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Natalie Portman and
Tom C make a lovely couple, don't you think?
I said DON'T YOU THINK? WHY AREN'T YOU LISTENING TO ME?
Look what you have done. LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!
Quickfire: Chef
Paul Bartolotta, who runs his eponymous restaurant in Vegas' Wynn Hotel, joins the transcendently beautiful (and increasingly callous ... preg rage?)
Padma in challenging the close-to-there cheftestant crew to whip up a TV dinner inspired by a randomly assigned television program.
Mike V, who draws
Cheers, starts lamenting about he and
Bryan (
M*A*S*H) eating frozen dinners when they moved in with their father as kids. Was this pre-Kids Cuisine? If so, that's a goddamn shame my friend, as the brownies were the bangingest.
Mike I has never seen
Seinfeld, but it's all the better because it means he doesn't know to make any facepalm-worthy "It's a show about nothing, so here's a plate of air!" jokes, but his decision to rock sausage and peppers is an interesting one � he at least knows Jerry's Jewish, right? No latkes or something?
Eli's too little to have watched
Gilligan's Island, but he knows it's set on an island so he makes shrimp. Our girl
Jen C draws
The Flintstones but can't find any bone-jutting-out meats. The first thing that
Robin thinks of when she thinks of
Sesame Street, apparently, is crispy kale. The boy
Kevin ends up winning for his
Sopranos-inspired meatball plate, and he also manages to tell an adorable story about how his gram cooks breakfast for his family every morning.
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Elimination: The cheftestants are originally told they're cooking at Tom C's Craftsteak, so they start concocting massive meat menus. Then
Princess Amidala shows up and the lovely shit hits the lovely fan � Nat's a total "foodie," Tom C tells the crew, but she's also a vegetarian. (She actually turned vegan after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's
Eating Animals, and she
wrote an essay about her decision for Huffington Post, which is quite possibly the whitest thing to happen to America since the theatrical release of
The Big Chill.)
So out goes all the red meat and in comes veg innovation. "I love cooking vegetarian food!" exclaims Robin. "They're people too." No one was claiming the contrary, Robz! Mike I's confident because a huge chunk of menu items at his D.C. restaurant are veg to begin with. Jen C and Eli flip a dehydrated orange chip to see who gets big beautiful eggplants (Eli wins). The Volt brothers, as per usual, display Vulcan-esque dearths of emotion while preparing their fantastically elaborate plates. Kevin, conversely, preps mushrooms and turnips and kale and is jolly.
At the top: Kev, whose hearty meal proved that "vegetables don't need to be light"; Eli, whose dish got a nod despite Bartoletta comparing it to "sucking on a bar of soap" in Provence; and Mike V, whose triple asparagus/tomato sashimi/banana polenta dealie was daring in all the right ways. Kevin snags a W again because I'm pretty sure he's going to win this thing.
Bottom: Mike I, who's criticized for using scallop-shaped leeks as his dish's protein ("You know that leeks aren't protein, right"
Gail asks him); Robin,who was just generally mediocre; and Jen C, who gets guff for her small portion sizes and shaky tableside saucing. Mike I cops a bit of an attitude, with I think ultimately contributed to him getting hacked. Now,
let us go back to a kinder, simpler time, when we Photoshopped Mike I's head onto one of the guys from LFO, and people just
listened to one another:
NatPo-centric asides: Why do you think Padma got such a pep in her step in her presence? Do you think
Where The Heart Is is one of Padma's favorite movies? Was Padma sauced when she said that thing about having a "little prick on the tip of her tongue"? Why was NatPo wearing so much makeup when she's so naturally beautiful? Is
Garden State overrated? And who would win in a transcendently beautiful transcdence-off, Padma or NatPo?
