Top Chef, S10E10.

My ranking of the top 25 big leaguers under the age of 25 is posted for Insiders, and I’m chatting today at 1 pm ET. We’ll also have a new Baseball Today show later today, with an interview with special guest Nate Silver as well.

No one’s really broken up by John leaving, partly because his personality had become a problem, but I think also because there’s some recognition that he had the ability to keep advancing – he was one of the few chefs here with any kind of vision, although I think in recent weeks he’d started to run out of inspiration and his dishes started to look more derivative. I’m really shocked the whole glasses-on-the-forehead thing hasn’t become a national fashion craze, though.

* Quickfire: Cook a dish emphasizing ginger in 15 minutes, judged by Wolfgang Puck. This morphs into an ad for Canada Dry … which I admit is my preferred ginger ale for mixing, actually. (I also like ginger beer, but they’re two different drinks.) Puck mentions a popular ginger creme brûlée dessert at his restaurant, which is right up my alley. My wife loathes ginger in all its forms, which I think is some sort of genetic defect on her end, but needless to say this was pretty close to the Quickfire of her nightmares.

* Kristen infuses ginger into ingredients using a pressurized CO2 canister, which most of us would recognize as a whipped cream dispenser. I have one very similar to this iSi model and love it, mostly because it avoids the mess of whipping cream with a hand mixer. Anyway, this kind of thing is why I think Kristen is a huge favorite to win – she’s operating on another plane from the rest of them, conceptually and technically. I was surprised she didn’t make the top three here, as Padma and Wolfgang liked her dish and praised her creativity.

* The bottom two were Sheldon for a stir-fried skirt steak with ginger and oranges that Wolfgang called “pedestrian Chinese food,” and Josh for a white chocolate ginger soup with peaches and tarragon that Wolfgang said was “underwhelming.” I like how Wolfgang asks for vocabulary help as if he hasn’t been here for 30 years. His English is good – I just think he likes messing with people.

* Top three are Brooke for a ginger caramel squid with fresh lime and chili powder; Lizzie for a cold watermelon-ginger soup with fresh mint, using ginger ale with pureed watermelon for the base; and Stefan for an ahi tartare with lemongrass ginger vinaigrette. Stefan butters up Wolfgang by switching to German, so apparently he’ll flirt with anyone. Brooke wins for her dish, something I’d expect to see on the menu of a fine-dining Vietnamese restaurant, assuming Americans would actually be willing to pay $10 for a Vietnamese entree.

* Elimination challenge: Restaurateur Danny Meyer is in the house for the setup to Restaurant Wars. Each chef must come up with a restaurant concept and make one dish that encapsulates it. There will be two winners, each getting $10K, and one chef sent home, so we’ll have 4 vs 3 in the actual Restaurant Wars episode next week.

* Meyer’s advice to the chefs: “Do it from your heart because you can’t fake soul.” How is that remotely useful advice? “Do it from your heart, not your spleen.” And is faking soul at all like faking the funk?

* Micah’s concept: raw foods. This is an obviously terrible idea – you’re going to build an entire menu around food that isn’t cooked on a competition that’s about cooking? Raw food quality is entirely about ingredients; if the fish isn’t incredibly fresh, you’re toast. He hits the market and finds no meat he can serve raw, which should have immediately led to a change in concept, but he’s determined to fail.

* Kristen’s comment “I need to show them I deserve to be here” was some serious unintentional comedy. I don’t think anyone’s questioning whether she’s still here on merit.

* Four of the eliminated chefs return to work as sous-chefs for the remaining eight, and Stefan picks Carla because “she is super fast and her butt is always cute.” Unless he’s going to slow-braise her butt with some red wine and figs, I don’t really see how that helps him.

* He then tells Tom that in “every Quickfire I’ve been sloppy seconds.” The man is incapable of discussing anything without resorting to at least one reference to sex. He then spills liquid all over a guest with yet another blender explosion.

* Brooke’s concept is “Unkosher” – traditional Jewish items expanded without the limitations of kosher requirements. Tom says “it’s like my mother-in-law’s Seder every year.”

* Josie says her croquettes aren’t done and that she wants to shoot herself in the head, although I think most of us would settle for her duct-taping herself on the mouth.

* Why is Gail judging this competition instead of Wolfgang? Gail doesn’t bother me like she does some viewers – although horizontal stripes are really not her friend – but is there any question whether Wolfgang would provide better insight into the food?

* To the dishes: Josh serves a seared ribeye on cauliflower purée with a red wine mushroom sauce and barley. Aside from the steak being slightly underseasoned, this goes over well with praise for its “earthy” flavors. It doesn’t seem particularly innovative to me, though. Is there anything here you couldn’t whip up at home?

