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Top Chef Season 5, Episode 5: Gail Order Bride
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Top Chef Season 5, Episode 5: Gail Order Bride
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At the end of last's week recap, I mentioned that Episode 5 would feature the chefs catering a bridal shower. I didn't realize it would be Gail Simmons' bridal shower. Amazing. I love all things Gail. Most all small-screen culinary personalities can be lumped into one of two groups: snooty, inaccessible pinky-up gourmands (Martha) or overly excitable foodies who don't seem like real people (Guy Fieri). I think Gail succeeds at striking a friendly balance between these two extremes. As an editor at Food & Wine, she's at the top of her field, but she still possesses a fun demeanor and the vim and vigor of someone's who's hungry most of the time. Tell me how to properly store my cheese, Gail! Parchment paper? You got it! Now talk to me about knife skills! You're so good at cutting!
This week's Quickfire featured a bracket-style, backwards Name That Tune tourney where the cheftestants tasted multi-ingredient sauces and challenged each other to rattle off lists of the components. ("I can five ingredients." "Well, I can name six." "Name those ingredients!") A new and welcome twist on the usual blindfolded taste test challenge. Carla, Hosea and Stefan made it to the finals, where they were given Mexican mole, the most ingredient-laden sauce of them all. Hosea edges out Stefan ("I outpalated him!"), snatching away immunity from the domineering Euro who doesn't get why lesbian Jamie doesn't want to bump uglies with him.
"I would rather be on Satan's team than Stefan's team," Radhika told the camera as the contestants drew knives and formed four themed teams — "Old," "New," "Borrowed" and "Blue" — to tackle the 40-gal shower luncheon. (Non-Gail guest of honor: Food & Wine EIC Dana Cowin, who loves Philly.) A bit dramatic, Rad. Give the man a break — he revealed to Tom Colicchio in this episode that he married the same woman twice, so nuptials could very well be a touchy subject for him. Or maybe not: Stef's "Old" team (working with Jeff and Hosea) impressed both Gail's girlies and the judges' panel with their trio of classic tomato-based dishes (a terrine, a carpaccio and a gazpacho shot). Rad, Jamie and Ariane, aka the "Borrowed" squad, also earned high marks for their gorgeous lamb served atop a vadouvan carrot purée. (They "borrowed" the Indian spices from Rad's Indian background.)
The other two teams dropped the wedding bell ball a bit. Team "New" — Gene, Danny and Carla — crafted some sort of mediocre DIY sushi plate that they didn't feel the need to explain to the perplexed ladies who lunch. Then Fabio's "Blue" team — easily the most difficult theme of the four to visually interpret — was met with shrugs and scowls for its blue corn-encrusted Chilean sea bass. ("Not the most politically correct choice, perhaps?" said Gail of the threatened species.)
Ariane took home the win for the second week in a row for perfectly cooking the lamb. Jamie whined and pouted about it a whole lot. "None of us expected anyone but me to win," she moaned after the fact. You made a purée, chick.
Alas, Danny was told to pack his knives and go for refusing (or not being able) to articulate just what was wrong with the lackluster "New" offerings. This counts as my favorite moment of the episode, if only for the fact that he used the phrase "a little splooge of this" to describe his team's approach to plating. That's going to haunt me for a minute. Good riddance.
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