Top Chef recap: Texas' recap
The Top Chef caravan stuck a flag in Austin and moved once again… back to San Antonio, where we started this circuitous culinary adventure through Texas. At this point, does anyone care about the change in location? The next time Top Chef chooses an entire state as its inspiration, they should set their sights on a less geographically expansive one, like Delaware, known for its crab puffs and Scrapple. (With the Wikipedia blackout it was way harder to look up “Delaware state food” just now.)
Location aside, the Quickfire Challenge was a rather ingenious one. The chefs had to choose three ingredients from a moving conveyor belt and use them all in a dish. The longer they waited to pick ingredients, the more likely they were to nab good ones but the less time they’d have to cook them. It was like playing a game of chicken against the clock and the conveyor belt gods-elves. I seem to remember a Mario Party game sort of like this. Fast Food Frenzy, anyone?
It was fun to see the cheftestants pick food combos even the most pregnant of women would think were weird. It was also fun to see Grayson chest-bump Sarah’s elbow. And it was also fun once again listening to fan-favorite guest judge Eric Ripert’s amazingly thick accent, which is somehow totally easy to understand.
Landing in the bottom was Chris, who had to chase down the lobster (the conveyor belt giveth and the conveyor belt taketh away) for his poached lobster-foie-gras-vanilla dish. Lobster and foie gras sometimes go together but it’s a tricky combo, and Eric said they didn’t complement each other in Chris’ case. Padma noted that the milk and vanilla with Chris’ cauliflower brought out a chocolaty taste, to which Eric said “to-tal-ly.” (I know Padma’s been at this for a long time, but I always feel like cheering whenever she gives a critique that sounds especially expert.) Grayson also did poorly by crumbling soggy-looking Goldfish over Dover sole and citrus-ing the hell out of it. Paul had a bad showing with his dish that brought together Wonder Bread, saffron, and bitter melon in an unholy trifecta. If this challenge were a videogame, the bitter melon would be a trick item that turns into a bomb once you touch it. I recently went to an authentic Chinese restaurant with some very authentically Chinese people, and nobody touched the bitter melon dish that I, for inexplicable reasons, insisted on trying. In Top Chef, bitter melon is the anti-bacon.
NEXT: Nothing tastes better than the A-list …
Sarah impressed Eric with her soft-shell crab and cottage-cheese sauce. Sarah was in heaven as she snorted up Eric’s praise as if it were illegal. She was nodding so hard I thought her head would bobble right off. But can you blame her? Beverly used Rice Krispies, tofu, and black-eyed peas to make a sock-eyed salmon dish. She ran out of time and couldn’t get her curried Rice Krispies topping on the plate. With the curry topping, Eric said Beverly would have won the challenge “by a mile,” but because rules are rules, the challenge and immunity went to Lindsay for her bouillabaisse. When Lindsay admitted in a confessional that it was bitter(melon)sweet to win for the second-best dish, I expected Sarah to pop up on the screen a la SNL‘s Penelope and say, “Actually, Lindsay, yours was the best … By a mile … Beverly sucks … she cooks Asian food …”
To introduce the Elimination Challenge, Oscar-winning actress and style icon Charlize Theron breezed into the Top Chef kitchen and dazzled these comparatively frumpy chefs with her megawatt radiance. As brazen a cross-promotional stunt as Top Chef has ever seen — Jack Donaghy would be proud — the challenge was to create a dish fit for the Evil Queen as played by Charlize in the upcoming Snow White and the Huntsman. Okay, blatant Bravo-Universal synergy aside, I was glad to see another challenge totally unrelated to Texas, even if it was gimmicky and borderline nonsensical. One of the great joys of Top Chef has always been visually stunning food, and that’s been lacking this season, partly due to so many challenges that required cooking in mass quantities. BBQ may taste good, but it mostly looks…brown. So it was refreshing to have an artistic challenge that rewarded creative presentation. (By the way, as soon as you heard about the challenge, how many of you instantly predicted Chris would do a play on the poison apple? Everyone? That’s what I thought.)
