Amar is the winner of Last Chance Kitchen, so Carl, who I thought was a clear top 3 coming down the stretch, is out. No Kwame, no Carl, and possibly no Marjorie in the finals? Is this a good thing? Is it fair to think that we might not get the best chefs in the finals when we haven’t tasted any of the food?
* The winner of this first challenge goes right to the finale. The chefs each get a pantry at random and must create a dish inspired by the limited pantry you’re dealt. Marjorie gets the royalty pantry, so she can choose from all four pantries, not just her own. Amar gets only the peasants’ pantry, so he can’t use any pantry but his. This sounds like a new worker-placement game, and like most games of that ilk, this challenge will take three hours.
* They’re serving 150 people in just three hours from the start of the challenge, but they do get help from the last four eliminated chefs. Marjorie takes Karen, Isaac takes Carl, Jeremy takes Kwame, so Amar gets Phillip. Jeremy can’t believe the first two chefs passed on Kwame. I still can’t believe Kwame didn’t make it to the finals.
* Is it just me or does the top of Padma’s red dress here look like lingerie?
* Marjorie has salmon and dry-aged steak available to her. I’d hope she’ll be judged along a higher standard given the inputs she’s getting. I do want to know how she was trimming that salmon – she sliced something off the top of the fillet, which I haven’t seen before.
* Amar’s protein choices are chicken livers and beef tongue. He’s downplaying the livers, but liver cooked properly can be delicious. It needs other flavors, but I’ve really grown to like it.
* Isaac is trying to cook his fish to order for 150 people, which seems very difficult to do, especially given what’s on the line this episode.
* The judges go to Amar’s station first for his sauteed liver and onions with root vegetable puree and crispy leeks. The judges all seem to like it, but whatever other flavors were in there, we didn’t hear about them. Liver and onions does not excite me but he apparently did something novel with it.
* Jeremy made butter-poached chicken with togarashi, zucchini puree, chicken cracklings, and pickled sweet and hot grapes. Gail loves the grapes, and of course everyone loves the cracklings. Crispy chicken skin has been ‘in’ for a couple of years now – I’ve even seen it in vinaigrettes – but I don’t think it’s just a fad, because it’s very satisfying to eat (thanks to the crunch) and because it fits in the new philosophy of using as much of the animal as possible. I nearly always save mine and cook them separately if I’m not cooking them with the meat.
* Isaac made seared black cod with caramelized fennel, eggplant, and red wine vinegar. He served it with toasted slices of bread, but they were too dry to soak up the sauce. I grew up Italian, so to me, one of bread’s primary functions is as the sponge you use to clean your plate before sending it to the sink.
* Marjorie made seared salmon in vadouvan beurre monté with a Meyer lemon purée and shaved vegetable salad. Meyer lemons and yuzu are two of the most overused ingredients on Top Chef. At least I can get Meyer lemons in Whole Foods – yes, they’re good, but 95% of the time regular lemons would work just fine – while I’m not sure I’ve ever seen yuzu in any form.
* Padma’s super cheerful this time. Tom likes that they’re not eliminating someone this challenge. I think he’s happy because he has a restaurant in Vegas and every time he goes there he remembers how much money he makes from it.
* Rick Moonen loves the comfort food aspect of Amar’s dish, while Tom likes the ingenuity and simplicity. They loved the Meyer lemon puree in Marjorie’s dish. Tom praises Jeremy’s poached chicken despite the natural blandness of poached chicken, crediting the grapes in particular. Butter-poached chicken isn’t any poached chicken, though.
* The winner is Jeremy, who goes to the finals and gets a $25,000 prize. Two of the three remaining chefs will end up going home. Padma makes a “Leaving Las Vegas” joke for which she should have to pack her knives and go.
* Illusionist David Copperfield is there. Can he make Donald Trump disappear?
* The second challenge is to make a dish that “leaves the judges spellbound.” I don’t like how this sounds. Is this Top Chef, or Top Showman?
* Jeremy sounds gracious in victory, saying of the double elimination here, “I’m sure it’s in the back of each one of their minds, it’s the end of the road. It sucks.” For a guy who cops a bit of a bro attitude, he’s come across as way more mature and thoughtful the more he speaks in the confessionals.
