Top Chef, S13E07.

Second strong episode in a row, with almost complete emphasis on the craft of cooking, which is good because next week’s (Instagram users voting?) looks like a trainwreck.

* We start out with lots of scenes of the chatter among the ten remaining chefs, who are driving back up to LA in two vans. Most of it was just small talk, until some of the chefs started ribbing Kwame about his crush on Padma. He doesn’t even flinch: “what guy wouldn’t be attracted to Padma?” I can’t really argue with that, although at 5’9″ she’d tower over me even without heels. I did like his chianti-dry delivery of his supposed date line to Padma, saying he’d show up with flowers … and a Yorkie. “‘Surprise, I got you a dog!’ That wouldn’t be weird, right?”

* Season 4 and All-Stars contestant Antonia, now at Scopa and Black Market Liquor Bar in LA, is back to judge the Quickfire. Each chef gets to choose one ingredient, and thosee ten in total are the only items available to all chefs (although they don’t have to use all ten). We’re also back to immunity rather than sudden death, which is welcome. The chefs go one at a time, each getting twenty seconds to go grab an ingredient.

* Phillip grabs prime beef loin. Isaac grabs … a whole chicken? Marjorie asks (in the confessional) “why are you choosing another protein?” That made no sense to me either. I think only one of the chefs was really glad to see chicken, as it turned out. It’s versatile because it’s pretty flavorless.

* Chad grabs jalapeños, of course. Jeremy gets kosher salt, to which Isaac says, “thank God.” (I mean, if none of the chefs picked salt, would they really have denied that ingredient to everyone? How can you cook anything, especially any protein, without salt?) Marjorie grabs rice vinegar … I might have gone for lemons but any acid is good. Karen gets olive oil. Kwame takes garlic, which he says he can’t cook without. Amar takes cremini mushrooms. Carl gets a big basket of heirloom tomatoes. Jason, picking last, kind of annoys a lot of the other chefs by taking celery rather than an herb or other flavoring agent. I was surprised no one went for black pepper, butter, bacon, or onions. I’d never think to grab celery before onion, for example. I wouldn’t even take garlic before onion.

* Carl points out that this challenge is like “cooking at home” with just a few things in the fridge. Granted, our homes don’t have equipment this nice, but it’s nice for once to see a challenge that at least somewhat reflects the limitations home cooks face – and the common challenge of “I need to make dinner with what’s in the house already.”

* Amar says Charlie Palmer, one of his first bosses, always judged chefs and restaurants by how they cooked chicken. Now that I can see: it’s probably an easy dish for restaurants to half-ass, because if you go to a high-end place (especially a steakhouse) and order chicken, the kitchen is just not going to take you very seriously. I’m not saying that’s right; I’m saying that’s how it is.

* After picking chicken as his ingredient, Isaac cooks steak. I mean, he has the right to do that, but why not pick an ingredient you know you’ll use heavily?

* Jason is unapologetic about the celery and seems to enjoy the fact that other chefs are a little miffed. He’s right about its versatility and I could not agree more with him about the leaves. I buy whole stalks (sometimes called “heads” … sometimes “stalk” refers to a single rib) because I want the leaves and tender ribs in the center, and whatever I don’t use ends up in the next batch of poultry stock.

* Amar mocks Jeremy for yet another raw preparation – tataki style beef, which is kind of like a Japanese carpaccio, usually very lightly seared or grilled just to warm the exterior, raw in the center, and seasoned with vinegar and a paste of ginger. Jeremy just heats the surface with a blowtorch, but Amar is correct that Jeremy leans a little too much on the raw preps.

* Karen says she doesn’t want to complain about the ingredients they had and in doing so manages to complain about the ingredients they had while Padma and Antonia are tasting her dish.

* Least favorites: Isaac’s seared carpaccio with shaved jalapeños and mushrooms and tomato concentrate was both unappealing to look at and underwhelming to taste. Antonia says Karen’s flavors in her grilled steak salad with grilled and raw celery and jalapeño vinaigrette were “beautiful,” but that there was “no focus” to the dish. I’m trying to figure out how a jalapeño vinaigrette would taste like anything but pain.

* Favorites: Jeremy’s tataki-style steak with shaved mushrooms and crispy garlic vinaigrette worked as planned, especially the slight texture change that came from warming the top of the meat (I guess starting to denature the proteins without fully cooking them?). Amar’s wood-roasted chicken breast – that takes stones, serving the most boring part of the chicken in a competition like this – with roasted tomato vinaigrette and mushrooms à la Grecque (with olive oil, lemon juice, and herbs) showed great finesse and technique. Jeremy wins. Amar looks pissed, and why not? He actually cooked. Jeremy just sort of prepared, no?

* Elimination challenge: Ten years ago this year, Top Chef premiered (pre-Padma!). Each chef must create a dish representing who s/he was ten years ago.

* Jeremy was in a metal band … and had hair. Anyone catch what kind of guitar that was?

* Kwame talks about how ten years ago, he was starting high school and it marked the beginning of the end of his relationship with his strict father. Over the rest of the episode he makes it clear that the relationship never recovered and they haven’t spoken in years.