NEXT: “I’ll have what Charlize is having.” — the starstruck judges
I have to say, the dinner service, which took place in a Gothic-style dining room, was a little ridiculous. I don’t know if the judges were drunk from the red wine or all that star power in the room. Charlize is A-list enough to make even the most celebrity-jaded person act a bit sycophantic, and I have to question whether the judges would have been as into the super-literal, over-the-top dishes if Charlize hadn’t expressed such delight in them first. Just watching the judges laugh their asses off each time Charlize or anyone else made a lame Evil Queen pun — and there were a lot of those — was a little icky. It felt as though Padma and even Eric were thinking of things to do and say to make the only Oscar winner in the room laugh. Eric Ripert hanging a chicken leg from a chandelier — really? He was like a child begging for attention. You can get kicked out of Le Bernardin for not wearing the right jacket.
But that isn’t to take away from the quality of the evening’s dishes. I believed Tom when he said they were excellent, especially since he’s been such a downer all season so far. Ed went for a good-vs.-evil theme with black garlic ponzu on one side of his plate and a white Asian pear vinaigrette on the other with a tuna tartare in the middle. Apparently tuna tartare is the Switzerland of food. Charlize totally got the good and evil theme and called the black garlic “assaulting,” in a good way.
Paul made a bold albeit rather unrefined statement by making a “bloody” palm print on each plate. Proving once again that he can successfully bring a random assortment of ingredients together, his dish — made of foie gras, bacon, strawberries, pickled cherries, and a whole bunch of other stuff — was probably the most visually remarkable dish all season, even aside from the silly hand print, which only reminded me of the time Ed cut his hand. Charlize loved the dish, calling it “beautiful and scary,” and therefore all the judges loved it.
Beverly perhaps revealed some signs of passive-aggression by making halibut — the ingredient Lindsay accused her of messing up last week — and doing it “perfectly” now that she was cooking for herself. She used red curry sauce to represent blood, but compared to the other dishes, Beverly’s was the most ordinary looking. However, that halibut was unimpeachable, which again begs a burning question: Beverly’s halibut last week — sabotage or shoddy directions on Lindsay’s part?
NEXT: What does evil food look like? Well, kids, it looks like a chopped-up black chicken.
Always the exciting one, Lindsay didn’t want to do anything too out-of-the-box this challenge, but she fit her seared scallop over “witches’ stew” into the evil category by using insidious-looking dragon-tongue beans. Tom loved the stew, and both Emeril and Charlize went crazy over the smell of the dish.
Sarah kind of sold me on lamb heart, even though I’m not into most organ meats, by comparing it to a really good steak. The redness of the meat looked great against the Amarone risotto, which was meant to resemble blood and guts. Did anyone else think “sliced lamb heart” was a metaphor for Beverly?
Grayson’s dish looked. So. Disgusting. Like Becky the duck, who died in that tragic oil spill on Saved by the Bell. She took black chicken, which is a legitimately evil-looking protein, and chopped it up like a crime scene and served it with beets and a quail egg, which represented the slaughtered chicken’s unborn baby. The “story” behind the dish sent Charlize and the judges into ecstasy, although I don’t think a dish should require so much explanation. I can’t help but think that while Charlize genuinely loved the theater and camp of everyone’s food, the judges were on some level just falling in line behind her. Still, they all agreed that the chicken was juicy and delicious.
This was the challenge Chris had been waiting for all season. His chicken cigar didn’t work, his sweet potato chain-link fence fell apart, and his poisoned apples, complete with worms and maggots, looked like they were heading in the same direction. However, I was filled with giddiness when the judges cut the apples open to expose the bright red innards. Those apples really did look like mythical fruits from a fantasy world.
Basically, everybody loved everything in this dinner of perverse, orgiastic delights, which made the Judges’ Table especially difficult. Paul was named the winner for his colorful, forbidden forest-inspired dish, and he received two tickets to the world premiere of Snow White and the Huntsman. Not the most exciting prize, but at least the movie looks way better than Mirror, Mirror. Sarah, Beverly, and Grayson were put in the bottom 3 for making just tiny mistakes in their dishes. Sarah’s risotto wasn’t great (remember how livid she got when a previous guest judge dared to suggest that her risotto wasn’t perfect?), Grayson’s components weren’t well integrated, and Beverly’s sauce had a strange texture. All three ladies gave impassioned speeches to the judges — at one point I wanted to tell all of them to stop — and interestingly enough, it was Grayson, not Sarah, who threw Beverly under the bus a little bit. In the end, Beverly was sent packing for making the worst dish by a hair.
What did you think of last night’s evil-themed dishes? Did the judges lay the praise on a little too thick, or did the exciting food warrant all of the hubbub? Without Beverly, will the chefs need another scapegoat? How was Charlize as judge? Which dwarf would Tom be?