* Lizzie does a mustard green canaderli (a central European dumpling also known as knödel, often made from leftover side starches) with fonduta and crispy speck. She’s going for northeastern Italian, a regional cuisine that draws heavily from Austrian, Hungarian, and Slovenian traditions because the area has changed hands so many times over the last few centuries. The flavor is great but the judges all agree it’s too heavy.

* Hat Guy Thierry is in the house as a guest.

* Sheldon serves a Filipino dish, sour tamarind soup with pork belly, shrimp, and snapper. This gets raves, I think because it’s got huge, bold flavors, and because (per Padma) he took a dish that’s usually ugly and made it elegant without losing its authenticity. This is one of those dishes I think future competitors should sit up and notice – there are successful formulas for winning challenges on this show, and they don’t change much over the years. But hey, go ahead and make yet another sloppy risotto. That’ll work too.

* Stefan does a “German-Thai” fusion thing with a lobster bisque with shrimp dumplings along with a dessert lollipop of Bavarian cream. I know this is shocking but the two don’t really play well together.

* Micah’s plate of raw fail has thick slices of four (I think) types of raw fish along with mizuna and raw vegetables, along with not enough of the vinaigrette over the top. This is a cold mess. There’s no cooking involved, no risk, and, per Danny Meyer, it offers no improvement over our palates’ raw-fish standard of good sushi.

* Kristen does an onsen egg (poached in the shell so the yolk just barely sets) with a Camembert mustard sauce and buttered radishes. Everyone says she nailed the eggs. She’s the only chef here who went really upscale, which is also something that tends to succeed here. She’s a lot like Michael Voltaggio without the tattoos and antisocial behavior.

* Josie is busy talking and not serving, again, which is really painful to watch. She serves a puerco asado with a black bean sauce and chorizo croquette. Judges are visibly annoyed at her act, and even more so when the pork proves to be flavorless and dry.

* Brooke does a matzo ball soup with duck confit and black rye bread. The duck broth is good but Gail says the matzo ball is “offensive to my people,” after which Tom suggests that she should have used the rye bread in the matzo. As someone who grew up outside of New York and loves rye bread in almost any application (I suppose bread pudding would be an exception, although I’m open-minded), I’d definitely eat this dish if she made that switch.

* Judges’ table: Kristen, Sheldon, and Josh are the top three, at which point it seems obvious that Kristen and Sheldon will win because they were way more creative than Josh, who’s here for execution. Sheldon gets the win on his 30th birthday, while Kristen is now up to $45K in winnings.

* The challenge now is to move right into Restaurant Wars, with less than 48 hours until judging. Their spaces are completely empty and they must pick their staffs now in stew room before they learn who’s been eliminated.

* Kristen takes Brooke, Lizzie, and Josie, in that order, while Sheldon takes Josh, Stefan, and Micah – that is, boys versus girls. I thought Kristen made one mistake here, taking Josie over Micah, because Josie seemed at least as likely to go home, if not more so, and because if Josie doesn’t get eliminated, then you have to work with her, which is probably worse than working with no one at all.

* The bottom three are, unsurprisingly, Micah, Josie, Lizzie. Micah tries to shift blame to the store for lacking the kind of meat he needed, which is a great way to dig your own hole a little deeper. Lizzie’s dumpling should have been cooked more, and was pretty heavy without any relief in it. Josie’s pork was bland, greasy, overcooked. Tom refers to the “Josie show” and I think he’d like to see it put on hiatus.

* Micah is eliminated, which I understand, since he had such a terrible concept, but I would have sent Josie home – her concept was no better, and she didn’t execute it either. I’m disappointed in Micah, though, because I thought he showed more upside in his concepts, but he ends up leaving primarily because his concept this week was so poor. This leaves Sheldon’s team one chef short for Restaurant Wars, which means they’ll probably have just two guys in the kitchen and one out front – although I assume they’re responsible for one fewer dish as a result.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Micah and CJ have to do a raw meat preparation. Micah’s dish looked really unappealing with a large triangular blob of duck breast tartare, placed on top of a bison carpaccio in part to hide the fact that he didn’t slice the latter item cleanly. CJ’s looked more appealing and he did something novel by pickling the duck skin and subcutaneous fat, which made it fairly obvious he’d win his sixth challenge in a row.

