POSTED: Saturday, August 21, 2010, 12:35 AM
Filed Under: Food TV |
Top Chef
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| "If you don't want to get cut, you'll hand over the xanthan gum, pendejo." |
First off, let me apologize for the tardiness of this recap — I was attending a sneak peek of
Robert Rodriguez's Machete, starring my dude
Danny Trejo as a stoic blade-wielding ex-federale hero (and also
LiLo as a sexy meth fiend in a nun's habit!), and I think that is as good a lame blogger excuse as any. The only problem is that the movie was so sickeningly badass that Machete has successfully infiltrated all my avenues of thought. Now do my bidding and STAB
WILEY DUFRESNE RIGHT IN HIS TAPIOCA MALODEXTRIN-LOVING HEART, AND BRING THE TRANSCENDENTLY BEAUTIFUL INDIAN WOMAN TO ME!
Quickfire: Yay, a despised bane of professional chefs worldwide and the reason
Ted Allen still has steady TV work — we're talking mystery boxes, jerks! You know they're the genuine article, too, because they have giant question marks on the sides, clearly denoting
mysteryyyyyyyy. The remaining cheftestants — just six left after this ep, meaning it can only get sillier/more entertaining from here — start out with a box containing rockfish, fava beans and canned hominy. After 10 cooking minutes and at the end of two more 10-minute intervals after that, janky Secret Service-dressed dudes looking like they were fresh-plucked from a community theater production of
The Matrix stomp in and drop off additional boxes, which the chefs then have to work into their dishes. Squid and black garlic and ramps and passion fruit start flying, the chefs start perspiring like they're on a Shawshank chain gang, and Dufresne just looks around shiftily, hoping (just HOPING!) someone pulls out agar-agar so he can practice his Disapproving
Top Chef Judge Look™.
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| "Wait, Kevin, you got a whole fish? I got The Riddler's porno stash." |
Dufresne and
Padma (hot third-grade-teacher-during-Halloween-season look, Padz!) stick my-man-is-still-here?
Alex and the oily-fish-cooking
Amanda at the bottom, and
Tiffany and
Jersey Kev at the top, but it's the so-hot-right-now Tiff's fish stew that wins her the QF and a $10,000 chunk of change.
Kelly was about to complain that her Yucatan seafood stew should've placed, but then Machete looked at her like
So Kelly was like
That interaction didn't actually happen but it is awesome to think it did because it is far more interesting than the actual Quickfire. (If you don't know:
Kelly's the one who just barely lost to our own Jose Garces on
Iron Chef America a few months back.)
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| You know what they always say: the shittier/more hastily Photoshopped the laser eye
death rays, the deadlier they are! Everyone I've ever met has said this |
Elimination: The seven remaining chefs draw knives to get assigned various classic dishes (Jersey Kev yanks cobb salad, which apparently made Alex mad enough to pull a Cyclops) that they must "disguise" with technique well enough to fool the food-loving
CIA, including strangely warm director
Leon Panetta. Tiffany's excited, as she's a big
La Femme Nikita fan!
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| Luc Besson would be so proud ... |
Amanda, who lands French onion soup, expresses a desire to "seduce some secrets out of the KGB," which sounds like an awesome Lifetime movie that I would watch.
Ed draws chicken cordon bleu and flips it/reverses it (
chicken on the inside/ham on the outside); Tiff gets a gyro, which sounds really damn good right now;
Angelo draws the food-for-reserved-English people Beef Wellington, and buys pre-made puff pastry (
I tried to make that four years ago with very little success); Alex gets veal parm; and Kelly draws kung pao shrimp, which she's never made before. They present their dishes before Panetta and bunch of other spy types who probably have files stuffed with all our worst secrets on their BlackBerries, which gives them the right to be a little snooty,
like Rubicon snooty.
At the top —
La Femme Nikita's Tiffany's gyro, which
Eric Ripert says is the most elegant he's ever had (you ever notice how Ripert and Dufresne and other chefs always eat stuff off their knives on these shows? is that like a chef thing, or can we start doing that too and cutting ourselves in the mouth?); Kelly's improv kung pao shrimp; and my-man-pots-and-pans Ed's cordon bleu (I think Ed has a real solid chance of taking the show, don't you?). Tiff, continuing her ridiculous hot streak, ends up with the win and a trip to Paris, where she will be required to drop a duffel bag containing a sniper rifle and a list of cryptic GPS coordinates in a storm drain beneath a snow-covered footbridge in the fifth arrondissement.
At the bottom — Alex, whose veal Tom C. said was "as tough as pulling a post in Yemen" (a lil' spy humor, nice! wait, why does Tom C. get to pull out spy humor?!); Amanda, with her too-sweet French onion; and Angelo, who clearly does a better job than me of making Beef Wellington but doesn't keep it tight enough to impress the judges. As we all suspected, this is Alex's week to go home. He packs his knives, taking the truth behind
the Great Pea Puree Scandal of 2010 — a national security issue if I've ever seen one — with him.
