‘Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen’: A war after ‘Restaurant Wars’ comes down to pasta, roots and one big mistake [Watch]

Daniel Montgomery
·3 min read
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“I am ever so determined to get back into the competition and make it to that finale. I’ve put enough hard work into this. What was the purpose? to win ‘Top Chef’ 20,” says Nicole Gomes as she enters “Last Chance Kitchen” following her elimination from the competition in the dreaded “Restaurant Wars.” “I call her a beast, and it’s my pleasure to compete against her,” admits Charbel Hayek, who was eliminated from the show last week in “Street Food Fight” and is the current “LCK” champion. Watch their battle above.

Gomes had never been in the bottom during an Elimination Challenge before, but “Restaurant Wars” did her in when her risky tortellini dish came out with thick, uneven pasta. That dish also took forever to be served to the judges and restaurant patrons, and her team as a whole failed to present a coherent theme. Their restaurant was called Root as a way to honor the chef’s culinary roots, but nobody understood that message.

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“LCK” host and judge Tom Colicchio also thought it was a missed opportunity for a restaurant called Root not to use root vegetables to unify their dishes. So guess what he has in mind for this redemptive battle. “For this challenge, I want you to both make the best pasta you possibly can, and I want you to incorporate roots,” he tells them. The combination of roots and pasta sounds odd to Hayek, who nevertheless plans on incorporating parsnips into ravioli, but Gomes seems more comfortable right out of the gate as she prepares some Parisian gnocchi.

Hayek struggles under the 45 minute time limit: he mixes his pasta dough by hand, which itself is time-consuming, and his parsnip stuffing just isn’t blending properly, but he wants to push himself and earn his spot in the competition. Nicole, meanwhile, makes a rookie mistake while preparing leeks for her dish. She pours salt in her pot right out of the container, and she knows immediately that it’s way too much. Should she start over? She decides to forge ahead, hoping the rest of her dish will balance her salty leeks.

Alas, the salt is Gomes’s downfall. Colicchio declares Hayek the winner even though his pasta is just so-so, but a win is a win. Homes kicks herself for including the leeks when she could have done without them entirely; Colocchio likes the rest of her gnocchi and doesn’t even consider leeks a true root vegetable. But “I really enjoyed this,” says Gomes in her final exit interview. “Never in my lifetime would I ever think that I would have done a ‘World All-Stars,’ and to that, I mean, what a memory.”

As for Hayek, “I basically just beat two Top Chefs from Canada. I love you Canada, don’t hate me.”

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