* Top three: I’ve still got Kristen, a big gap, and then Brooke, with a pretty big gap to everyone else at this point. Brooke’s concepts aren’t as out there as Kristen’s, but they’re fairly evenly matched on execution. Sheldon would be my pick for the third spot over Stefan, only because Sheldon’s shown more upside (albeit more downside too). Josie is the clear bottom once again and yet survives for another week, with Josh and Lizzie in spots 5 and 6.

Comments

  1. Looking forward to this, as always, but haven’t watched the episode yet.

    Would be very curious to hear your thoughts on this food piece. Some interesting thoughts in here, I think, and a lot of stuff in your food areas of interest. I have no affiliation with it. Just curious:

    http://firstwefeast.com/eat/20-things-everyone-thinks-about-the-food-world-but-nobody-will-say/

  2. We did appreciate the glasses on head a bit more in his hometown.
    http://sidedish.dmagazine.com/2012/12/07/tesaring-tumblr-goes-live/

  3. Micah choosing a raw theme was not a problem, indeed one of the four or five most amazing restaurant experiences I’ve had was a raw place http://www.crusilverlake.com/ … (my blurb http://meadowmuffinsofthemind.com/2010/09/10/los-angeles-day-one/)

    The problem was Micah did not GO anywhere with it. Where was the creativity, the preparation, the flavor – just food on a plate.

    Kristen is operating on a different level.

  4. What, no mention of the photo of Tom with hair????

  5. I would put CJ as third right now. He has got to make it back to the competition doesn’t he?

  6. Klaw,
    Where would you put CJ is he makes it thru LCK? Seems his imagination and execution, albeit in less quantity (1serving vs hundreds) is superior to many of the existing chefs.

  7. In your chat you mentioned not having venison on menu’s. Not sure about everywhere but it is not allowed due to poaching of deer. I know Amish in new york got in trouble for selling it to a restaurant.

  8. I also think CJ has to now be a factor. He looks to be doing a much better job in LCK each week, and I think he’s fourth overall right now with both Kristen, Brooke, and Sheldon all ahead of him.

  9. @Amos: Yes, enjoyed a lot of it, and there’s a good bit of sense in there among the snark.

    @Sriram: You don’t think that’s a limiting concept? Especially in a contest about cooking, where I think he’d be held to a very high standard because he eschewed heat.

    @Lark11: I just didn’t have a good line about it. I figured without a picture to go with this post I had to say something funny or say nothing at all.

    @Alex/John/Chris: Yes, I think third is very fair given who’s left. Sheldon’s high beta – he can win but his lack of range is a concern.

    @Tim: Didn’t know that, thanks.

  10. So, first, I have to say that I really can’t believe Josie managed to luck her way out of elimination again. I was sure she was gone with dry overcooked meat (come on!), but when Tom said something about concepts not coming from the heart I was like, Really, they’re booting Micah? Iffy concept for sure, especially because I’ve never heard of a raw concept that included fish/meat (raw restaurants tend to be derived from the raw foodist/raw vegan movement), but his was just poorly thought-out and Josie’s was poorly executed. I’m sorry, but execution first.

    And I mean, when she’s not laughing, I don’t mind Josie that much. I like that she is awkward, loud, lacks bullshit, and played football back in the day. Um, she reminds me of a less mild version of myself 😛 But I watch this show to get excited by the cooking and she has failed.

    As a vegetarian I ADORE how many vegetarian (or ostensibly so – chicken broth can be swapped) dishes Kristen has made, and the fact that two have won and one has been high. I am sure it’s not intentional, but for me she is a serious inspiration for how fine dining can work for me and for new cooking ideas and I adore her for it.

    Finally: deer POACHING? I (like your chatter who mentioned it) grew up in eastern PA, and the idea of anyone getting in trouble for killing deer is unfathomable to me. They can’t give out *enough* deer hunting licenses where I grew up. There are no predators and more deer than people.

  11. No mention about Tom’s face when Micah made his raw food and women in Beverly HIlls comment?

  12. @Daphne: are you still in greater Boston? Been to any of Barbara Lynch’s places? I never did try any, because back then I just didn’t spend as much on food. I agree on Josie – this act is very, very tired, and I am actively rooting for her elimination.

    @JoshF: I might have missed that. I thought the comment itself was kind of sexist.

  13. Can anyone point me to the recipe that was on an ad for Canada Dry? It was a ginger-vinegar-oil dressing. Thanks!

  14. I agree that Kristen is the heavy, heavy favorite to win. She seems to nail every single dish.

    One thing I wanted to ask everyone else, and this has nothing to do with who should win: does everyone find Sheldon extremely likable? He just seems like such a nice, happy guy. I was pulling for him to win just because it was his birthday. Maybe it’s because he’s juxtaposed with characters like annoying Josie, cocky tattletale John, perverted Stefan, sometimes-dickish Josh, etc.

