Just another quick reminder that my farm system rankings are now up for Insiders; you can see the top ten here and from there see the other two-thirds of the list. The top 100 starts tomorrow with prospects 100-81.
What does it say that when I see an episode of Top Chef is an hour and 15 minutes, I’m disappointed?
* Was last week’s elimination all really that dramatic? Jamie’s dish sucked. And it wasn’t good the week before. He’d never won an elimination challenge. There wasn’t much evidence at all that he belonged in the upper half of chefs on the show. Yes, he did a noble thing, but it’s not like a front-runner walked away.
* It’s Restaurant Wars. The guest judges are the guys who run front and back of the house at Eleven Madison Park in NYC’s Flatiron District. They charge $295/person for their tasting menu, which is more than I have ever spent on any meal. They have a cookbook out, but I haven’t seen it.
* “Immunity is off the table. Just as well with people throwing it away.” Padma getting a little snarky with the intro here.
* They’re splitting the two teams into different days, working in the same space, which I suppose evens out the playing field a little bit on the stuff I care about least (décor, ambience, etc.).
* Katsuji and Shirley pull the ‘leader’ knives and get to draft their two teams. Katsuji picks Sheldon, and Shirley picks Brooke. Katsuji takes Casey, and Shirley takes Sylva. I think Katsuji absolutely botched this – Shirley ended up with maybe the two best chefs remaining, certainly the odds-on favorite in Brooke. Katsuji takes Tesar, which leaves Shirley with Emily. Katsuji says he doesn’t care for Tesar’s personality, but “he’s 100 times better than Emily (as a cook), that’s for sure.” I agree … but ouch. Shirley’s team will cook on the first night, and Katsuji’s on the second. Given the end result, there’s a lot of irony in this entire sequence.
* Tesar tells the team, “I like a woman in the front of the house, I’m not being sexist.” Yes, you are being sexist. That’s definitely sexist. Casey takes the role, though, because she’s comfortable with it (and probably has the best personality on the team, too). Tesar somehow talks his way into being exec chef, and then talks the team into doing a “low country” menu even though I don’t think that is any of their strengths. They’re calling it Southern Belle, which Katsuji says is the most famous strip club in South Carolina. (I guess he’s right – it is at least a famous strip club, according to my Internet.)
* Shirley’s team is going seafood-driven, which seems like something they can execute better than the other team can execute low country.
* Sylva’s would-be restaurant Maison 208 was burned down by an arsonist in September 2015. If I’m reading the court stuff correctly, the suspect, Stephen Pettiway, goes to trial on Monday.
* Now my least favorite part of Restaurant Wars – the décor stuff. I’m here for the food. I rarely if ever remember what a restaurant looked or ‘felt’ like. I remember the food.
* Emily wants to do chorizo in a squid-ink pasta dish, but Shirley and Sylva more or less command her not to do it. She’s also doing miso butterscotch and a buttermilk cake.
* I wonder if Top Chef talks to Whole Foods before each season starts and has them order huge quantities of things like fish, shellfish, pork, etc.
* Brooke says Shirley is “a little bossy but in a good way” and has the “loudest voice in the room.” You do need to be a little bossy here, though. You don’t have a lot of time and you have too much to do – much of which involves coordinating on shared dishes, or in the case of the front-of-house person, trusting the completion of your dish to someone else.
* Tesar seemed to want jumbo lump crab at the stores, but strikes out at two places, and now is using pasteurized crab meat even though he says it has an inferior texture. That feels like foreshadowing.
* Casey is making a strawberry dish – she says they’re really good this season, so what time of year is this? Their season here is June, and further south it’d be the spring. Also, she’s slicing the tops straight off; I usually use a paring knife to hull them so I don’t lose any of the red ‘meat’ of the berry near the top. I don’t think my way is really slower.
* Katsuji says at his first job he was illegal so his boss paid him less than minimum wage. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I’m going to let it pass me by.
* I hate when people call it panna coat-a. It’s cotta. Like cot, the thing you sleep on. Think about having a lotta cotta. Also, it’s not that good. Italian cuisine has so many better desserts.
* Ah yes, Kristen was eliminated in Brooke’s season of Restaurant Wars, one of the absolute worst things i’ve ever seen on this show because it felt so utterly orchestrated.
* Just once I want the front of house person to greet Padma with, “I’m sorry, I don’t have a reservation under that name.”
* Latitude (Shirley’s team) goes first. The 11MP front of house guy doesn’t love the benches. Who. Cares.
* Brooke made cured king salmon with pickled kohlrabi, marcona almonds, and “tiger” milk (come on, no one asked if she milked a tiger?). Emily’s first dish was squid ink tagliatelle with bread crumbs and shrimp butter. They love Brooke’s. Emily’s pasta isn’t great; the texture is off, her butter sauce is heavy, and there’s not a lot of shrimp flavor in it.
