Top Chef California Recap: Finale Part 2
By Jason Lee
March 21, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jeremy and Amar arrive here with differing levels of momentum. Jeremy is on a three-challenge win streak and is clearly riding high. Amar has fought back from his Sudden Death Quickfire to claim the Last Chance Kitchen mantel and bested Marjorie and Isaac in the penultimate episode. Use whatever metaphor you want - all the marbles, bet the farm - everything will be decided in one challenge.
But not before brunch. Interrupting a game of pool, Amar answers a knock on the hotel room door to find Tom Colicchio in the hallway with a cart of cooking supplies and food. Noting that he’s never cooked a meal in 13 seasons on Top Chef (it pays to be the head judge and executive producer), Tom is going to cook a four-course brunch for the chefs, with each dish highlighting one of his favorite ingredients. Jeremy and Amar are treated to squab with honey-glazed onions, potato pasta with leeks and caviar, wagyu beef with chanterelle mushrooms. It’s an amazing experience and Jeremy and Amar all but have to pinch themselves in between bites to make sure they’re not dreaming.
Finishing up, Tom hints that the finalists may be tasked with making a similar menu. Indeed, that proves true when Jeremy and Amar arrive at the MGM Grand kitchen met by Padma and the entire Top Chef: California cast. For the finale, each chef will have to cook a four-course menu, where each dish highlights a single ingredient—something they love to cook. To help them through it, each finalist will get to choose two sous chefs. Amar goes with Kwame and Marjorie. Jeremy goes with Carl and Angelina, repeating what Marjorie said a few episodes ago about Angelina being a “beast” with prep.
But wait, there’s more! The two finalists are also met with their own respective culinary mentor. For Jeremy, it’s Jean-Georges, and their reunion is incredibly heartfelt and sweet. Their faces clearly show how much they mean to each other.
In stark contrast, Amar sees Charlie Palmer, who had a guiding hand in Amar’s development as a chef. When Amar decided to break away and open his own restaurant, though, it apparently was not an amicable departure. “Some things were said that I now regret,” Amar notes, leaving it at that. Charlie is similarly terse - there’s a fine line, he tells us, between being confident and being an asshole. Amar, he says, crossed that line.
Kinda makes you wonder why the producers decided to bring Charlie into the finale.
The two crews get to work, with Jeremy and Amar in charge, and their mentors working as sous chefs. After a trip to Whole Foods, prep starts in the kitchen. Jeremy gleefully sets Jean-Georges to work cleaning foie gras. Tom and Emeril check in to see how both groups are doing. There’s a ton of lighthearted banter and laughter with Jeremy’s group.
But the clouds come out when Tom and Emeril saunter over to Amar’s station. Amar and Charlie haven’t addressed the elephant in the room - the way Amar left things when he struck out on his own - and though nothing is said to make anyone uncomfortable, the entire atmosphere is thick with tension. It feels a bit like the opening scene of a horror movie, where people are acting just oddly enough to let you know that something is very wrong here.
The next day, the two finalists get their game faces on. Amar knows he faces a steep challenge. Many Top Chef winners - Harold in Season 1, Ilan in Season 2, Stephanie in Season 4, and Mei Lin last year - won the very first challenge in their respective season, as Jeremy did here. If history is any indication, Amar will be the underdog going into this.
As they finish up their dishes, it quickly becomes apparent the both chefs are taking drastically different approaches to the challenge. Jeremy seems to be incorporating every technique he knows - from gels, to liquid nitrogen, to strange food pairings. Amar, on the other hand, is going old school. It’s the Season 2 finale all over again: technique vs. flavor.
With the two celebrity “sous” chefs (Jean-Georges and Charlie in the dining room) with the typical Top Chef judges, the cheftestants from this past season, and the finalists’ family members in the dining room, the eating gets underway. Jeremy presents foie gras in hot and cold preparations with chili, passion fruit, and marshmallows (!!!!). Amar highlights tuna in a seared tuna tataki with habanero coconut dressing, compressed pineapple, and toasted peanuts.
Padma adores Jeremy’s foie gras, and Richard appreciates the textures incorporated in it. Tom points out that in the past two finales, chefs have struggled with doing torchons, but here, Jeremy nailed it. Gail appreciates the pairing of foie gras and passion fruit.
As for Amar, Gail raves about the brightness in the dish from the tropical flavors, and Hubert Keller compliments the heat. It’s neck and neck after round one, with Padma noting that it’s a “tough match so far,” and Tom agreeing that both dishes were “very good.”
Some initial hiccups lead to consternation back in the kitchen for round two. Jeremy packed his fish too tightly into sheet pans, leading to severe undercooking for those fish in the middle. Amar, meanwhile, is taking his sweet time making sure that his risotto goes off without a hitch.