    Kristen and Brooke are very likable too. So I would say they join Sheldon in the top three in terms of likelihood to win and likelihood to be my friend.

    Klaw – does Sheldon have plus makeup?

  15. I have not been to any Lynch restaurants, though I’d love to; my partner is wicked picky so I pretty much only do fine dining at upscale Italian or when my parents visit and I think she’s a little rich for them – but someday I hope (my boss has been to Menton and he made me ragingly jealous with his descriptions). I definitely have an added bias towards Kristen being the local. (I really hope the next season is here!)

    Sheldon definitely has 80 likability. As much as Kristen is awesome and I want to see a woman win again finally I would not cry if it were him.

  16. First, the baseball writers admit no one to the Hall of Fame, then Josie gets to stick around Top Chef at least one more week.

    It was not a good day for people voting on things.

    While I understand that Micah failed pretty spectacularly, Josie *again* took way too long to get her food out and served lousy food on top of that. Considering her history of doing pretty much exactly those things, I thought for sure she was going home. Micah had a bad week; Josie has had a bad season.

  17. The way this is going, Josie will finally be eliminated soon but will return after winning LCK.

    This season seems to be having me root against people rather than for people, more than other seasons. Kristen is the clear choice in talent and hasn’t said anything to have me rooting against her but I also feel no rooting attachment other than wanting the best to do well. Previous seasons had me actively rooting for Paul, Blais, Kevin Gillespie (runner up in the amazing TC6, not TC7’s winner).

    Sheldon is my favorite in terms of likability and has pulled off some fantastic dishes…but also has had a few where you were wondering if he was going to be sent home.

    @Daphne – I’ve never hunted but lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin my whole life and the deer population is out of hand here, as well.

  18. “Micah had a bad week; Josie has had a bad season.”

    I always wonder more broadly how much of the decision of who to send home is based on that week/challenge and how much is based on body-of-work. Too much of the former and someone can finish second from the bottom every week and then take home the grand prize by winning the finale. Too much of the latter and folks don’t get punish for spectacular failings. I’m sure the actual answer and the correct answer are “both/and”, but it seems somewhat inconsistent, which can lead to confusion like we see here.

  19. Sheldon’s team is really at a huge disadvantage in restaurant wars. Beyond being one person down, they also are committed to a rustic Filipino concept. I presume that most chefs have some sort of upscale French dish in their arsenal, but but rustic Filipino is rather more obscure, even if Sheldon helps his teammates.

  20. @ Ryan – The deer population has really declined in Wisconsin over the last ten years, for two reasons. 1. The DNR has been killing deer as quick as they can in the southern part of the state due to Chronic Wasting Disease. 2. Reintroduction of the wolf population up north.

    With the deer population going down the DNR has also been releasing less doe tags up north to hunters. This is a real shame, as it’s limiting the amount of venison in my freezer. 🙁

  21. What do people think of the raw food movement in general? Micah mentioned losing 25 pounds doing it, but my cynical side that is more a function of the limited choices available to him then the actual health benefits of raw food over cooked. A double-bacon cheeseburger can’t be made raw. I would venture to guess that if he ate all the same foods in the same quantities but had cooked them, he still loses the weight. I could imagine other health benefits attributed to raw food cnsumption, but I doubt weight loss itself is actually related to it in the way he implies.

  22. Anybody else notice how Kristen quickly jumped to pick first when they were picking restaurant wars teams? Was it previously agreed upon, or was Kristen taking advantage of the nice guy who wouldn’t call her out for it? If the latter, it was a smart move. I would have fought hard to have Brook on my team if I were in that situation.

  23. @Kazzy: Alton Brown discussed it in a Good Eats episode several years ago, where he argued that heat helps break down the cell walls of fruits and vegetables, making their nutrients easier for our bodies to access via digestion. I’ve never understood the argument behind raw food; vegetarianism I understand, veganism a little less so, but this one seems to be based more on emotion than hard science. And yes, you really can’t eat a whole lot – lots of whole grains become unavailable to you as well.

    @Tom: I did notice that, but omitted it because I got the sense that there was something we missed, some agreement that Kristen would pick first, maybe because she was named the first team leader? She doesn’t have an on-screen reputation as pushy or inconsiderate like that, and no one in the room reacted oddly when she picked first. I don’t mind calling the chefs out for humor’s sake, but I got the strong sense here I’d be out of line to do so.

  24. If they had only memorized that ‘Ginger’ page in the Flavor Bible..