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But alas, perfection is always fleeting. Jeremy starts slicing his duck and realizes that many of them are severely underdone, but there’s not much he can do. On the other side of the kitchen, Marjorie has started slicing Amar’s lamb and suggests that they could use another one or two minutes in the pan, but Amar disagrees. He’s happy with how they’re cooked.

Amar puts out a harissa-rubbed rack of lamb with braised lamb pastille, a date, ginger purée, and yogurt emulsion. Jeremy offers duck with roasted maitake mushrooms, smoked chilies, buttermilk, and lemon. While both dishes are delicious, the proteins are the problem. Padma loves Amar’s lamb jus, and Gail compliments the combination of dates, nut and yogurt. But the lamb is definitely underdone. As for Jeremy’s duck, Emeril adores the flavors, but wishes it’d been cooked more. Padma’s duck was raw.

With two strong dishes each and one clunker, the final dish will decide things. In line with what’s come before, Amar is doing a rustic dessert, while Jeremy is channeling Bill Nye the Science Guy (or maybe Alton Brown) with his. Amar has a coconut financier with mango sorbet, passion fruit curd, a tropical fruit salad, and a brûlée meringue. For his part, Jeremy has homemade ricotta and mozzarella cheese “cylinder” with spiced fig jam, pumpernickel toast, and a honey “sphere.”

Most of the commentary indicates that Jeremy has appealed to the technicians in the dining room. Padma likes the creativity of the dish, Richard says that it was led by technique as opposed to ingredients, and Emeril calls it “intellectual.” Tom simply criticizes the honey sphere, which tasted like sugar water.

As for Amar, Tom likes his flavors and Richard appreciates the tropical fruit, but no one likes the texture of the cake. It’s just far too dense.

With dinner done, it’s on to Judges Table and a course-by-course examination of the meal. A theme is quickly apparent - while Amar did well pairing ingredients and flavors, Jeremy was far more creative. For the first course, Amar’s bold flavors made sense, but Jeremy showed real finesse in pulling together his torchon and was ingenious in his use of marshmallows. In the second, Amar packed a huge seafood punch in his risotto, which Gail calls one of the best on the show in many, many years. As for Jeremy, his branzino was smartly paired with acids like lemon and raw tomatoes. Both third courses were marred by incorrectly cooked proteins, with Emeril a huge fan of Jeremy’s flavors and Gail loving the harissa rub on Amar’s lamb. Finally, Gail adored the intensity of flavors in Amar’s financier, though Tom again voiced concerns about the denseness of the cake. Jeremy’s play on a cheese course, though, was “intellectual” according to Emeril, highlighted by an amazing use of mozzarella “skin” per Gail, which delivered on flavor and was much more than a culinary trick.

As the judges start to confer, Padma sums things up by saying that one chef was “technique forward” while the other was “flavor forward.” I agree. And in such a situation, you gotta think that flavor wins out. As prior seasons have shown, over-reliance on technical dexterity can easily cross into gimmick territory devoid of authenticity or soul. It doesn’t seem like that’s happened here, but I still give the edge to Amar here.

With the announcement of the winner at hand, Tom gives a shout out to everything that’s inspired the two finalists to achieve the level that they’ve reached - from their family to their culinary mentors, who got to pass the baton to two blossoming new stars.

But one star shone just a bit brighter today, and that was... JEREMY. Sigh. Taco Dude 1. Flavor 0.

“No fucking way,” Jeremy blurts out, which is followed up by further random utterances of profanity. He’s clearly blown away, and in the course of that, reverting to form. Amar, for his part, is taking the defeat in stride, saying that his dream of becoming a great chef like Emeril or Charlie Palmer will live on. “I’m working my way up there,” he says, and I agree.

But tonight is Jeremy’s night. He describes for us a photo he has of his daughter holding his face after he won his first jujitsu competition. He’s looking forward to seeing her and telling her “Daddy won.”

Indeed, he did. Congrats to our Season 13 winner.

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