Jeremy ends up presenting slow-cooked branzino with an herbal-lime vinaigrette, squash, and tomatoes. Against that, Amar puts up a sea urchin risotto with butter-poached lobster, finger limes, jicama, and shellfish froth that’s inspired by the season’s Santa Barbara uni challenge.
Both chefs have knocked it out of the park. Culinary superstar and intimidating French chef Dominque Crenn declares Amar’s risotto to be “an amazing dish,” and Tom finds everything “perfect.” Dominque also appreciates Jeremy’s balance of flavors, especially through incorporation of the raw tomato, and Tom agrees, pointing to the use of cherries. Emeril declares things to be neck-and-neck and Dominque agrees wholeheartedly.
But alas, perfection is always fleeting. Jeremy starts slicing his duck and realizes that many of them are severely underdone, but there’s not much he can do. On the other side of the kitchen, Marjorie has started slicing Amar’s lamb and suggests that they could use another one or two minutes in the pan, but Amar disagrees. He’s happy with how they’re cooked.
Amar puts out a harissa-rubbed rack of lamb with braised lamb pastille, a date, ginger purée, and yogurt emulsion. Jeremy offers duck with roasted maitake mushrooms, smoked chilies, buttermilk, and lemon. While both dishes are delicious, the proteins are the problem. Padma loves Amar’s lamb jus, and Gail compliments the combination of dates, nut and yogurt. But the lamb is definitely underdone. As for Jeremy’s duck, Emeril adores the flavors, but wishes it’d been cooked more. Padma’s duck was raw.
With two strong dishes each and one clunker, the final dish will decide things. In line with what’s come before, Amar is doing a rustic dessert, while Jeremy is channeling Bill Nye the Science Guy (or maybe Alton Brown) with his. Amar has a coconut financier with mango sorbet, passion fruit curd, a tropical fruit salad, and a brûlée meringue. For his part, Jeremy has homemade ricotta and mozzarella cheese “cylinder” with spiced fig jam, pumpernickel toast, and a honey “sphere.”
Most of the commentary indicates that Jeremy has appealed to the technicians in the dining room. Padma likes the creativity of the dish, Richard says that it was led by technique as opposed to ingredients, and Emeril calls it “intellectual.” Tom simply criticizes the honey sphere, which tasted like sugar water.
As for Amar, Tom likes his flavors and Richard appreciates the tropical fruit, but no one likes the texture of the cake. It’s just far too dense.
With dinner done, it’s on to Judges Table and a course-by-course examination of the meal. A theme is quickly apparent - while Amar did well pairing ingredients and flavors, Jeremy was far more creative. For the first course, Amar’s bold flavors made sense, but Jeremy showed real finesse in pulling together his torchon and was ingenious in his use of marshmallows. In the second, Amar packed a huge seafood punch in his risotto, which Gail calls one of the best on the show in many, many years. As for Jeremy, his branzino was smartly paired with acids like lemon and raw tomatoes. Both third courses were marred by incorrectly cooked proteins, with Emeril a huge fan of Jeremy’s flavors and Gail loving the harissa rub on Amar’s lamb. Finally, Gail adored the intensity of flavors in Amar’s financier, though Tom again voiced concerns about the denseness of the cake. Jeremy’s play on a cheese course, though, was “intellectual” according to Emeril, highlighted by an amazing use of mozzarella “skin” per Gail, which delivered on flavor and was much more than a culinary trick.
As the judges start to confer, Padma sums things up by saying that one chef was “technique forward” while the other was “flavor forward.” I agree. And in such a situation, you gotta think that flavor wins out. As prior seasons have shown, over-reliance on technical dexterity can easily cross into gimmick territory devoid of authenticity or soul. It doesn’t seem like that’s happened here, but I still give the edge to Amar here.
With the announcement of the winner at hand, Tom gives a shout out to everything that’s inspired the two finalists to achieve the level that they’ve reached - from their family to their culinary mentors, who got to pass the baton to two blossoming new stars.
But one star shone just a bit brighter today, and that was... JEREMY. Sigh. Taco Dude 1. Flavor 0.
“No fucking way,” Jeremy blurts out, which is followed up by further random utterances of profanity. He’s clearly blown away, and in the course of that, reverting to form. Amar, for his part, is taking the defeat in stride, saying that his dream of becoming a great chef like Emeril or Charlie Palmer will live on. “I’m working my way up there,” he says, and I agree.
But tonight is Jeremy’s night. He describes for us a photo he has of his daughter holding his face after he won his first jujitsu competition. He’s looking forward to seeing her and telling her “Daddy won.”
Indeed, he did. Congrats to our Season 13 winner.