New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

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.

Continued:       1       2       3