* I wonder how often the chefs just make a dish they make all the time at their restaurants and cook up a narrative for the judges or the cameras.
* Amar is making a cauliflower white chocolate ganache. This sounds … terrible, really. White chocolate is sugar and fat. It has no cocoa solids, so it has no chocolate flavor. If you wouldn’t add sugar to a savory dish, don’t add white chocolate. I hate white chocolate, by the way.
* Marjorie is using liquid nitrogen for the first time, which is a very bad idea. She tastes something she made with it, and “burns” her tongue, so she can barely taste her food. LN is around –196 degrees Celsius – that is, nearly 200 degrees below the freezing point of water – and can freeze human tissue on contact. This is not a toy.
* She plates first, trying to put on a show, talking as she goes … which has Tom looking totally bemused. They did tell the chefs they had to entertain, right? She’s nervous as hell, but she’s powering through it.
* Marjorie says she’s never used liquid nitrogen before and it makes her nervous, to which Padma says, “it’s making me nervous.” You’re twenty feet away, Padma. Simmer down.
* The dish is roasted duck breast a l’orange with braised endive, orange cells, caramelized romanesco, fennel puree. The screen said “romesco,” which is a sauce, but I think the item was actually romanesco, a close relative of the cauliflower with a bright green color and fractal form to its pointed florets. The endives are good, but the dish didn’t have enough orange flavor, perhaps because she was struggling with the LN.
* Isaac is up next, making his “chicken-fried steak” with crispy chicken skin attached to the steaks. He’s not talking to the judges, which shouldn’t matter but might, although he finishes with a cute if silly magic trick. The actual dish: dry aged ribeye with chicken skin, “quadruple” fennel puree, and yuzu hollandaise. The flavors are great but the puree wasn’t smooth enough.
* This seems like the perfect challenge for molecular gastronomy, or even just a Jacques Derrida approach. I had a dish at ink. last week that would have fit the challenge: a deconstructed apple pie that looked like a bit of a mess, but when eaten all together had all the flavors of a real apple pie. It included a “burnt wood” semifreddo and bits of apple gelée. Richard Blais’s restaurants often have dishes like this too, where your eyes tell you to expect one thing but your palate gets something totally different. That’s the kind of illusion I expected given the challenge.
* Amar serves his dishes under a glass cloche with smoke in it. The dish is roasted squab with the aforementioned ganache, whipped balsamic, and potato rings with onion flavors in the breading. He also had dabs of LN-frozen squab sauce with mole flavors in them.
* Judges’ table: Tom says Marjorie’s story was good, the duck and endive were great, it needed more orange flavor but was otherwise “terrific.” She had the most showmanship, I think. Amar’s plate “looked like a terrarium” (Tom) but worked, although the praise is about the flavors, and we don’t get any real breakdown of the various techniques he used. I also really wanted to hear something about that ganache, which sounded vile to me. Isaac tried the magic trick, which gets him some points. He needed more skin on the filet, but gets some points for going well out of his comfort zone.
* Padma boosts Marjorie for the performance. Amar’s dish had the best elements of surprise, the most technically difficult, but didn’t have her showmanship. Isaac’s concept was good, and Tom says it was better than real chicken fried steak.
* The winner of this challenge is Amar, so we have Amar and Jeremy in the finals. It does seem like he did the best on this challenge, but to have Marjorie gone is very disappointing given how well she did all season and how much more versatile she was than anyone else this season.
* Amar gets very choked up afterwards, having just lost his first ever boss, Gerry Hayden, and remembering his father, who died of brain cancer when Amar was a teenager.
* Jeremy’s reaction to Amar walking in is priceless: “I was hoping it wasn’t you, motherfucker!” Jeremy has done so well on the more sophisticated, fine-dining sort of challenges, but was so uninspiring in some of the earlier challenges that were either more basic or that let him do one crudo after another. I think I’m pulling for Amar at this point, as long as he doesn’t sous vide another chicken breast in the finale.