Top Chef, S13E10.

So, the first part of the top 100 prospects package is up: the top 100 ranking itself, ten prospects who just missed, and the ranking of all 30 farm systems. My team by team top tens and reports will go up Tuesday and Wednesday.

And now, Restaurant Wars, part two…

* Isaac’s team was very happy with lunch, and it seems like a smooth transition to set up for dinner service because they were done on time and organized. Then Isaac realizes, “holy shit, team orange is still serving.” Yes, yes they are.

* Phillip says, “we definitely failed lunch service.” Spot on. The weird thing is that the judges seem to have taken little notice of this. Tom and Bill even show up to admonish the chefs … for “playing it too safe” with their food, not for, you know, taking a geological era to get food to the tables.

* Carl is doing a snapper crudo for his entree with cucumber, ginger, and grapes. I do not get grapes with raw fish. I’ve had it. It doesn’t work for me. The grapes are way too sweet. I love grapes. I don’t like them with meat.

* Kwame’s amuse-bouse is a beet-cured hamachi. When he removes the tuna loin, it looks like some sort of horrible monster eel, or perhaps a tapeworm removed from an elephant’s intestine.

* Amar is making a slow braised pork belly. In other words, he’s not making another sous vide chicken breast!

* Phillip claims, “when you add acid to olive oil, it turns acrid.” That’s funny. I thought that when you added acid to olive oil, it turned into a vinaigrette.

* Karen is making 2.5 dishes plus running front of house, so we see servers standing around with nothing to do because she doesn’t have time to talk to them about how to do their jobs.

* Phillip comes up with the idea to offer guests a complimentary cocktail with pineapple, ginger, turmeric, lemon juice, and two kinds of sake. He calls it “Bangkok Dangerous,” which sounds like the villain in a bad 1940s movie. Also, that drink sounds disgusting.

* Jeremy says, “Risotto is risky because there’s been so many horrible ones on Top Chef.” There have been so many horrible ones because making risotto for a large number of people is fucking hard, genius.

* A stand mixer walked off the counter and hit the floor. I have contemplated solutions like duct taping it to my counter to try to prevent this.

* It seemed like both teams were still finishing prep when dinner service started. Maybe the producers truly didn’t give them enough time between lunch and dinner?

* Marjorie made parmiggiano-garlic-parsley bread. Tom is so impressed that she bakes. So am I. Usually, in the kitchen, the only life form on which you’re relying is yourself. With bread, you’re relying on a billion or so yeast to do their jobs how you want and when you want.

* Okay, we’re off to the food: Karen and Carl made an oxtail consommé with tripe, tortellini, and mushrooms. Carl’s own entree was the snapper crudo with cucumber, ginger, and grapes. Padma likes that Karen cut the tripe so small. Tom approves of the tripe and the oxtail, which is kind of a big deal because Tom knows cow. The snapper really good, but Tom is suffering from crudo fatigue. The struggle is real, Tom.

* Karen is getting praised for her front of house work (which she did well) and for training the waitstaff (which Marjorie helped do).

* Karen’s dish is a stuffed trout with coconut rice and heirloom tomatoes. Isaac made a braised lamb shoulder with couscous, pickled fennel, and orange. Isaac “loves to braise.” Well who the hell doesn’t? Braised dishes are comfort food. And the judges love, love, love his lamb. Karen’s trout dish was just “misconceived” and badly done. I’ve never had trout stuffed; I can’t fathom how rainbow trout, which is what I usually get at Whole Foods, could stand up to stuffing with anything more than an aromatic or two.

* Marjorie made a composed cheese plate with dates, pecans, and plums; and a dessert of a California berry soup, buttermilk panna cotta, vanilla, and macadamia nuts. Tom offers the insight, “I like dates. Love them.” But the judges don’t like the fizz from the champagne in the dessert soup. Maybe they would have liked it better had she explained what it was?

* The judges move over to Bro Bistro. Padma immediately eyerolls at the cocktail.

* The amuse bouche from Kwame is the beet cured hamachi with avocado mousse, osetra caviar, and a cucumber lime emulsion. “It’s horrible. Technique over substance.” Padma says the emulsion was “sort of like spittle.” Also, isn’t osetra caviar wildly expensive? Why did they waste money on that for an amuse?

* Amar’s first dish is an avocado gazpacho with lemon pudding, shaved radish, king crab, and fried tortilla. Phillip’s super-weird salad has strawberries, pickled cucumber, roasted beets, pickled cucumbers, arugula, and a strawberry champagne gazpacho. Of the latter, Tom says “Take the onions off and it’s a dessert.” Gail says it didn’t make any sense and “it felt stupid.” They’re slamming it like I haven’t seen them slam a dish in a while. Amar’s dish reminds Tom of nachos. Gail says it was odd but she liked it.

