We start out back in the stew room and see the Kuniko debate again, where John points out, quite accurately, that Kuniko had five hours to cook a potato dish and never checked to see if it was cooking properly. Josh then lectures John about tact while he’s tying a damsel to a railroad track. John says he’s not being a prick, he’s being truthful, although those things aren’t mutually exclusive. I agree with his comments on Kuniko, and I don’t think he lacked tact, although he was way out of line to snipe at Josh’s home state of Oklahoma, an argument ad hominem that ceding some of his high ground.
The next morning, we see Kristen smoking on the balcony while flirting with Stefan, who is also smoking. I do not understand chefs who smoke. It wrecks your taste buds. Do you want to taste your food? That might be important. And that’s assuming your tongue doesn’t go all Achatz on you. By the way, flirting with Stefan? He looks like he should be fronting a Rammstein cover band.
* Quickfire: Naomi Pomeroy from Beast is the guest judge. Two beef primals are hanging in the kitchen. Chefs get one hour to butcher and cook a cut of beef, with no more than two chefs butchering any one piece at one time. There’s actually some coordination there rather than the literal backstabbing I expected.
* Sheldon talks about the importance of technique and his apparent lack of it. Josie and Carla can’t get their primal off the hook, which isn’t going to convince Stefan that girls belong in the kitchen any time soon.
* CJ is doing a tartare, which is so cliché – and doesn’t involve cooking, by the way. Tyler is also doing a raw preparation. Granted, I prefer meats cooked, other than fish, so I’m probably not the ideal judge for that.
* Lizzie is struggling with the pressure cooker, which she’ll need to get her cut cooked enough. This shocks me – how does any chef get this far without knowing how to use a pressure cooker? They’re pretty user-friendly, other than your inability to see the food while it cooks.
* Micah and John are also struggling with braising ox tail, which I assumed took hours and hours.
* Kristen, showing some strategy, says she picked first cut she saw to get cooking.
* Bottom three: Lizzie’s didn’t cook enough, as foreshadowed. Eliza’s steak was fine but the combination of asparagus and cherries didn’t work together. Tyler’s crudo was under seasoned, which is fatal. I swear I heard “underseasoned” fifty times in this episode; if you had a Top Chef drinking game based solely around mentions of seasoning, you’d be dead before Judges’ Table.
* Top: CJ’s tartare, John’s oxtail gnocchi (which had a rich sauce from the oxtail’s connective tissue), and Josh’s meatball with polenta. That is, the three chefs who were at each other’s throats in the stew room. Winner is John, his second quickfire win. He cooked something harder than the other two chefs did, and CJ didn’t cook his at all. John gets immunity. They can snark at him all they want, but he’s clearly got some ability.
* Elimination challenge: Cook dishes from the original menu at Seattle’s Canlis restaurant, which first opened in 1950. Only one dish is still on the current menu, the Canliss salad. Two chefs will be eliminated.
* Somehow, Stefan ends up assigning the dishes, for reasons I must have missed. Kristen is unhappy that she ended up with two sides, fried onions and sauteed mushrooms. Chrissy gets the dreaded salad. Carla is stuck doing squab, which either she has either never cooked, or she’s comparing it to her ex-husband. I really have no idea.
* John offers to expedite because he has immunity. CJ mocks John in the confessional for having experience opening restaurants. I don’t get the invective here. Either John is behaving way worse off camera than he is on, or CJ and Josh need to worry about their own shit.
* Josh, listening in on a conversation in the condo, is twirling the ends of his mustache.
* Kristen’s a real perfectionist, drying mushrooms in the oven at 450 before searing them so that they’re completely dry when they hit the pan and she’ll get the maximum possible caramelization.
* Carla can’t get into the grill for the squab and has to delegate the cooking of her protein to Sheldon and Bart. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.”
* Other chefs are ignoring John as he tries to set up for expediting. Then we see a bunch of chefs without their noses, faces fully spited.
* Service – forgive me for the detail here, but I don’t see a better way to get through it. Starters: Lizzie did marinated herrings, which Naomi loved, saying they’re balanced, well marinated with plenty of acid. Josh does a French onion soup that isn’t “guest friendly,” with a too-hard crouton, nowhere near enough cheese, and far too much salt. John’s steamed clams bordelaise seem to be good-not-great. Chrissy’s special salad is visibly wilting on the plate from all the dressing. Brooke’s seafood salad a la Louis gets raves for the preparation of the seafood. Tyler’s crab leg cocktail was also great, mostly because he let the Dungeness crab shine, although he earns props for the chopped lettuce on bottom as well. My takeaway at this point was how dated some of these dishes are.
* Switch back to the kitchen where we see Carla talking over John so other chefs can’t hear orders, after which we see her dishes coming back because they’re too rare and have to be refired.
