Top Chef, S13E08.

If you’re looking for info on the top 100, it’s in today’s “Stick to baseball” links post.

This episode was definitely not my favorite. We got a challenge that wasn’t about cooking at all, then a challenge that was basically who can do the best Texas de Brasil impersonation.

* We do get some interesting background on Kwame before the Quickfire. When he was “about 19,” he was selling drugs to pay his tuition – I assume that last bit was connecting to the rupture between him and his father that he described in the previous episode – until his girlfriend told him he was “better than this,” after which he moved to Louisiana and became a professional cook. What I found really interesting about the monologue was when he said that he figured if he could be a successful drug dealer, he could be successful at something he really cared about. So selling drugs gave him the confidence to go be a great chef. That’s … weird, but good, I guess.

* Chad blow-dries his beard. I really have no words for this.

* Also, we see Karen and Marjorie sharpening their knives in the morning before challenge, a reminder to me that I just don’t do this often enough, mostly because I hate the sound of the knife scraping the stone.

* Quickfire: Food porn. Chef “Jacques La Merde” (merde is the French word for “shit”), an anonymous, minor celebrity on Instagram, is on in silhouette with his voice disguised, saying he’s “feeling pretty soigné today,” and keeps saying “bro,” just in case you weren’t in on the joke. The account has over 30K followers and posts pics of beautiful plates made from junk food. The quickfire challenge is for chefs have to do the same: make beautiful plates from junk food. Really. All nine plates will be (were) posted to Bravo’s Instagram account, and the one with the most likes wins the challenge. So it’s a plating challenge with immunity and it doesn’t matter what the food tastes like.

* Phillip says in the confessional that “You eat with your eyes before you eat with your mouth.” Then we get Isaac saying, “people who say they eat with their eyes first should be stabbed with a pork chop bone.” I’m Team Isaac, for what it’s worth.

* So half the chefs don’t seem to know what “soigné” means. It’s one of Chef La Merde’s favorite hashtags, and means refined or elegant if you want to sound like a total douche. The French word soigner just means to treat or take care of someone or something, but apparently we stole and distorted the word from them about two hundred years ago. They’re probably still mad at us.

* Amar loves spray cheese, saying, “That’s the original foam.” Silly me, I thought the original foam was whipped cream.

* Chef Jacques La Merde is actually Christine Flynn, a French Culinary Institute-trained chef who now works for the Toronto health food chain iQ Foods.

* Amar painted half his plate with fermented black bean paste to make it look like wood. That was the only thing I saw on any of these plates that looked clever.

* Kwame’s was the “first one that you could eat that would make sense. Pretty soigné.” That’s so much less amusing when it’s said out loud, isn’t it?

* Phillip going way overboard to take the ideal pic. Padma even has to hurry him along and count down “3, 2…” like she’s telling her kid to get upstairs for bed already.

* Elimination challenge: Neal Fraser, chef/owner of Redbird in LA, where they host occasional “beefsteak” banquets: Black-tie affairs, for charity, where guests only eat with their hands and are served beef tenderloin, whole roasted salmon, and a few side dishes. Fraser describes it as a “gluttonous feast,” which is not very soigné in 2016 when we know that people don’t need to eat all that protein, raising cows en masse is not environmentally sound unless it’s done very well, and overfishing and ocean acidification are depleting stocks around the globe. So, hey, let’s have a big celebration of overeating!

* The team of Marjorie-Isaac-Chad isn’t doing a beef dish at all. I do like her idea of doing bread as one of the sides because it becomes a vehicle for eating the other foods.

* Phillip just wants to cook lamb, so his team (with Amar and Jeremy) is not doing beef either.

* Amar buys a 25 pound, $575 halibut! I don’t even think that’s a very big halibut, but man that’s an expensive creature.

* Chad wants to make ahi tuna – originally he wanted another fish but Whole Foods only had a few pounds – yet can’t figure out how to serve it. You eat sushi with your hands and that is the quintessential fish for sushi. Maybe that’s too fussy for beefsteak, but if you’re choosing that fish, you have lots of raw and near-raw options for serving it.

* Isaac is making chicken sausage with bacon, which is their meat dish in place of beef. “It’s a good way of showing that chicken can be decadent … when it’s packed full of bacon!” So why not make a beef sausage with bacon? I’m thinking like the Bar at Husk burger, which I think is equal parts chuck, brisket, and bacon.

* Round one: Carl New Zealand lamb with prune, Amar halibut with mustard vin, cucumber, pickled red onion: jeremy roasted carrots with spiced yogurt, fried Brussels sprouts with bacon cilantro and sweet and sour sauce.

* The central group of judges and diners includes Colin Hanks, Simpsons executive producer Matt Selman (who appeared to be completely hammered), Top Chef Masters winner Chris Cosentino, Recipe for Deception host Max Silvestri, and our dear friend Hugh Acheson.

