with a seared scallop, grilled corn, and corn sauce. Ming was surprised by how un-sweet the corn sauce was, but Tom declares that he likes it that way.
Keriann puts forth her braised short rib with parsnip puree. Everyone at the table agrees that it wasn’t cooked enough and is underseasoned. Keriann is frustrated. She says it was cooked exactly as she wanted.
Katsuji serves up a bread pudding with mushrooms and bacon and braised pork belly. This was a reimagining of fried dough and Richard thinks it’s a brilliant one. Hugh Acheson, though, finds the pork belly tough and Tom criticizes it for having a lot going on.
Melissa is next with a popcorn and ramp soup. The soup is a bright, bright yellow. Like Pikachu yellow. The judges adore the dish, though. Ming loves the corn flavor and use of “popcorn bacon.” Tom loves her pickled ramps.
Mei Lin is next with a seared pork loin with braised peanuts. Hugh loves the radishes she used and says it’s a great dish, but Richard notes (and others agree) that her pork is overcooked.
Stacy, the local girl, presents seared scallops with pickled peanuts and sunchokes. The judges engage in a totally irrelevant discussion about whether and how Stacy would be able to throw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game. Guess her food wasn’t worth discussing as well.
Rebecca comes out with a roasted salmon with mustard and honey glaze. Richard notes that lots of things could have gone wrong with her dish, and turns the conversation to when he had his own bad salmon moment when he was a contestant on Top Chef. Tom notes that Rebecca’s dish “got the job done.” In other words, “you’ll be in the middle of this challenge.”
James offers a lobster cake with pretzel panzanella. Tom likes the lobster flavor but finds it overall very mushy.
Adam serves his watermelon curry with peanut oil-poached halibut. He knows it’s overcooked - earlier, the convection oven in the Fenway kitchen “hammered” his fish. He blames the Curse of the Bambino. And sure enough, Hugh says that while he likes Adam’s peanut base, he “hated the fish.” Tom chimes in. “Exactly.” Richard, though, says that Adam’s broth saves the fact that his fish is overcooked. We’ll see about that.
Last, we have Greg with a roasted duck with peanut “nam prik pao” - whatever the hell that is. The judges love it, though. Hugh likes the use of pears and scallions and Richard declares it well-balanced. “It’s like moneyball,” he says.
The cheftestants head to the Stew Room, where Adam is convinced he’s going home. Aaron is too, noting that the judges didn’t like the filling of his dish. Katsuji is surprised that Aaron isn’t blaming someone else for his F-up. Aaron tells him to STFU. The two immediately engage in a heated, talking-over-each-other, slinging pot shots as quick as they can come up with them, argument. Aaron criticizes Katsuji’s bread pudding, say that it’s what “five-year olds cook.” Sigh, that’s always his comeback - “you make simple food.” Katsuji tells Aaron not to talk to him like that. Aaron says, “I’m so scared of you right now.”
Sigh. If only Katie had gotten her shit together during the SDQ.
The judges call everyone out and Greg, Melissa, and Katie are declared to have made the best dishes of the evening. Katie is praised for having found a way to rebound and reconfigure her dish in light of the complications she encountered. Melissa gets kudos for the simplicity of her dish (I hope you’re taking notes, Aaron). Greg’s dish was incredibly balanced. Tom says that “there was nothing screaming for attention, it all worked together.”
It sounds like Greg has won again, and yep, that’s exactly what he’s done. He’s swept this episode. Padma calls him “quite the frontrunner,” and I agree. Tom notes that Greg has won the second Elimination Challenge in a row (though, again, last week was a team challenge) and asks the other chefs to step up.
The bottom three are Ron, Keriann, and Katsuji. Wow. This just goes to show that success one week is no assurance to success the next. Ron was on the top of this episode’s SDQ, but is now on the chopping block. Katsuji was down two weeks ago, was up last week, and now is down again. Keriann… well, she’s been mostly down.
Meanwhile, Aaron and Adam are relieved. They were sure that they were gonna be on the bottom. Me, too.
Tom questions why Keriann though she could braise a short rib in the short amount of time she had without a pressure cooker. Keriann stands behind her braise. Hugh finds that doing so shows poor judgment - it was not braised enough. Keriann says that she doesn’t like it when braised short ribs “turn to mush” and prefers not to have to eat short ribs “with a spoon.” Hugh says that he needed “saber-toothed tiger teeth” in order to eat her short ribs. Ouch.
Katsuji says that he’s having trouble avoiding original mistakes. Hugh agrees and tells him to be a better editor of his food. His dish had some good attributes, but they were drowned out by bad ones.
Tom says the same thing applies to Ron’s dish. Was his dish supposed to be a soup or giant fish ball? He says it totally lacked proportionality. Ming agrees and says he should have cut the croquet in half.
Tom, meanwhile, wants to cut to the chase and announce the loser of the night. He says that all the chefs swung for the fences, but that some struck out. And that person… is Ron. Yep. There was nothing “fine dining” about the dish, and as per usual practice in the early episodes, the judges are sending the chef home who showed the poorest culinary judgment. Here, Tom says that the judges just couldn’t get past the “overall messiness of the dish.”
Ron, in his final testimonial, is brought to tears. He knows that he’s better than what he showed today and better than many of the chefs still in the competition. He says that TC has reaffirmed his passion for food and will return home with renewed vigor. And smaller portion sizes, I hope.