* Jason ten years ago was in his first management job, but says he was kind of awful to staff and used to chew out cooks who screwed up the restaurant’s signature trout dish, which was actually quite difficult to make.

* Marjorie wants to make green curry, but the Whole Foods they visit is out of lemongrass (in LA? Really?). She buys jarred green curry paste instead, which struck me at the time as a colossal mistake, because chefs get killed all the time for buying anything that’s that processed rather than working from scratch. Turned out I was wrong about it, but that’s what I thought in real-time.

* Carl does a pretty good Tom impersonation but we need to see more of this to put a grade on it.

* Chad quit drinking a year and a half ago and has since dropped 75 pounds, which in and of itself seems like a good reward for getting sober, although of course he talks about the improvements in his life too. I would have liked more on how he quit drinking – a good success story needs that aspect too as a way to encourage others, I think.

* So Recipe for Deception premiering last night means we never have to hear that “I just got a culinary boner” dipshit again, right? I do appreciate Bravo warning me that I want no part of that show. If that’s the line you chose to use in the commercial that introduces the show to the audience, it must be all kinds of awful. Also, boner jokes are only funny if your age hasn’t reached double digits yet.

* Jason is dressed like a clown. Yellow pants, red shoes. He’s talking about his look as if it’s some kind of fashion statement, but looking like you bought Ronald McDonald’s hand-me-downs and got dressed in the dark is not a fashion statement.

* Marjorie decides to grill some lemons to pull out the bitter aromatics in the rind and use that as a substitute for lemongrass. The two plants are not related: lemons are a true citrus tree (Citrus limon), while culinary lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) is a flowering rhizome that is typically harvested as soon as its stalks are mature. Both contain the aldehyde citral, also called lemonal, which has the strong aroma of lemon but is only found in small amounts in actual lemons, showing up more in lemongrass, lemon verbena, and other lemony plants. So she might need a lot of grilled lemon to replace what she lost when she couldn’t buy lemongrass, but at least she has that one chemical similarity as a hinge between the two ingredients.

* Michael Voltaggio is one of the guest judges, yet when he asks Phillip how the experience has been, Phillip says right in front of Tom that he has had to “cook food that makes the judges happy,” which makes Tom make that WTF face he makes when someone says something incomprehensibly stupid. Marjorie says in the confessional that she thinks “the kid is delusional.” It’s hard to argue with that.

* Amar makes a dish for his former mentor from ten years ago, Long Island chef Gerry Hayden, who was very sick at the time with ALS and passed away in September, probably not long after the episode finished shooting. Tom gets very choked up as they talk – visibly so, and the editors just let the moment “breathe,” with the camera on Tom while he tried to keep some composure. All reality shows want real emotions like that and end up trying to manufacture them through challenges, false drama, and other silliness. This was one moment that I think will stand out for a long time from season 13. (The episode ended with a brief full-screen honoring Chef Hayden’s memory.)

* Kwame’s dad is half Jamaican. One of the only decent memories Kwame seems to have of that period was going to jerk chicken shacks with his dad, although even talking about that seems to weigh him down further. I don’t know what it’s like to have such a terrible relationship with a parent – I have a couple of good friends who’ve had to sever parental ties, for reasons such as a history of abuse, and I can at least see the shadow it leaves on a person’s soul even after s/he has made the right decision to end the relationship. Anyway, we don’t know exactly what Kwame split with his father over, but it was clearly something worse than we’re hearing, and it’s got Kwame in a bit of a mental tailspin here. In hindsight, he probably should have pulled back for another memory, maybe an earlier or later year – it’s not like the judges know where he was in 2006 – but once he’d committed to this dish he was pretty well stuck.

* Blais is wearing a blue camo blazer for the upcoming war with invading aquatic creatures from Kepler-22b.

* Talk about a table where I’d love to just sit and listen: In addition to the five judges, we get Mei, Antonia, Zach Pollack, and iconic baker/restaurateur Nancy Silverton, who looks like my great-aunt Antoinette in that black and white outfit and with her hair up in clips. (Don’t laugh: “Aunty” was once President of the Amateur Astronomers’ Association of New York and longtime physics teacher who died about eight years ago at age 100.) Chef Silverton’s La Brea Bakery, and associated cookbook Breads from the La Brea Bakery, often show up in discussions of what and who started the artisan bread revival in the U.S.

* The dishes … Marjorie made a seared halibut with grilled and roasted vegetables in green curry sauce; so it turns out the lemon trick worked out great and I had it all wrong. Blais even said her vegetables were so good that maybe she didn’t need fish. (Am I dumb for expecting rice? Probably. Stupid American.) Chad made a shrimp ceviche with tomato concassé, shrimp cracker, pickled serrano, olive, and caper. Both dishes were hits.

