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The challenge today is strange. Mizrahi states that the chefs will not be judged on their cooking but instead on the physical appearance of their dishes. Seriously, am I watching the right show? My agitation is reduced for a moment as a hilarious editing montage demonstrates how poorly several contestants adapt to these rules. Even though taste doesn't matter, people begin cooking anyway. Fabio goes so far as to say that he has the inspiration of a "beautiful woman walking in the rain trying to not get messed up by the water". He represents this by putting sloppy vegetable gunk on uncooked beef. Stuff like this is exactly why I don't go to art museums.

Richard Blais notices that Mizrahi wears a lot of black, so the chef determines that he should work with black ice. That's one way to go, I guess. Antonia reflects the best ability to adapt as she chooses not to cook anything, instead building an inedible art project based upon her favorite book, The Giving Tree. Dale makes street graffiti about his girlfriend's Masters Degree. Or something like that. As you can see, people are all over the place with their ideas. This leads to quite the mixed bag as they get judged.

Isaac Mizrahi does not have a reputation for being a polite, nice person. The chefs find out why over a span of several minutes as he makes one vile remark after another. He treats the entire cast like they just ran over his Yorkshire Terrier (I don't know if he has one of these, I'm just presuming). Dale is told that his meal looks like what he should have left behind as scraps when he was cooking the real meal. Fabio is so nervous that he talks so much that Mizrahi has tuned him out before he can stop talking. Worst of all, Fabio's plate has an entire paragraph of explanation wrtten in icing (?) so any talking he did was redundant. Mizrahi also makes some sort of raw egg/salmonella joke about Isabella's dish that is so acerbic that I needed to listen three times to recognize his underlying meaning. Isaac Mizrahi is a jerk.

Let's ignore the judge and focus on the dishes chosen for the bottom and the top. Clearly the worst dish in terms of visuals is Angelo's. He has created a reptilian theme and he has attempted to reinforce this by writing the word "Crocadile" on the table. The other contestants are cackling at his Dan Quayle-ish mistake and when Whathisname says that it reminds him of Charles Manson, I cannot disagree. Of course, the problem with insulting everyone and everything is that when something is truly worthy of scorn, you've already shot your wad and have nowhere else to go. Can't Top Chef have gotten Lauren Conrad from The Hills instead?

Anyway, Dale, Tre and Angelo fail to make a visually appealing dish. The top half of the group includes Fabio (what???), Carla and Richard. Moments later, Richard is given immunity in the next challenge, and reminds us yet again just how vast his culinary skills are.

What is the immunity challenge this week? The producers of Top Chef woke up this morning and got themselves a gun. The chefs will be taken to one of the most exclusive restaurants in the country, Rao's, a New York City location with an Italian theme as well as a reputation for catering to made men. In fact, Frank Pellegrino, one of the co-owners, appeared as an actor in Goodfellas and The Sopranos. Ignoring the innumerable potential mob jokes (at least for the moment), an Italian cuisine challenge is music to the ears of three remaining contestants, Fabio, Antonia and Mike Isabella. This is their wheelhouse and frankly seems to give them an unfair advantage over the other six players.

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