* Mains: Sheldon’s mahi-mahi with beurre blanc (something you might actually see on a modern menu) wasn’t quite trimmed right but was perfectly cooked with a properly emulsified sauce. Carla’s squab with red wine reduction isn’t boned properly, is now overcooked in reaction to the earlier undercooked ones, but does have a nice sauce. Micah’s vegetable medley is a mess of over and undercooked items. Stefan’s liver with French fried onions gets big raves both for the liver and Kristen’s onions on top. Bart’s New York strip steak was cut with the grain instead of against it, which kind of wastes the tenderness of the meat. CJ’s lamb kebab was underseasoned (drink) and the lamb was mealy, as if he used sous vide to cook it (he did). His pilaf underneath was soggy as well. Kristen’s mushrooms get huge raves and the color on them is spectacular – I love well-browned mushrooms with just a little salt, black pepper, and maybe a little fresh thyme, and her dish looked like it had that flavor. Josie’s enormous baked potatoes aren’t hot enough and get more comments on their size than their flavor.
* Desserts: Danyele and Eliza each made two, with Danyele doing vanilla ice cream and a royal Hawaiian supreme, and Eliza doing mint sherbet and a frozen Hawaiian pineapple parfait. Danyele seemed to get more positive comments, especially for the salty peanut brittle with the ice cream that balanced out all the sweetness in the four dishes.
* We get another discussion of losing dishes at the dinner table, which I think is a great change to the format. Chrissy’s salad gets trashed. Carla’s squab had the breast plate left in and was overcooked. CJ’s lamb had no flavor, was both tough and mushy, and wasn’t seasoned well. This sounds absolutely disgusting, like something you’d get at a school cafeteria. Josh’s soup had so much salt and no bubbly cheese on top. I’m inclined to say that his failings are the worst because French onion soup is still a popular dish, and because proper cooking of onions is a cooking 101 thing – the onion even gets its own chapter in Ruhlman’s Twenty.
* Judges table: The top four are Lizzie, Kristen, Tyler, Stefan. Stefan plants one on Kristen’s cheek, because he’s a pig. She’s the winner for making two side dishes, getting $10k and I think a pretty big boost to her confidence.
* The bottom four are, as expected: Carla, Chrissy, CJ, and Josh. How freaking tall is CJ? He’s like Lurch in a sea of Cousin Its.
* At the inquisition, Josh immediately throws John under the bus, calls him a monkey as expediter, and refuses to take any responsibility for Tom getting cold soup. CJ says he tasted the mealiness after sous vide-ing the lamb, but can’t explain why he used a technique that didn’t exist in the 1950s. Carla wilts under questioning over whether she tasted the dish during service, and I honestly don’t think the judges ever got a clear answer – but they seemed to believe she hadn’t.
* Chrissy and Carla are eliminated, but as badly as Carla fared, Josh’s flop with a very ordinary dish and CJ’s choice of sous vide seemed like bigger transgressions to me. That said, no one will be sorry to hear the relative silence in the kitchen with Carla gone.
* My new top three: Kristen, John, and Micah, with Brooke making a strong showing. Stefan might be on the fringes of that group. Right now, I don’t see who else belongs in this discussion.
* Last Chance Kitchen: The four chefs eliminated so far are each charged with making a dish using the 2-3 key ingredients in the dishes that got them eliminated; they can make the same dish if they so choose but don’t have to. Carla cooks the squab incorrectly again, in large part because she uses 40% of the allotted time just getting the meat off the bone. (I have never cooked squab or tried to de-bone a bird this small, so I can only imagine that it’s not straightforward.) Chrissy’s salad isn’t falling under the weight of the dressing, Jeff’s halibut isn’t overcooked, but Kuniko reimagines her whole dish, skipping the potato pave in favor of a lemongrass potato chowder that seems to really show off both her technical skills and command of flavors. It’s a huge challenge for her to run the table now through Last Chance Kitchen but, before her elimination, I thought she was comfortably among the top five chefs in the main competition, so I do like her chances more than I’d like any of the others to do it.
I forget when you said you started watching the show, so I dunno if you saw CJ’s original season. He’s an insufferable know-it-all of only middling talent who should have gone home over Chrissy, who got jobbed.
I think he’s a legit 7 feet, btw.
During the service in the restaurant – I could swear that is John Larroquette who gets a camera time comment as a diner.
Hi Grant,
He is a giant, but I think I recall him saying 6’9 or 6’10 at some point…still, way too tall for alot of those old kitchens! Imagine him down in that basement kitchen at Les Halles that Bourdain worked at / has gone back to on his shows…
shocked… shocked klaw doesn’t see it as a lack of tact to gloat over someone’s exit. or have trouble seeing an insufferable prick for being an insufferable prick. shocked i tell ya
Greg, I suspect you’re right. Still, as you say, very tall.