* Isaac made a duck gumbo with roasted jalapeño andouille sausage, crispy rice cake, and duck cracklings. Man, I want to make this and then eat it, especially now since I’m still fighting some sort of bad respiratory infection. Jason made poached trout with toasted beets, spring vegetable salad, and goat milk vinaigrette, but he didn’t season the fish correctly before poaching it and had to top it with what looks like an excessive amount of finishing salt before service. Tom clearly does not like it – he turns like he’s debating the etiquette of spitting it out. Volt says the fish is perfectly poached, but it “stopped right there.” I’m very much on board with having him back as a judge more frequently – his comments are very specific and, at least this week, never denigrating. Anyone seen the cookbook he and his brother wrote a few years ago, VOLT ink.?

* Karen made orecchiete with pork ragù and broccoli rabe. She left some radicchio leaves whole, which meant they stayed fairly bitter, but I think the judges liked the concept. Still, it’s fresh pasta in a pork ragu with earthy vegetables – it’s not that novel so it has to be executed better than this. Amar made a butter-poached lobster with sauteed bok choy, tapioca curry, and tempura onion rings. Volt likes the homage to Chef Hayden and everyone seems to agree that the lobster is cooked perfectly. I assumed he’d be in the top three at this point.

* Carl made a fricassee (a meat dish that starts like a stir-fry but finishes like a braise) of California vegetables, burgundy snails, and fried eggs, along with a spring garlic puree. This is a clear hit from plating to tasting. Phillip made a ceviche mixto with tiger shrimp, halibut, razor claims, and pressure-cooked squid. Chef Silverton says it lacks brightness of true ceviche, but then Volt drops the cleaver by saying it was a “not-so-fresh fish taste” per Volt. If someone describes your seafood dish with a catchphrase from a 1980s douche commercial, you should probably log off your knives and go. Instead, Phillip just blames the judges again for not appreciating his genius.

* Jeremy lobster ravioli with a shellfish sauce (looks like a foam to me) and king salmon. The salmon is well cooked but unnecessary, and everyone just seems kind of whelmed – not underwhelmed, but there’s no praise here – until Padma drops this non sequitur “good thing you have immunity” bit. Either they edited out Tom saying it tasted like the before picture in a Febreze commercial or that was a real overreaction. Kwame made jerk broccoli with corn bread pudding and smokey blue cheese, and presents it with no conviction or any emotion other than exhaustion. Tom says “this is just confusing the hell out of me.” Silverton says a dish “has to look visually appealing” and this doesn’t. Volt, with pretty good insight for someone who just walked in, infers how Kwame’s emotional connection to food in general and the specific nature of this challenge probably worked against him. Padma dismisses the two with a curt “see you later,” although “off with their heads!” may have fit the mood more.

* Top three: Marjorie, Chad, and Carl. Chad’s ceviche was very acidic and bright. Marjorie’s was technically well executed. Tom liked her story, liked the dish, and liked the audible she called with the lemons. Carl’s was very classic and timeless, per Gail, although that doesn’t usually win a challenge. Marjorie wins. She kind of does this Eeyore thing when talking to the camera but she’s been fairly consistently in the top 3 just about all season now, other than that weird hiccup in the beer challenge, where Blais loved the dish but the beer she used didn’t come through in the sauce.

* Bottom: Kwame, Phillip, and Jason. Kwame “tried to bring a good memory out of some bad memories” and it didn’t work. Phillip is really acting like a narcissist at this point, saying, “I know this panel likes … really spicy” foods, like it’s just not possible that he’s cooking inferior dishes to those of these other very talented chefs. Tom, with his customary impatience for bullshit, cuts that off with “We just want good food up here.” Simplest dictum there could be. Jason just flat-out underseasoned the fish, which is typically a fatal error on this show. You do not give Tom Colicchio protein that is overcooked or underseasoned.

* Jason is eliminated. I would have preferred Phillip, especially given the whining, but given the face that Tom made while eating Jason’s dish, it had to have tasted pretty bad. Underseasoned fish is atrocious to eat.

* LCK: Take bland ingredients and make something flavorful, using the sponsor Soy Vey’s Teriyaki sauce (soy sauce; sugar; dried garlic, onion, and ginger; and sesame seeds and oil), which, while very sweet – and let’s face it, Tom ain’t using this in his restaurants – does at least include a lot of the base flavors you’d want in stir-fry dishes. I don’t know what will happen if you end up reducing it, though – it could get very sticky, or very salt, or maybe even both. Soy sauce is great but if that’s your only real source of umami you may end up with too much salt by the time you get enough glutamates.

* Angelina made terikyaki shrimp with potato and onion hash and a celery and orange salad. Shrimp a little overcooked. Jason made a salmon fillet with soft-cooked egg with broccoli and grilled sweet potato salad. Tom screwed with him a bit, asking if that’s how he liked the salmon cooked as if it were overdone, but Tom (like me) prefers his salmon around medium. Jason wins, just because Angelina’s shrimp was a tick overdone. I understand the need for sponsorships to pay for the web series, but this is too blatant a product promotion for my tastes (no pun intended).

* Rankings: Kwame, Marjorie, Carl, Jeremy, Amar, Chad, Karen, Isaac, Phillip.