Top Chef Las Vegas Recap

By Jason Lee

October 29, 2009

He hopes Robin has a nice day!

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On the bottom, we have the two remaining women: Robin and Jennifer. Their dishes just never came together. Jennifer is clearly frustrated and I'm worried that she's digging herself into an emotional rut that she may not be able to recover from.
On the top we have Kevin and Bryan. Kevin wins but does not get immunity. Not that he needs it. In ten episodes, he's landed on the bottom exactly once.

The cheftestants are told that their Elimination Challenge will take place at chef Tom Colicchio's Las Vegas restaurant, Craftsteak in the MGM Grand. It's one of the finest steakhouses in the country and everyone is excited to cook meat. Kevin, in particular, thinks that meat is his forte. In fact, the only one who isn't excited is Robin. The chefs talk into the night about what they might prepare for the Elimination Challenge.

The next day, the chefs awaken and head to Craftsteak. The kitchen is absolutely beautiful and the chefs all run into the freezer to see what type of proteins are available. They see a bounty of steak, pork, lamb, lobster...you name it, it's there. Any good carnivore probably had to mop up a pool of his own drool after seeing the spread of protein.

Tom quietly arrives and calls for the chefs to come out. We will have a guest judge at Judges Table and it's none other than Harvard-alum, Queen Amidala herself, Natalie Portman. Eli makes a snide comment about how the only significant thing she's done was Star Wars. I hate Eli. I throw my shoe at the TV. "You OBVIOUSLY didn't see her in Closer!!!" I scream.




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Natalie has a bombshell to drop (though it's not really a bombshell if you have any knowledge of Hollywood starlets.) Yep, she's a vegetarian. Though this isn't exactly a revelation of epic proportions, the chefs are shell-shocked. Every dish, every meat, every idea that they had coming into this challenge will have to be junked. They're cooking veggies today.

Most of the chefs have problems with their dishes – frankly, I think most of them are just burned out after so many challenges in such a short amount of time. Michael and Bryan are plating down to the wire, Kevin's presentation looks like a slop of mush on a plate, Robin is spazzing out over the idea of using fresh garbanzo beans in her dish, and Pompous Mike wasn't able to get his water to boil quickly enough to cook his leeks, which he's trying to plate so that they look like scallops.

But none can compare to Jennifer. First, she has to change her dish TWICE because first Kevin and Robin want to use the type of mushroom she wants, and then she loses her eggplants to Eli. Her final dish looks very...how do I put this? The portion size is so small that you'd expect it to come from Jenny Craig.

I am really not happy. First off, Jennifer doesn't have any of the fire that we saw early on in the season (anyone remember the swagger she carried when she served as Executive Chef in the Air Force Base challenge?). Secondly, in her interviews, she looks like she's been crying. There have been more than a handful of episodes in past seasons of Top Chef where you can tell who went home by the fact that in their pre-Judges Table interviews, you could tell that they had been crying. And this week, it's Jennifer. And I'm scared.


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