Top Chef Masters, S4E2.

Today’s Klawchat transcript was pretty prospect-heavy. Today’s podcast has me and Dave Schoenfield talking about the Angels/Rangers game, Mike Olt, and sophomore slumps, among other topics.

* No Quickfire this week, as the entire show is built around an elimination challenge that involves catering the wedding of a couple who’ve had both tragedy – the death of the groom’s sister/maid of honor in a car accident – and horrible luck – their planned venue “disappearing” with some of their deposit. The chefs look genuinely nervous about the challenge of putting together an entire wedding menu in one day, which raises the question: With real-life consequences involved for the bride and groom, why not give the chefs more time than normal to ensure a better result?

* The bride wants a “many-tiered cake,” which made me wonder if the producers encouraged the couple to be demanding, or at least max out their demands, to the chefs. I don’t think that’s unfair at all, but if I were in that groom’s shoes, I’d probably be so thrilled that these phenomenal chefs were catering my wedding (presumably at no cost to me) I’d be saying “whatever you want to do is fine with me.”

* Some of the chefs’ stories of their own weddings were pretty funny – Chris Cosentino cooking the food for his own wedding, which probably should have had led to him being committed, or Thierry saying he had to have a croquembouche at his wedding because that’s the dish that made his wife first fall in love with him.

* You couldn’t do this challenge on regular Top Chef because it requires so much cooperation between erstwhile competitors. To their credit, there’s barely a whiff of competition either at the grocery store or in the kitchen: chefs are moving all over the place to help each other get their dishes done and plated. It was kind of amazing to see chefs at this level receiving orders barked by their peers and executing them without complaint or hesitation.

Half full cart, with most of the crab , left at seafood counter. How does that happen? Kerry doesn’t blame anyone but himself, though

* Ah, Art. After more sniping with Chris, Art is really coming off as a prima donna; Chris voices patience in the confessional shots, but in the kitchen he’s more confrontational with Art, who probably had it coming but seems to get more sour the more that Chris pushes him. Meanwhile, Curtis says Art was “gutsy” to volunteer to do the cake, while Art has to tell us fifty times that he did the cake for Lady Gaga’s birthday party.

* Speaking of Curtis, his one-off shots talking to the camera are useless. He’s not informative; he’s recapping what we just saw, but with an accent.

* After yesterday’s absurd “eat fried chicken if you don’t believe in the 14th Amendment” event, the timing of Mark’s comments about marriage equality – he and Clark have been together for 25 years, but can’t get married in Maine because heterosexual marriages would spontaneously combust from Portland to Presque Isle – couldn’t have been more perfect. Mark’s charity is Equality Maine, which campaigns for equal rights for Maine’s LGBT community.

* As for Clark, don’t move his cheese.

* Really, James? That’s the best jacket you could find for a wedding? Goodwill wouldn’t accept that blazer if you tried to donate it to them.

* The chefs provide five small dishes for the cocktail hour. Thierry makes a Filipino blood soup (I believe that’s dinuguan). Clark does barbecued duck with sirloin Szechuan sauce in lettuce with Asian herbs. Kerry, who had panicked earlier when they left one of the grocery carts at the fish counter and left him with maybe half of the crab he expected to have, does a successful corn panna cotta with crab salad and grilled okra. Patricia does a one-bite canape of pickled mackerel, young coconut, herbs, and chilies, served on a spoon; Oseland later refers to it as a “ceviche,” so the pickling may have been rapid. Takashi’s dish looked the best, with braised pork belly that was a deep amber color, served with pickled daikon and a steamed bun, like a deconstructed baozi.

* For the mains, Debbie’s green papaya salad concept degenerated into a grilled lettuce dish that James said was one of the “weirder things” he’d ever eaten. Even as Kerry was grilling the greens, you could see on his face that he thought it was bizarre, and I know of no scientific validity to her argument that grilling them “adds acidity.” I’ve grilled radicchio, which makes it taste smoky but doesn’t add acid, and, more importantly, doesn’t make the thing any less bitter.

* Mark made a sesame-coated salmon that did not cook evenly, with the judges receiving raw fish but the bride getting a perfectly cooked one. Chris does a stunning banana leaf-braised pork with bitter greens and aioli and adobo sauces. In a related story, I need to get to San Francisco.

* Dessert: Art realized early on that his icing was too soft, foreshadowing eventual disaster that required him to dismantle and reconstruct the cake, only to have it leaning when he brought it out for service. But what I didn’t get about his “inside-out pineapple upside-down cake” was why he didn’t do anything to caramelize the pineapples first – that’s the best part of a pineapple upside-down cake, isn’t it? Grill them, fry them in a little butter, whatever, just get them to a nice golden brown. Lorena’s vanilla leche flan with toasted coconut gets kind of ignored in all the brouhaha over the slouching cake.

* Judges’ table: Takashi, Patricia, and Chris (again) are on top. Patricia wins with the one bite dish, another $10K for Heifer, up to $16K total. I didn’t see any surprises here.

* Elimination: Mark, Debbie, and Art. No surprises here either. Krista just starts rubbing it in to Art, talking about how important the cake is to a bride. What compassion – Art already looked like he wanted to die before that. Otherwise, the judges aren’t really responding to the chefs’ comments, which I understand given who’s standing there, but a little back-and-forth would be fine.

* I’ve been killing James so far, but his criticism of Debbie’s dish was great. He explained very specifically what a green papaya or mango salad should have, what elements and flavors make it great, and how her reconception fell short. We need more of that from him, and less of him looking like he’d rather be home playing with 37 of his 83 cats.

* Debbie is eliminated, which fits; of the bottom three, she was the only one with a bad concept and bad execution, where the other two primarily failed to execute.

Next week’s recap will probably be a day late, as I’m headed to the Area Code Games in Long Beach and may not see the show until early Friday.