Mr. Rosecrans, tell me why you think John was gloating. Maybe I missed that while taking notes, but it sounded to me like an analysis of what went wrong. John did say more than once that he respected Kuniko’s skills.
Grant, I didn’t see CJ’s original season, so thanks for that.
I don’t usual comment here, but I have to disagree with Grant. I’m surprised to see the negative take on C.J., as I think he was one of the most likeable and funny contestants they have had on the show. He had a really good sense of humor, even about his battle with testicular cancer, and seemed to have a good outlook on life and the show. I didn’t see him as a know-it-all type. At all.
I do agree, however, that his skills in the kitchen were a step behind the elite competitors, which he himself seemed to acknowledge in the first or second episode of this season. The fact that his skills were a notch below the elite competitors would seem to reinforce the notion that it was his personality, rather than his cooking ability, that landed him a second chance this season.
So far this season, he seems to be taking things much more seriously, wanting to demonstrate his improved skills, earned through additional experience, rather than his sense of humor. So far, he’s struggling, but I wouldn’t characterize him as a know-it-all, not this season or his first season. Anyway, my $.02.
I would note so far the winner of each of the last elimination challenges got KO’d the next week!
With regard to the use of pressure cookers, it’s my perception that chefs on these reality/competition shows frequently have trouble using them, often having trouble getting the lids on and locked down properly, while racing around under time constraints.
I agree with Keith’s point that John wasn’t gloating, but rather taking a postmortem of the situation. He clearly liked and respected Kuniko, and I think he was just reflecting on how you can’t let yourself lose focus at any point if you want to get through this thing. I don’t appreciate Josh who seems like he’s constantly on the defensive and trying to pick a fight. I’m not sure why he doesn’t realize how much of an asshole HE comes across. I hate the appeal to authority too, Keith, but it’s clear that the judges have a ton of respect for Tesar’s decades of experience and some of the other contestants would do well to reflect on that, since he’s obviously a formidable opponent and they need to objectively analyze him as a contestant if they want to beat him.
I think Lizzie and Sheldon are contenders flying under the radar right now. It seems Sheldon’s technique isn’t great right now, but I think it’s more a matter of haste or lack of care (due to nerves maybe) and not lack of skill. But I get the impression his flavors and creativity are among the best of the chefs. Lizzie seems to have more technique and has been consistently strong. We’ll see if she can hack it as she needs to get more creative.
I hate to be annoying, but since you seem to be a perfectionist….it’s beurre blanc, not buerre. Great recap!
One other thing. I have noticed that on many of these cooking competitions, chefs seem to advance on the strength of dishes featuring curry, lemongrass, thai basil, etc., since it is almost impossible to underseason (drink) these. Have you noticed this, and do you think that since the judges are typically classically trained, their (possible) lack of expertise in these dishes gives chefs like Kuniko an advantage?
Great recap, Keith.
I would have sent Josh home last night. He screwed up french onion soup, one of the few dishes still commonly seen on menus today, which consists mainly of: onions, bread, cheese, and water. The fact that he carries with him a bizarre chip on his shoulder about being short and from Oklahoma doesn’t help in my view either (perhaps there is a negative stereotype about people from Oklahoma I’m not aware of which puts him on the defensive?).
I was initially put off by Carla being judged by food she isn’t actually cooking, but Tom’s later point about having to teach and direct others to cook your food rang quite true.
Two other questions:
1. Why does no one seem to taste food before serving it? As Keith noted, “under-seasoned” is said at least 10 times per episode, but we’ve also seen undercooked and over-salted food as an issue a number of times as well.
2. Can the chefs use tools like instant read thermometers? I don’t know if there’s a rule against it, but it certainly seemed like it would have been a good idea on the Thanksgiving episode. You may be able to judge a steak by look or touch, but not an entire turkey.
It is too bad that Carla got kicked off for not even cooking her food. That is the one thing that bothers me in a Top Chef elimination. But, it looks like she couldn’t have done it anways (based on LCK) so it isn’t that bad of an issue.
The underseasoned comment would seem to prove that many people who go to restuarants get underseasoned food, but eat it anways because they think it is supposed to taste that way.
LOL @ Chris – I’ve been wanting to say that to Keith for ages and just forgetting 😉
Chris, I second your question on the Insta-reads… I use mine all the time as do chefs in professional kitchens, but I’ve never seen one used on this show as far as I remember.
1) I think Lark11 described CJ’s original stint on Top Chef well. Likable guy, good contestant, just not as good as the elite contestants.
2) Re: Smoking. I’m not saying smoking is a good habit for anyone, or arguing your point about tastebuds, but smoking offers many people a sense of a break, an excuse to go outside and unwind. I think that might be more enticing to chefs than other professions, because you spend most of your time in a confined space with no windows. It’s also an appetite suppressant–albeit a mild one–which might help in that line of work (cocaine is popular with cooks, too). Again, not saying it’s a good habit, but I get it.