* Shirley made a snapper with bone broth, chile de arbol, and wild mushrooms. Sylva’s dish is pan-roasted halibut with fennel dust, tomato chutney, and mushroom rice. Tom says it would have been better if Shirley had seared and then braised the snapper. Sylva’s gets raves.
* It can’t be a coincidence that the two most attractive women on this show – maybe the two most attractive contestants in Top Chef’s history? – are in the front of house. I get that actual restaurants do this, probably because it’s effective (and sexist, but I doubt most businesses care about that), but was that actually both teams’ intent here?
* Emily’s dessert was a poppy seed buttermilk cake with miso butterscotch, pistachios, and blackberries. Shirley made a plum wine panna cotta with cherries, cashews, tarragon, and freeze-dried lychees. Emily’s was pretty good all across. Shirley’s panna cotta is terrible. It sounds like she used too much gelatin, which would make it overly firm. Customers are making terrible faces as they eat it.
* Meanwhile, the other team’s kitchen is turning into a disaster across the board, with chefs dropping food on the floor. Tesar’s already bickering with Katsuji, the start of a long run here of Tesar causing problems on his team and blaming everyone else for them.
* The judges love all the crap I don’t care about, like décor, menus, etc. Shut up and eat.
* Tesar boasts that he conceived an “amazing organizational system of tickets and expediting,” but “there are servers who just can’t get anything right.” Then he should have trained them. He seems to not know what’s happening on the tickets, really. It’s all the servers’ fault in his mind, and he’s talking down to them too. Meanwhile, judges have to wait a while before first course.
* Tesar’s first dish is this weird pimento crab dip with a sesame seed cracker, while Katsuji’s first (of three!) is a sweet potato tamale with charred chili onion relish. They only sent 3 of each dish to the table, and the plates are small. The judges hate Tesar’s and dislike Katsuji’s.
* If you hear the host(ess) say “sorry about the wait” you pretty much know which team is losing.
* Anyone else catch Padma say “Easy on the tongue” to whoever was serving her that dish?
* Katsuji’s fried green tomato and almond gravy over beef tongue was apparently very good. Sheldon’s acorn squash stew with sorghum cod and eggplant had no acidity, no texture, and weird flowers sprinkled on top.
* Casey is trying to put out the virtual fires backstage and thus not seating people. In most seasons, I think that would put her on the chopping block, right?
* Katsuji’s blackberry cobbler with Patron whipped cream is a mess – the dough isn’t cooked, and why is there tequila in the whipped cream? Casey’s one dish is a strawberry-lemon sorbet, buttermilk curd, crumbled meringue, and roasted strawberries. Padma really loves it, Tom likes it, so maybe Casey’s safe. Tom says the whole meal read not-southern to him.
* Judges’ Table: Red team (Shirley) wins, obviously. The judges are praising pretty much all of the dishes, even the ones they didn’t really like, although they seem to skip over Emily’s pasta and Padma gets in one dig at the panna cotta. The individual winner is Brooke, who had the best dish of anyone on either team, and ran the front of house well.
* And then we get the disaster team, which devolves as quickly as any losing team situation I can remember. Tom says they couldn’t recover when the system broke down, but the food was a problem too. Tom mocks the crab dip, saying he saw the recipe “back in 1970” and that it tasted like tinned fish. When asked why he only did one dish, Sheldon blames the “tension and anarchy” in the kitchen. Tesar lawyers up with a narrow admission, saying “I take responsibility for those missteps in the expediting.” They ask Katsuji why he chose not to lead. Those two knuckleheads are flat-out arguing with each other in front of the judges and Padma has to tell them “all right!” to make it stop. I think Tesar is more full of it than Katsuji here – and Katsuji actually delivered one good dish, while Tesar brought the worst dish on other team.
* In the stew room, Tesar just unloads on Katsuji for all sorts of unrelated stuff. That’s bush league.
* Padma argues to exempt Casey and everyone agrees. She says the crab dish was the worst item on either team. Katsuji did one great dish and one poor one. He ends up eliminated, essentially penalized for choosing not to take the lead role. He’s actually quite gracious to Tesar after he’s eliminated. I really think Tesar deserved it – he led poorly, and he made the worst dish of anybody.
* On the whole, though, this was a pretty good episode – more focus on the food than usual, no gimmicks, and the usual one great team and one fiasco. We saw too much of the losing team’s kitchen conflict, and I would have liked to have seen more about how the winning team’s fish dishes were made.