* Padma calls serving the halibut like this “a little pansy to me,” which was probably not the best choice of words. Hugh expresses the sentiment much more diplomatically, saying the food was “dainty.” Max says eating the lamb, where you grabbed the bone and tore the meat off with your teeth, was the one really satisfying moment.

* Hugh throws Padma’s half-eaten lamb at another table, which was absolutely the best part of the entire episode.

* Round two: Isaac’s chicken bacon sausage with grilled cabbage; Chad’s seared ahi tuna with citrus, pickled beets, radish, and black sesame; Marjorie’s assorted pickled vegetables and milk bread (which looks like Parker house rolls … I could eat those for days). The judges liked the sausage concept but it didn’t have enough fat. Colin Hanks says the “looked rad, (but) it did not taste rad.” Tom says of Chad’s dish that there shall be “no micro greens at a beef steak.” Marjorie’s stuff was good, of course.

* After Selman says – in that way a drunk person says something he thinks is hilarious but that is not actually funny – that a beefsteak should be about “sexism” (what?), Issac is quick with the response, “I wanted to put my sausage in your mouth.” Hugh, never to be outquipped, “You have a dry sausage, though, so I’m not sure I want to put it in my mouth.” I’m sure Padma thinks they’re all pansies by now.

* Round three: Kwame’s peel-and-eat shrimp with thyme, garlic, Cajun seasoning, and drawn butter; Carl and Karen’s roasted strip loin with romesco; Karen’s asparagus with chorizo and some undefined dish of potatoes and olives.

* Kwame seems to have actually messed a dish up for real: His shrimp ranged from overcooked to very overcooked and seems to have been oversalted. The beef dish was not “caveman” enough. Should they have just served roadkill? Actually – and I’m only saying this with the benefit of having seen the whole episode – if they could have gotten any sort of blood and made something with it, even black pudding, it might have gone over really well as a nod to the spirit of the challenge. But I didn’t think of that till after I watched, and blood isn’t easy to find.

* So the universal feedback is that nobody “got” the challenge. Maybe the problem was the challenge itself, right?

* Winner of the Quickfire Instagram challenge: Karen. Okay, who cares.

* Tom asks, “why didn’t we get decadence?” Well, selecting chefs for the show was probably about the chefs’ refinement and ability to build flavors or cook in new or unusual ways, so maybe you confused the hell out of them, or should have just invited Uncle Gus on the show instead.

* Amar, Jeremy, and Phillip had the favorite meal. Their lamb was the only protein served on the bone. Jeremy’s vegetable dishes were both good. Amar’s fish was done well, but was just not appropriate for the challenge. The winner, unanimously, was Phillip. Jeremy says right away, “nice dude! About time, huh?” Even though the other chefs find Phillip annoying, it doesn’t seem like they dislike him – or anyone in their ranks now, really.

* Marjorie, Chad, and Isaac on the bottom. Tom says, “If you’re doing to make us sausage, don’t serve us chicken.” I would have thought Isaac would have done some kind of andouille, something that lights you on fire and drips with pork fat, but the judges even said his sausage didn’t have a lot of taste. He says he makes it at his restaurant, so something was off. Marjorie’s vegetables and bread were delicious, with Tom saying, “I’d have to say you are the best baker to ever be on this show.” That is high praise.

* Padma says Chad’s dish “ate fine.” I hate that expression. It’s the “pitchability” of foodspeak – words that sound apposite and mean nothing at all.

* Chad is eliminated. Unsurprising – his dish really missed the mark and he never even seemed comfortable with his concept.

* Restaurant Wars next week! It’s a two-parter where they serve two meals and rotate roles, which might actually be more fair than the usual “exec chef of the losing team goes home.”

* Rankings: Kwame, Marjorie, Jeremy, Carl, Amar, Karen, Phillip, Isaac. I’m kind of floored Isaac didn’t crush this “RAWR MEAT” challenge, and his relative lack of range seems like a huge weakness given who else is left.

* LCK: Chad and Jason get 25 minutes to prep a beef dish, but only 5 minutes with their knives for butchering. Tom says he wants “to see your inner caveman here.” Chad goes for the head, Jason for the bone-in ribeye. Chad grinds up cheek, eye, and tongue to make chili. Jason is making chuleton with grilled onions, basil, mint, and braised olives, which seems like a dish perfectly suited to please Tom (if it’s cooked right). His response is kind of telling: “That’s like beefsteak!” Chad made a huitlacoche puree, no-bean chili, grilled cheek, and crème fraiche on top. Tom says the whole challenge was “fantastic” and both guys did a great job with their beef. And then he says Chad’s dish “ate really really well,” just to mock me. The winner is Jason. Tom thinks Chad underdid the cheeks a little, but still says it was a great dish. I can’t see Jason hanging with who’s left in the main show, though – Chad might have had a chance.