* So the judges spot Phillip talking too much to customers. Tom says “I will bet you anything he’s talking about his restaurants,” and we cut to Phillip talking to the customers about his restaurants. I’m pretty sure Phillip is a narcissist. He talks about himself, his own restaurants, his own everything all the time. He seems unable to accept responsibility either for mistakes or even for negative assessments of his work. When he is criticized, he tends to belittle the other chefs. He certainly treated Kwame like an extension of himself, and says he’d treat his own employees like that, not like separate individuals. Granted, I can’t diagnose anyone through a TV, not least because I’m not a doctor, but on this show, in what we’ve seen, he has certainly behaved like a classic narcissist.

* The judges appear to be getting hammered on wine. I have no real problem with this.

* Kwame made a roasted Amish chicken thigh with a sauce of San Marzano tomatoes and marcona almonds, and some sort of cauliflower side. Jeremy made an artichoke risotto with crispy shallot and olive oil. The risotto looks gluey, mounded up in the bowl, with no spreading. It’s also flavorless and Gail guesses (correctly, as we learn later) that he cooked the rice in water rather than stock or broth. Kwame’s chicken was slightly overcooked. Tom calls it a “one-note dish,” which is usually a fatal error around these parts.

* Amar made a slow braised pork belly with a “BBQ sauce consommé,” whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. Jeremy’s second dish is a dry aged rib eye with celery root miso puree and miso butter. Amar’s consommé is “more concentrated than pickle juice,” although Tom says it’s better when eaten with the meat, which is probably how Amar intended it – but then don’t call it consommé, which is a soup. Jeremy’s dish is “serviceable” but Tom is getting drunk-grumpy and starts picking apart the unnecessary elements.

* Amar thinks they might be the winners because the gray team looks down. That is some strong power of self-delusion right there.

* Judges’ table: Tom acknowledges that it’s really hard to do what they were asked to do.

* Padma says it was close after lunch, but after dinner there was a clear winner – the gray team. Karen drops a “holy shit!” and they all seem legitimately surprised.

* There’s a lot of praise for Marjorie’s work in the front of house and for her food. Karen also earns plaudits for her front of house service, but the judges said she gave them one good dish, one not. Isaac gave them two great dishes. Carl praises Isaac’s expediting system for lunch and says they carried over the good ideas to dinner. Isaac claims the four of them had “no attitudes, no ego.” Tom says “we all have both, we wouldn’t be chefs if we didn’t have both.” But I think we could see what Isaac meant – the four of them seemed to avoid drama and communicate very well, including taking direction from the exec chef during each service.

* The winner is Isaac. It’s Isaac’s first win and it came after he was picked last for the challenge. He gives us a rebel yell to make Billy Idol proud. On second thought, I don’t think that’s what that song was about.

* And now, Bro Bistro comes to the guillotine. Jeremy can’t quite explain what happened at lunch. Bill says the cocktail gambit was “amateurish.” Phillip tries to joke that “at least (he’s) not being judged on that,” but the judges all kind of laugh and say that of course he is.

* Kwame’s amuse was terrible. The pistachio oil in the avocado mousse overwhelmed it. Amar’s gazpacho was heavy. Phillip’s strawberry course didn’t come off as a salad, and the sauce/dressing was like dessert. Kwame and Phillip start disagreeing again in front of judges. Tom thinks regardless of whether Amar or Kwame tried to intervene, the dish was unfixable. (Phillip wouldn’t have listened anyway.) Jeremy admits he used water tocook the rice. Tom says it was one of the worst risottos ever on Top Chef. They go after Amar as exec for dinner, for not trying to fix Phillip’s dish and for not tasting the risotto.

* Hey, Recipe for Deception has one of the horrible human beings from Million Dollar Listing as a judge! Can I not watch this show any harder?

* Phillip is eliminated. It was high time. He really had just one dish all season the judges loved. Of course, he’s “very surprised,” because of course he is.

* LCK: Phillip gets to pick the core ingredient and the time for the challenge; he picks sweetbreads and 20 minutes. The idea is that he can only blame himself if he loses. Jason says he’s never cooked sweetbreads in less than an hour and a half, so while he loves cooking them 20 minutes is awfully short.

* Phillip slices off a bit of his left index finger and is bleeding a lot, even inside the glove after it’s bandaged. He keeps cooking … but is this the built-in excuse if Jason wins?

* Phillip did roasted sweetbread with torched salmon belly, sweet potato chips, shaved apple and radish, and yogurt-ginger-carrot sauce. Tom says it’s kind of all soft textures, including the underblended purée; Phillip tries to claim that that was intentional but Tom shuts him down and says “don’t bullshit the bullshitter.” I like LCK Tom, if I haven’t mentioned that before. Jason made a fricasée of poached and pan-roasted sweetbreads with artichoke and saffron; it seems like Tom liked it, only saying that the saffron was a little aggressive. And Jason does indeed win.

* Power rankings: Marjorie, Kwame, Carl, Karen, Amar, Isaac, Jeremy. Jeremy takes the big tumble because he really seems to struggle when he’s not serving raw fish, but I’ll hear arguments that Isaac belongs on the bottom even after the win.