I held my usual Klawchat yesterday. The top 100 prospects package starts to roll out on Wednesday with the organizational rankings; the top 100 list itself follows on Thursday, with the org reports (including top tens) posting the following week.
This week’s episode was really half of a two-parter, so there’s no Judges’ Table and no elimination. But I do like the format change for reasons I’ll get into below.
* Isaac seems befuddled by his frequent near-eliminations, and thinks it’s because he’s losing to chefs who do much more refined presentations. He says, “I don’t tweezify my plates,” and if nothing else that’s a great word that needs to enter my Top Chef recap vocabulary. (The guy who got sent home last week was axed for tweezifying his plate, so I’m not sure what Isaac is getting at here.)
* The guest judge is Bill Chait, owner of Bestia in LA, and the man makes Debbie Downer look like a ray of sunshine. Jeez, Bill, you’re judging on Top Chef. You could perk up a bit.
* The chefs have a Restaurant Wars song and dance. It is not going to win an Emmy.
* Amar and Karen win the knife pulls to pick teams for Restaurant Wars. Amar picks Kwame. Karen picks Marjorie, calling her the “Top Chef MVP” for her versatility. Those are the easy top two choices, I say. Amar takes Jeremy. Karen takes Carl. Amar takes Phillip because Phillip wants to do front of house and Amar doesn’t. So Karen gets Isaac.
* Here’s the format change: This time, each team will do two services, lunch and dinner, and still gets just 24 hours to prepare. Every chef must take a turn at either executive chef or front of house for one service. This seems way more fair than the old system, where the eliminated chefs were nearly always from one of those two positions.
* Kwame feels Phillip can be “adamant.” That’s one way to put it.
* In the team menu planning sessions, Isaac’s ideas are all going over like lead balloons, and he’s kind of getting ignored/plowed over. Marjorie seems to be completely ignoring him, like he’s not even standing there. I would expect him to break the table in half at this point.
* I hate the part of Restaurant Wars where the chefs go pick their décor and flatware and such. Is this something any chef would normally do? It’s always lousy television. I’m here for the food, not the fucking wall art.
* Kwame: “Phillip wants to do mason jars and I think that’s so ten years ago Brooklyn.” I … nah, he’s right, I can’t snark this.
* So the Karen/Marjorie/Carl/Isaac team calls its restaurant Palate (okay, how about “Palette” with a wild color scheme?), and plans ten dishes plus a bread course for the two meals.
* Jeremy is making risotto. You know how that goes. It also looks like he’s making it ahead and cooling it on sheet pans … that seems like a really terrible idea.
* Isaac says he’s glad he’s not with the four “bros” on the other team, and that the two high-powered women on his team are “ego-less.” I don’t think Karen is ego-less, although Marjorie certainly seems to keep hers on a bare simmer.
* Phillip’s strawberry salad has a million steps, even though Kwame has to assemble it. This is beyond “adamant” – it’s self-destructive. You know someone else is making your dish, so make it simple.
* Marjorie marinated beets with baby greens pepitas and garrotxa; Carl pork and bacon terrine; Karen steak salad; Isaac shellfish stew with fennel.
* Jeremy crispy egg charred asparagus and truffle vin; Kwame corn and sage veloute; Amar roasted chicken breast with polenta; Phillip roasted salmon with crispy skin.
* Padma’s cleavage is on the menu. Almost literally.
* Here’s where the two-episode format kind of hurts the tension: When the judges arrive at District LA (Jeremy/Amar/Kwame/Phillip), Jeremy, the exec chef for lunch, pushes all other tables’ dishes back and puts the judges’ dishes at the front of the queue. This creates a pileup later that we don’t really get to see, especially since they seem to be having real trouble with the servers knowing what to do – or with the kitchen not giving them enough food.
* Their starters include Jeremy’s grilled asparagus, arugula salad, crispy egg, and truffle vinaigrette; and Kwame’s corn and sage velouté with pancetta and pickled corn, crispy sage. Both get high marks, although Bill is the only one who thinks soup is underseasoned. I’m starting to think he could tell you a double rainbow was too colorful.
* Marjorie has to try to push tables out the door. People are lingering like it’s some kind of prank, like the producers told everyone, “hey, when you’re done eating, don’t leave.”
* Tom has noticed that Jeremy isn’t feeding other tables. This seems like the kind of thing that gets your ass sent home, right?
* Somehow the judges’ table didn’t get utensils, and neither did some other tables. Did they hire servers off the street?
* Phillip’s main course is a roasted salmon with crispy skin, greek yogurt, and ratatouille. Amar served yet another roasted chicken breast (blech) with creamy polenta and wild mushroom ragout. Phillip’s salmon is good but the vegetables are undercooked, and Padma says she doesn’t like the ratatouille served over the fish (I totally agree – wouldn’t the heat from the vegetables continue cooking the fish and ruin its texture?). Amar’s doesn’t have enough sauce, and Tom points out that’s three times he’s sous vided a chicken breast. Unless it’s a heritage bird, or truly free-range and pasture-raised, the chicken’s breast will have no flavor of its own. It’s the worst protein to choose for a competition.
