Top Chef, S14E02.

Oh, we’re still at the slave place. Cool.

* The guest judge is Frank Lee, a low-country cuisine specialist and someone with absolutely no vibe of the celebrity chef, which is kind of refreshing. There’s a low country boil ready for the chefs to eat, so they spread it on a table and dump some on the ground because who the hell cares about wasting food.

* The elimination challenge: The chefs will be split into two teams, rookies versus veterans, and will each eat a family-style meal at a local chef with Charleston roots, and then prepare a dinner the next day using that meal as inspiration. Rookies versus veterans is a bad idea right off the bat – it confers way too much of an advantage on the vets, who also have one more person.

* The rookies eat at the house of Carrie Morey of Carrie’s Hot Little Biscuit, whom I found really condescending to the chefs from the get-go (to say nothing of those bizarre shoes she was wearing that seemed to make it hard for her to walk straight). The veterans eat at the house of BJ Dennis, a personal chef and caterer with Gullah heritage.

* I haven’t read it, but Morey has a cookbook out called Callie’s Biscuits and Southern Traditions that has great reviews on amazon, especially for the buttermilk biscuit recipe. Obligatory self-promotion: here’s my annual list of recommended cookbooks, from beginner level to home expert.

* Dennis serves a meal with a shrimp salad with mayo and mustard, collard greens with coconut milk and peanut butter (whoa), an eggplant stew, and a red rice gumbo that he says New Orleans people would hate “but this is OG gumbo.”

* Morey says biscuits were made with every meal, but her mother doubled the fat because when you’re going to eat a biscuit, eat a damn biscuit. The dough she’s using looks extremely wet compared to any biscuit dough I’ve ever made or seen. She serves pork chops breaded with parmesan, egg wash, and crackers, which I don’t get at all, not least because either she’s wasting some good, expensive cheese, or she’s using garbage. There’s also some sort of collards, hoppin’ john, squash casserole, a “permanent” slaw, and tomato pie, which is covered like a pot pie. She mentions a cobbler, which is kind of biscuits on hot fruit anyway, but I didn’t see what kind.

* Here’s a shocker: the rookie team is a hot mess. There’s no leader, no discussion of dishes, no coordination of shopping lists. Usually the trips to Whole Foods on this show are pretty boring, but it was cringeworthy watching the rookies get to the front of the store and realize they’d spent way more than their budget while buying far too much of some basics like eggs or butter. Have they never watched the show before?

* After the shopping trip, BJ suggests that they might “take one on the chin” for not doing it, which is great timing. They’re trying to pressure Jim, who has immunity, to do the biscuit as his dish, but he stands his ground. I wonder if they also thought the nerdy guy would be a pushover.

* Brooke is making biscuits for the veteran team, but there are no racks in the ovens in this kitchen. How is that possible? Did they remove them and hide them somewhere? She has to sit the pans on the oven bottom, and you can guess how well that’s going to work out.

* I adore Silvia’s accent, like when she says they are in “Char-less-ton.” It reminds me of my cousin in Genova telling me in 1999 while we were visiting them that the “Sant’Antonio Spurs” had won the NBA championship.

* The rookies are a disaster, as you might have expected. Annie is trying to make a tomato tart in two hours, but can’t find room to work or time to rest the dough sufficiently. BJ cooks his entire pork loin whole and it’s 30 degrees below where it needs to be, so he cuts it into chops and sears them off to finish. Neck-Tat burns some of his vegetables for the second week in a row. I know it’s the format and some artificial constraints, but boy have these two episodes made the rookies look like kitchen noobs.

* Rookie dishes: Padma notices right away that there are no biscuits. Carrie says, “I guess I didn’t inspire biscuits,” which I thought was a bit snotty, while Padma says “it is a glaring omission” from a southern dinner. Jim made grits with charred asparagus, ham hock, spring onions, and hen of the woods mushrooms … Silvia made hoppin john with farro, crispy skin, refried beans, carrot puree, but Tom said the farro was overseasoned and Chef Dennis just didn’t like the upscale version … Emily made pickled shrimp and dressed cucumbers, which the judges loved, but did she actually cook anything here? … BJ made cornmeal-crusted pork with peameal bacon and pickled peaches, but the pork is inconsistently cooked, with Gail’s portion way below rare … Annie’s tomato tart with smoked tomato vinaigrette is a disaster, as expected, with the crust basically raw … Sylva made a cornish hen with dark meat rice, adzuki beans, and a Haitian-style “permanent slaw” that’s more of a chow-chow … Jamie’s summer squash casserole with raw and roasted vegetable salad on top is also a mess, as the custard itself seems to have broken. Chef Morey spoke to the local paper in Charleston about why skipping biscuits was such a mistake.