* Rankings: Brooke, Sylva, Sheldon, Shirley, Casey, Tesar, Emily.
The “o” sound in “cotta” is in between “coat” and “cot”, more like the vowel sound in “awe”. And don’t forget the syllable break is between the double consonants, not before or afterwards!
Eh, I’m not expecting anyone to pronounce it the way my cousins in Italy might. But COAT-a is just wrong.
I know, it’s tricky. I think the “coat” sound is a well-intentioned but poor attempt at native pronunciation, and so I agree it’s best for non-Italian speakers to cut their losses.
Like a Boston accent? ‘WHERE THE FAHK IS MY PANNAH CAUGHTA?” Like that?
This recap makes me want to re-watch the episode, as I kinda remember it the way the judges laid it out: Katsuji electing to make 3 dishes (which seemed absurd at the time) and, as a result, the exec chef role (somewhat) falling to Tesar. I was actually relieved to see the judges boot Katsuji. In part because his decisions could arguably be seen as the reason for the team failing and also because I think he’s the least pleasant, least enjoyable contestant in TC history. Maybe that’s recency bias, but his grating persona was making this season less enjoyable to watch.
I’ve got no love for either Katsuji or Tesar. Both are provocateurs, just in different ways.
I just rechecked. Katsuji says he’s going to make 2 or 3 dishes, Sheldon offers to be exec chef but isn’t very strong about it, cutaway to Casey happy about Sheldon doing that after he won his RW, then Tesar says he’ll do it.
Katsuji is fun when it’s about him but I definitely turned on him when he was picking on Emily so unpleasantly right at the beginning of the episode.
he was picking on Emily so unpleasantly right at the beginning of the episode.
Not the first time he’s gone after her, either.
Marcel and Mike Isabella are the worst for me. Isabella especially rubbed me the wrong way. I feel like fans cut him slack because he’s a good chef. He is still one of the biggest jerks in TC history for my money.
Josie.
I think Katsuji is edited to make him look worse than he is.
I remember both in this season and in Season 11, the other chefs had fairly good things to say about him. They did rightfully call him out when he stepped over the line, but I think the edited Katsuji comes across way worse than the real one may.
As for villains or jerks, in my time watching the show, Josie was by far the worst. Coupling limited (for Top Chef at least) talent with a terrible work ethic and sleaziness that destroyed her team in RW. She outright lied about prep and essentially sabotaged her team for no good reason.
Phillip from last year was probably the one that annoyed me the most.
Aaron, the one arrested for domestic violence from season 12, gets my least favorite vote. Even before the arrest was made public, I remember him being unpopular.
The judges made the right choice. Katsuji’s selfishness makes it harder for the other chef’s to succeed. He’s a poison.
Matsuri erred greatly in picking Tesar over Emily. He’s a better cook but she’s much more docile and will listen to direction from almost anyone else. Tesar is a time bomb.
And thank you to autocorrect for that bizarre name swap.
I looked fast and thought, “why is he bringing Hideki Matsui into this?”
“maybe the two most attractive contestants in Top Chef’s history? ”
Um…Janine from Season 11 should at least be considered top 2 in this regard.
Check out Janine Booth (@ChefJanineBooth): https://twitter.com/ChefJanineBooth?s=09
Ah yes. Forgot her because she was bounced so quickly that season.
1. I think they picked the right guy to boot in Katsuji. Not a fan of Tesar’s, but the passive-aggressive gamesmanship from Katsuji was so transparently designed to undermine Tesar, I was relieved they didn’t reward it by booting Tesar. Again, John is a tool and I hope he gets kicked off soon too, but he was put in an impossible position in that episode.
2. Kristen is by far the most conventionally attractive female contestant in show history. She was a former model for pete’s sake. I also think they picked the right people for front of the house this episode, looks aside. Casey is good at it and enjoys it, and was able to avoid a lot of the drama in the kitchen. And Brooke, by far the strongest chef left, is good enough to come up with a really smart dish that allowed to stay in front. I don’t think any other chef could have pulled that off.
I also think they picked the right people for front of the house this episode, looks aside.
I can’t dispute this, not given their personalities or the end results, but I was trying to ask if that was how those two women ended up doing FOH for their teams – that others (Tesar in particular) were being sexist and saying “put the pretty girl out front.”
It is remarkable that Emily has stayed on the show this long. Her dessert was the first dish that I can remember the judges liking in an elimination challenge. She also wilts under pressure quicker than I have ever seen anyone on the show.
Like Keith, I usually enjoy the episodes more when they focus on the food. However, I feel guilty for admitting that I took great glee in watching Katsuji and John’s team implode during the challenge. It was a train wreck that I just couldn’t turn away from. I was pulling for a double elimination because both guys had been such asses during the season and you’d think Tom would realize the competition would be better without the two of them. Alas, I had to settle for Katsuji alone going home, but that was satisfying enough.