* Marjorie starts giving people booze to get them to abandon their tables. It’s kind of clever, actually. Sort of a Pied Piper act for grown-ups.
* Carl’s starter is a pork and bacon terrine with haricots verts, gem lettuces, prosciutto, salumi, and golden raisins. Marjorie served marinated beets with pickled cauliflower and shaved garrotxa (a semi-soft Spanish goat cheese). The terrine is just not good – Tom looks mildly disgusted by it. The rest of the dish was better, but that’s not salvaging anything. Marjorie’s beets were a little simple but done well. I love roasted beets and have had them in a few dozen restaurants by now, and the one thing that seems missing from her dish is something to add crunch, like pepitas or pistachios. It also sounds like it had no spice at all, so you’re getting sweetness and acidity but not much else. I had a great charred beet dish at Brigantessa in the Passyunk neighborhood of Philly last night, and it included a grilled head of treviso for that sharp, bitter flavor.
* Jeremy’s completely in the weeds now because of his decision to put the judges’ dishes first. When lunch service is technically over, his restaurant still has diners waiting for food.
* Karen’s main course is a grilled flank steak salad with shaved carrots, daikon, jicama, cabbage, papaya, herbs, and nuts. Isaac’s dish is a seafood stew cod with shrimp, clams, and mussels. Karen’s is the best dish the judges have had. Tom likes the added flavors from the Thai basil, mint, and cilantro – kind of like a spring roll herb combination. Isaac’s stew was solid, with big flavors from saffron and fennel, but no one seems blown away by it.
* The quick consensus from the judges is that Palate had much stronger entrees, while District had better apps.
* And … that’s it. The preview of next week makes it look like at least one team has everything go totally pear-shaped during dinner, so that could be fun in a sadistic sort of way.
Karen seemed very surprised by how well Isaac ran the kitchen; that seemed weird to me, since he owns and runs his own restaurant, pretty successfully it sounds like. He has a lot of experience in this, so I figured if he would do one thing very well, it would be being executive chef (though he’d also be a ton of fun in the front of the house).
Before you actually reveal the org rankings, let me just ask: How come you hate the 15 teams you have ranked in the bottom half? Particularly the bottom five?
Also, I ate at Bestia once and was underwhelmed. To make the obvious joke, more like Worstia.
Not the most overrated restaurant in LA, though. That honor goes to Osteria Mozza, which may have been great once, but is barely mediocre these days. PIzzeria Mozza next door remains excellent, however.
Maybe it comes from my years in the restaurant business, but I get anxious if I’m at a restaurant with limited seating, we’ve finished eating, and there are a bunch of people waiting to sit. I’ve herded my group out of such a setting on more than one occasion (usually to someone’s consternation). Especially in a lunch setting, it seems rude to linger. That said, it’s Jeremy’s fault…switching the tickets around not only created the delay in service, but probably got the guests half drunk before eating, thus increasing their obliviousness to anything happening around them. Marjorie’s solution was elegant in its simplicity!
Your comment regarding Padma and her…situation was about the best way to describe it. Holy cow.
The exchange between Tom and Padma regarding the terrine was weird. She thought he loved it because he ate it all but then he basically said he hated it, and wasn’t joking. Huh?
Count me in the anti-beet crowd. I thought fresh roasted beets had to be better than those disgusting sliced ones in the can. I was truly shocked to find out that they still tasted like…beets. One of the few vegetables I dislike.
This is where I struggle as a recapper. That was one of the more interesting moments of the episode … but I couldn’t figure out what to say about it. You’re spot on – Tom was not kidding – so why did he eat the whole thing?
It almost seemed like he was trying to figure out what went wrong with it from a technical perspective. Goes back a bit to the foreshadowing where the meat is not cold enough when he puts it through the grinder. The conversation ends with him mumbling things about taste and texture.
Padma was just as confused as we are. OK, I’ll take that…a woman who can keep up with Salman Rushdie and Adam Dell is not any more clever than me.
Maybe the only thing that irked me about the format change is that the judges didn’t recalibrate their expectations for lunch. Very few restaurants serve ambitious lunches, and it would seem like an obvious move to keep lunch simple, executable food, then pull out all the stops with dinner. The judges didn’t seem to see it that way.
They need a spell check on the captions. They had a typo on “business” at the beginning.
I wondered how much of the lunch crowd problem was who the producers invited to attend. (I assume people don’t come off the street.)
Clearly these people didn’t have to get back to work after lunch!
So that may make it hard to simulate the reality of lunch in a reality show.