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Wasting no time, Tom gets to the Elimination Challenge. The cheftestants are tasked with cooking for 200 VIP guests - including food critics and bloggers from across the state - at Hollywood Park. Tom warns them that the diners are individuals of such caliber that they can make or break careers. Appropriately, then, the critics will score each cheftestant’s dish, and the judges will select from among those cheftestants at the top and bottom of the scoring.

Armed with $500 each, the cheftestants inflict mass chaos on their friendly neighborhood Whole Foods. They then head back to the Top Chef kitchen where more chaos ensues. One chef (Wes) makes a total and utter mess in the kitchen, spilling ingredients and towers of used cookware all over the floor in front of his station. “If only Tom could see that,” I think to myself.

Speak of the devil. Here comes Tom and Emeril Lagasse, our guest judge for the challenge. Wes tries frantically for a few minutes to clean up, but he’s hardly made a dent in the culinary flotsam and jetsam. “What’s going on over here…” Tom asks before trailing off.

After a full day’s work, the chefs head back to their swanky house - wait a minute, they’re not at a house this year. The chefs are shacking up at the Hotel Roosevelt - an amazing hotel, but still a hotel, to be sure. I guess there’s gonna be so much traveling this season (“from Los Angeles to San Francisco”) that Bravo decided not to spring for a house. I assume Andy Cohen’s botox (with its scary results) ate up the network’s production budget.

Morning arrives and the chefs trundle out to Hollywood Park for the Elimination Challenge. Rule #1 of Top Chef states that the first chef eliminated is typically the person who simply didn’t deserve to be on the show in the first place - the chef totally out of his or her league. The exception was, of course, last year where Gregory (runner up) knocked George (fifth place) out of the running (before returning halfway through).

Each chef will be cooking in their own tent with a sign bearing their name and a picture of their home state. As the chefs prep for the challenge, Garret decides to start trash talking. In an earlier portion of the show, he revealed himself to be a self-impressed individual who talks as though he swallowed a thesaurus and now regurgitates all the words that were too long to fit in his stomach, by which I mean to say he does his utmost best to incorporate as many multisyllabic words in his speech as possible to emphasize his superior intellect. In this particular instance, after learning that Marjorie works with Top Chef All-Stars runner up Mike Isabella, Garret declares that Mike serves in his restaurants “one of the worst bastardizations of Italian food” and hopes that Marjorie has better chops than her mentor.

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