Through three episodes of this season of Top Chef Masters, I feel like they’ve toned down some of the absurdity of the previous season, at least in terms of the challenges. The “twists” in this episode weren’t outlandish – they forced the chefs to think differently, or maybe push themselves into an area where they were less comfortable, but there was nothing this week that screamed “gimmick” to me.

* Quickfire: Use at least one of the proteins (fish and shellfish) on display … without heat. In other words, a crudo challenge. Chris jokes that Takashi, as an expert in sushi and sashim, had an advantage. The prize is $5000 plus immunity, and the chefs have just 20 minutes since they’re not cooking. The guest judge was Brian Boitano, spurring the question of what he would do.

* Love Kerry’s charity, City Harvest, which takes leftover food from restaurants to food pantries – the quantity of food we waste in this country, neither given to people who need it nor composted, is appalling.

* One thing I didn’t follow: Was the lobster raw? I have eaten raw shellfish, but I can’t say I’m crazy about it, and growing up on Long Island where pollution kept warnings about eating raw oysters in the news on a regular basis has instilled a fairly strong fear of raw shellfish in me.

* Art’s avocado soup looked disgusting, like discolored mashed potatoes, or, well, baby vomit. The color also reminded me of the appliance set my parents had in the late 1970s, with a linoleum floor to match. That ain’t comin’ back in style any time soon.

* After some initial panic, it looked like the chefs actually enjoyed this challenge; why wouldn’t they, since nearly every high-end restaurant offers some sort of raw fish preparation on its menu?

* Patricia praised Boitano as the chefs watched the judging for his intelligent commentary about their food, and I’d agree. This almost makes up for the fact that he is one of the most boring figure skaters who has ever put on blades.

* Thierry’s gooey duck … excuse me, geoduck earns demerits for a briny/salty flavor. I have no other comment than “gooey duck.”

* Boitano’s idea of awarding medals when he names the top three was a little corny, but at least he can sell a joke properly rather than beating into the ground (which Curtis threatened to do, repeatedly). Bronze went to Mark’s maine lobster with heirloom tomato salad. Silver went to Chris’ one-bite mackerel fra diavolo. Gold went to Takashi for aji sashimi with daikon and apple, a fish Brian had never tried before. Takashi’s charity is American Red Cross disaster relief, and he’s sending his winnings to their rebuilding efforts in Japan. Given how one tragedy is displaced from the headlines by the next one, I think most of us are probably guilty of forgetting how much cleanup and reconstruction remains for the areas of Japan affected by last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

(Aside: I was in Long Beach earlier this week for the very modest 4.4 earthquake that had its epicenter in Yorba Linda. I’ve been through two or three lesser earthquakes before, but you have never seen me move as I did when this one hit, from the bed to the window to see exactly how much I needed to panic.)

* Elimination challenge: Teppanyaki. The chefs seem … displeased, but really, did they expect something easy? At least they’re not cooking with their right wrists strapped to their left ankles, which was an actual challenge in season 3 and succeeded in taking out four chefs in one episode.

* Takashi has never cooked on a teppan, then says it looks easy but isn’t easy at all, so you can try to figure out how he knows it’s not easy. As it turns out, none of the nine has cooked on a teppan before. The diners include four former competitors on Top Chef Masters.

* Teams are selected at random. Chris and Art end up on the same team – and the producers pop champagne corks. Prize is $10,000.

* Thierry interrupting his grocery shopping to get an in-store massage has to be a top five all-time Top Chef moment, right? He didn’t even show a shred of remorse afterwards.

* No one knows the grill temperature, which becomes a recurring problem throughout the episode. No one uses an infrared thermometer? That’s not snark – even I own one. I feel like Alton Brown watched this and just shook his head in disgust, while explaining to his daughter how to make an infrared thermometer from a clothes hanger and a television remote.

* Oh, God, does James Oseland have no mirrors in his house? Was that a gingham necktie? Did he strangle a schoolboy and steal part of his school uniform? Seriously, you’re supposed to be a food expert. Dress the part, be the part, motherfucker.

* Krista Simmons is replaced this week by Francis Lam. Never heard of him.

* To the dishes, most of which looked really good. Mark made Scallops and bok choy and pickled mushrooms with dipping sauce. Immediately evident that didn’t challenge himself. The dish looked very simple, and the judges weren’t wowed. You know right away he’s in trouble.

* Kerry made a Korean dish, shrimp with eggplant and herb salad and gochujang sauce (made with chili and red bean paste). Ruth’s shrimp was overcooked, also a bad sign.

* Lorena: Fried rice with kaffir/orange zest infused chicken, cilantro, and a sauce of soy, guava, and orange juice. It’s very colorful, but it’s fried rice – is that likely to win anything on Top Chef? Her guava starts to burn because the center of the teppan is very hot, and no one on this team tasted their food for salt, so all three dishes were under-seasoned.

