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In prepping Mei’s dessert, Rebecca sounds a note of alarm. The yogurt is too sweet. Mei almost freaks out. She adds additional lime elements and hopes that this will balance the dish out. Oh boy.

Meanwhile, back in the dining room, Tom isn’t a fan of Mei’s decision to do a dessert. “If I’m a savory chef,” he says, “I would go savory” for the last course. Padma agrees that doing a dessert is a big risk.

Mei finally brings out a strawberry lime curd with toasted yogurt, milk crumble, and yogurt-lime ice. Richard says that the dish is so beautiful to look at that he doesn’t want to touch it. As the diners dig in, Gail praises the toasted yogurt with its amazing, smoky flavor. Hugh loves the texture added by the milk crumbles. Tom stops all conversation by declaring that he has two things to say. “Number one, it’s the best dessert I’ve ever had on Top Chef. Number two, she was very smart in doing dessert.”

Wow. I’m stunned. Way to bring your A-Game in the most important challenge of the season. The best dessert ever on Top Chef. Again: wow.

The diners head over to Greg’s dining room and Gail immediately points out that Greg is not doing a dessert. Tom comments that he’s using all Mexican ingredients, though Greg typically skews Asian.

Greg also chooses octopus for his first dish - it’s a grilled octopus with prickly pear, xoconostle, passion fruit, and cashew milk. Richard loves the presentation, Padma dubs it “sublime,” and Tom marvels that Greg’s ability to look for inspiration and find it everywhere. He calls it a “powerhouse of a dish.”

Greg’s next course is a shrimp dish and he’s feeling confident. In particular, he likes the tang added by his use of crispy shrimp heads. He presents a shrimp broth with green chorizo, pickled nopales, and crispy shrimp heads. Hugh appreciates the crunch added by the shrimp heads but Gail expresses doubt about Greg’s inclusion of shrimp shells in the broth. Tom agrees and attributes this problem to Greg’s unfamiliarity with the ingredients. “Mei’s second dish was much better,” he comments.

Back in the kitchen, Greg is realizing that he has a potential catastrophe on his hands: he erred in cooking the carrot sauce for his fish dish. Specifically, he forgot to add vinegar and sugar to it. He proceeds to add sugar to the sauce, hoping to fix things, but then realizes that it tastes too sweet. He adds some salt and prays that the tomatillo sauce will balance things out.

Out in the dining room, he presents a striped bass with roasted carrots, radish, pineapple, and tomatillo. After a few bites, Tom notes that even though Greg chose not to make a dessert, his fish course “is sweeter than Mei’s dessert.” He doesn’t think it worked. Traci Des Jardins, on the other side of the dining room, says that this dish feels like it’s from a totally different chef than the one who prepared the previous two.

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