* Veteran dishes: The plates look better right off the bat, like maybe these chefs have been here before. Shirley made a pork belly and oyster stew with sweet potato, potato, and pork crackling … Tesar made Carolina rice with caramelized okra, green onion, and jumbo lump crab gravy; Tom, who hates okra, sort of liked it, although I think this is hackneyed Tesar work, throwing a fancy or expensive ingredient on at the end to boost an ordinary dish … Brooke made sweet corn biscuits with salted benne butter and dulce de leche, and, shocker, they were inconsistently cooked, some overdone on bottom, some underdone in the center … Amanda made a whole fish ceviche with old Bay, cayenne, sorghum, and lemon pepper … Casey made collards with turnips, coconut, peanut, crispy chicken skin, bread crumb, trout roe … Sheldon made eggplant stew with tomatoes, fish sauce, okra, and bitter greens … Katsuji made a shrimp stew with hot (spicy) pineapple sauce … Sam made a vinegar and tea-brined fried chicken with pickled yellow beets and hot sauce, which gets good reviews all around. Dennis approves of this meal way more than Morey did of the rookies’.

* Judges’ table: Veterans had the better meal, obviously. Tom says it was the best family-style meal he’s ever had on the show, and given how it looked I’m not that surprised – it just looked professional in a way most meals on this show don’t. The top three dishes were Casey’s collards, John’s okra, and Sheldon’s eggplant. Every single person around the table loved the greens. Tom almost grudgingly admits he liked Tesar’s okra dish. Frank says his chefs tell him (did I hear that right?) that “Your job is to make the food taste like what it is,” which has that ring of folksy wisdom that ultimately falls apart when you’re thinking about, say, a basic broiler-fryer that is all about how you cook and flavor it. Anyway, the winner is Casey and the collards.

* Their least favorite dishes were BJ’s pork loin, Annie’s tomato pie, and Jamie’s squash casserole. Jamie’s looked good, but when you cut into it, the custard broke apart because the squash released too much liquid. It just seems like Neck-Tat struggles with some fundamental execution, at least in the time constraints of the show. BJ’s pork was a mess – badly cooked and cut to varying thicknesses, which I assume is because he was rushing. Annie says her dough took longer than planned, so the crust was undercooked, and I agree with Tom that the crust should be the star of any pie, sweet or savory.

* I thought Sam commiserating a little with the rookies could have been an interesting scene, but instead we got just one sentence of it.

* The judges’ decision seems to come down to poor technique by BJ and Neck-Tat versus poor decision-making by Annie, trying to do a tart in a timespan that couldn’t accommodate it. I really thought Jamie deserved to go home more based on their commentary and this idea of execution versus concept, but Annie gets the boot, which is doubly brutal given that she didn’t want to do that dish in the first place (although she could have chosen a different twist on the tomato-pie concept). That’s two rookies out in two weeks.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Gerald versus Annie, with their cooking time determined by the ingredients they choose in a two-minute “shopping” spreed in the pantry. The catch is they have use everything they pick up. Gerald gets 33 minutes, while Annie gets 25. I’m going to fast-forward here to the end, because Annie failed to use one ingredient and was automatically disqualified, giving Gerald the win. I’m going to go on a limb and say I don’t think he’s going to go very far either.

* Very early rankings: I think Brooke is clearly the best of the veterans and probably the best chef here overall. Shirley’s my sleeper pick among the vets. Among the rookies, I think Silvia’s going to go very far given her pasta-making skills, and Jim is two for two so far, but none of the others has done anything to separate him/herself from the pack, and a couple have looked overmatched. Those would be my top four right now, with Brooke the current favorite – unsurprising since she nearly won her original season.