* Team two starts with Takashi, who made Calamari with okonomiyake, a savory Japanese pancake (first place I had one? Epcot), along with a sweet soy sauce. Takashi struggles with time, so Patricia jumps in to help, telling the diners “I’m not really here.” Takashi knew when preparing the batter that he had the wrong kind of flour, and the diners comment right away that the texture was off.

* Clark struggles with grill temperature as well, making lobster with orange-soy vinaigrette, a dish that spurs disagreement among the diners over how well it was cooked.

* Patricia makes kalbi in a lettuce wrap with her own gochujang. Mary Sue thought the meat needed more marinade, but in general this earned high marks, especially for her lettuce wrap, which only makes me think “P.F. Chang’s.”

* Team three: Chris is bossing Art around in the kitchen; I don’t think the editors are responsible for this. Thierry just mocks them (“Hey, girls…”), which is really all he can do, but also, he was Zen because he’d just had a massage, man.

* The interesting bit here is that this team avoided Asian flavors entirely. Art makes cheese grits cakes with two tomato-based dressings, marinated grilled shrimp, and a watermelon salad. The cakes aren’t staying together – but with polenta those messy ones can be great because they brown more, since you’ve increased the surface area. Art is also the first one to put on a real show, pouring some Jack Daniels over the shrimp and lighting it.

* Chris gets some eye-rolls from the judges for the way he browbeats Art – but I think Art played the victim a little here too. Chris’ dish is a take on clam chowder, although I don’t think I heard much about this after he said “seared pork belly in duck fat.” Skip the soup and serve that, pal. Art misplaces Chris’ mandoline and Chris loses it to the point where Thierry even seems shocked.

* Thierry makes crepes, then struggles with the hot grill and uneven temperatures across the surface. I think crepes were a good idea, but several of the chefs approached it like it was a traditional flat-top, which it’s clearly not (among other things, that would risk burning the diners). He finessed the uneven cooking with his charm, or maybe just the accent, and really I can deal with an overcooked crepe when it’s served with flambeed pears, almond cream, and pear butter.

* Judges’ table: Team three, Art/Chris/Thierry wins. They seem shocked, but they didn’t know anything about the other teams’ troubles. Winning chef is Art, making a nice comeback from last week’s fallen cake. He won points for the flambe – and $10K for Common Threads, a charity that teaches low-income kids to cook and understand nutrition. That feels like a great cause that might struggle to raise funds because it’s not sexy and its goals seem modest, even though modest goals are better because you can actually achieve them.

* Elimination: Team one, Mark/Kerry/Lorena. Lorena calls the teppan “the plancha,” which is either funny or a little playing for the judges.” Ruth says the whole team’s food was under-seasoned. Francis says Kerry’s flavors didn’t come together. Mark’s dish was indeed too safe. Lorena gets praised for working the teppan, but Ruth saw some of the food burn, and hers was also underseasoned.

* Mark goes home – dish was not ambitious, and the flavors didn’t click. He seems to understand that he took a risk by not taking a risk. Equality Maine gets a donation. The cameras keep showing Clark as Mark says his goodbyes. I’m sure he was upset, but it’s not like they broke up. They’ll be apart for what, a few days? It’s not half as tragic as the fact that they can’t legally marry. Let’s focus here.

* Final three prediction: Chris and Patricia seem way ahead of the others, at least in terms of working within the confines of the challenges. Takashi is probably the next most skilled, but the judges seem to really like Lorena’s way of utilizing Latin flavors in unexpected places, so I’ll give her the edge.

Today’s Klawchat transcript was pretty prospect-heavy. Today’s podcast has me and Dave Schoenfield talking about the Angels/Rangers game, Mike Olt, and sophomore slumps, among other topics.

* No Quickfire this week, as the entire show is built around an elimination challenge that involves catering the wedding of a couple who’ve had both tragedy – the death of the groom’s sister/maid of honor in a car accident – and horrible luck – their planned venue “disappearing” with some of their deposit. The chefs look genuinely nervous about the challenge of putting together an entire wedding menu in one day, which raises the question: With real-life consequences involved for the bride and groom, why not give the chefs more time than normal to ensure a better result?

* The bride wants a “many-tiered cake,” which made me wonder if the producers encouraged the couple to be demanding, or at least max out their demands, to the chefs. I don’t think that’s unfair at all, but if I were in that groom’s shoes, I’d probably be so thrilled that these phenomenal chefs were catering my wedding (presumably at no cost to me) I’d be saying “whatever you want to do is fine with me.”