Anyone else catch Katsuji mention this was his third RW? That’s because he apparently did Top Chef Mexico also, didn’t win that one either.
Katuji “portrayed” the villain on Top Chef MX as well.
I liked this edition of RW a lot, especially since we get a rare occasion where the eliminated chef is not either the FOH or Exec.
I’m somewhat surprised Tesar didn’t get booted since it was (seemingly) his odd numbering system to expedite that was a complete mess and ruined service times, along with teh fact he had the worst dish.
But I do feel they saw through Katsuji’s BS and penalized him for essentially giving John the Exec. Chef hoping he could throw him under the bus when the time comes.
As for the FOH being the attractive ladies on the team, there was obviously sexism in what John said, but they definitely made the right choices. Brooke had done it before and did it well. Casey’s personality works best on her team (Sheldon seemed a bit off, but I get the sense he may be good at it as well?).
I’ve been very up-and-down on the season, but ultimately do find we have a good set of chefs remaining (Emily aside), and I’m hopeful for the final-4 to be all fairly solid.
I think Katsuji’s fate was sealed when one of the EMP teams said, “He had a chance to be a leader or a star and he chose star.” They really hated that he made three dishes to hog the spotlight (four if you count the little roasted nut dish he wanted to put out on the tables…and then complained about for taking up prep time). Also, the passive aggressiveness was really grating.
Emily is that one chef they have every season who is near the bottom each week but someone else is just a little bit worse, so she skates by past her due date.
*team, not teams
Agreed on the EMP comments. They seemed to weigh the role question more than the quality of the food itself.
Before they announced the elimination decision, the judges asked themselves who was most responsible for the team’s downfall. I think eliminating Katsuji, who hi-jacked the menu and created Mexican-themed dishes in a southern boil concept, bit off more than he could chew, and was adversarial with the rest of the team the entire time, was certainly deserved. I also think Katsuji tried to game the process, knowing that a cook (non-exec chef/FOH) had never been eliminated during RW in the show’s history. He intentionally put Tesar in position to be eliminated, while he thought he was putting himself in line to either be the star of a good team or skate by on a bad team. I wonder if the judges saw through that and eliminated him in part because of it. Tesar definitely sucked as exec chef and could have easily been eliminated, but I’m fine with the decision.
Brooke was my favorite contestant her first season, and now I think it’s safe to say she’s my favorite in the show’s history. She’s a really fantastic chef, but she’s also a very strong team player, isn’t cocky, and has a quiet calm confidence that I really relate to and admire. I’m hoping to visit one of her restaurants next time I’m in Southern California.
Keith’s browser history this week seems more, …, interesting.
How close was Sheldon to going home? I know in front of the judges Katsuji and John tried to blame each other, but they never talked about how bad Sheldon’s dish was. Did that factor into them not talking much to Sheldon and getting his thoughts on his dish and they just focused on John and Katsuji? Sheldon also seemed to play it safe with a dish that was similar to one who cooked earlier in the competition.
Sheldon also got a free pass for skirting the exec chef role. Thought he was almost as much to blame as the other two.
Does anyone else think it’s rather silly that the person who draws the knife to pick the team is expected to be the executive chef? I realize all the chefs should be talented and confident enough to take the role, but I feel like Katsuji was eliminated more for bad luck in drawing the knife than anything. If Sheldon had drawn the knife, picked the team and then Katsuji had acted the same way, I don’t think he’d have gone home.
It does bring up one scenario that could have happened. What if Emily was a captain and picked Katsuji and John? Is there a fourth person that could have been added from the other five that would have prevented a total disaster? Maybe Brooke given her temperament, skill, and respect from the others.
And, in such a case, would that have sealed Emily’s fate?
I know that Keith can tell from looking at IP addresses (and, presumably, e-mail addresses), but just to be clear, I had nothing to do with that message. Not even sure why it appeared here, since I didn’t even comment on this thread.
Yeah, just some dumb troll.
“maybe the two most attractive contestants in Top Chef’s history?”
Whoa, I think that says more about Keith than it does Top Chef. I would never choose Casey for front of the house. While attractive, she has an icy personality. Not at all welcoming. Out of the remaining contestants, I would choose Sylva and Sheldon for front of the house positions. Attractive, great smiles and very charming. A nice intro to an enjoyable meal.
I was saying this in the context of Tesar’s “I’m not sexist” comments where he said he preferred a woman in the front of the house. Otherwise I don’t think any contestants’ looks are fair game for commentary. Although I will concede I prefer women over men.