* Some of the chefs’ stories of their own weddings were pretty funny – Chris Cosentino cooking the food for his own wedding, which probably should have had led to him being committed, or Thierry saying he had to have a croquembouche at his wedding because that’s the dish that made his wife first fall in love with him.

* You couldn’t do this challenge on regular Top Chef because it requires so much cooperation between erstwhile competitors. To their credit, there’s barely a whiff of competition either at the grocery store or in the kitchen: chefs are moving all over the place to help each other get their dishes done and plated. It was kind of amazing to see chefs at this level receiving orders barked by their peers and executing them without complaint or hesitation.

Half full cart, with most of the crab , left at seafood counter. How does that happen? Kerry doesn’t blame anyone but himself, though

* Ah, Art. After more sniping with Chris, Art is really coming off as a prima donna; Chris voices patience in the confessional shots, but in the kitchen he’s more confrontational with Art, who probably had it coming but seems to get more sour the more that Chris pushes him. Meanwhile, Curtis says Art was “gutsy” to volunteer to do the cake, while Art has to tell us fifty times that he did the cake for Lady Gaga’s birthday party.

* Speaking of Curtis, his one-off shots talking to the camera are useless. He’s not informative; he’s recapping what we just saw, but with an accent.

* After yesterday’s absurd “eat fried chicken if you don’t believe in the 14th Amendment” event, the timing of Mark’s comments about marriage equality – he and Clark have been together for 25 years, but can’t get married in Maine because heterosexual marriages would spontaneously combust from Portland to Presque Isle – couldn’t have been more perfect. Mark’s charity is Equality Maine, which campaigns for equal rights for Maine’s LGBT community.

* As for Clark, don’t move his cheese.

* Really, James? That’s the best jacket you could find for a wedding? Goodwill wouldn’t accept that blazer if you tried to donate it to them.

* The chefs provide five small dishes for the cocktail hour. Thierry makes a Filipino blood soup (I believe that’s dinuguan). Clark does barbecued duck with sirloin Szechuan sauce in lettuce with Asian herbs. Kerry, who had panicked earlier when they left one of the grocery carts at the fish counter and left him with maybe half of the crab he expected to have, does a successful corn panna cotta with crab salad and grilled okra. Patricia does a one-bite canape of pickled mackerel, young coconut, herbs, and chilies, served on a spoon; Oseland later refers to it as a “ceviche,” so the pickling may have been rapid. Takashi’s dish looked the best, with braised pork belly that was a deep amber color, served with pickled daikon and a steamed bun, like a deconstructed baozi.

* For the mains, Debbie’s green papaya salad concept degenerated into a grilled lettuce dish that James said was one of the “weirder things” he’d ever eaten. Even as Kerry was grilling the greens, you could see on his face that he thought it was bizarre, and I know of no scientific validity to her argument that grilling them “adds acidity.” I’ve grilled radicchio, which makes it taste smoky but doesn’t add acid, and, more importantly, doesn’t make the thing any less bitter.

* Mark made a sesame-coated salmon that did not cook evenly, with the judges receiving raw fish but the bride getting a perfectly cooked one. Chris does a stunning banana leaf-braised pork with bitter greens and aioli and adobo sauces. In a related story, I need to get to San Francisco.

* Dessert: Art realized early on that his icing was too soft, foreshadowing eventual disaster that required him to dismantle and reconstruct the cake, only to have it leaning when he brought it out for service. But what I didn’t get about his “inside-out pineapple upside-down cake” was why he didn’t do anything to caramelize the pineapples first – that’s the best part of a pineapple upside-down cake, isn’t it? Grill them, fry them in a little butter, whatever, just get them to a nice golden brown. Lorena’s vanilla leche flan with toasted coconut gets kind of ignored in all the brouhaha over the slouching cake.

* Judges’ table: Takashi, Patricia, and Chris (again) are on top. Patricia wins with the one bite dish, another $10K for Heifer, up to $16K total. I didn’t see any surprises here.

* Elimination: Mark, Debbie, and Art. No surprises here either. Krista just starts rubbing it in to Art, talking about how important the cake is to a bride. What compassion – Art already looked like he wanted to die before that. Otherwise, the judges aren’t really responding to the chefs’ comments, which I understand given who’s standing there, but a little back-and-forth would be fine.

* I’ve been killing James so far, but his criticism of Debbie’s dish was great. He explained very specifically what a green papaya or mango salad should have, what elements and flavors make it great, and how her reconception fell short. We need more of that from him, and less of him looking like he’d rather be home playing with 37 of his 83 cats.

* Debbie is eliminated, which fits; of the bottom three, she was the only one with a bad concept and bad execution, where the other two primarily failed to execute.

Next week’s recap will probably be a day late, as I’m headed to the Area Code Games in Long Beach and may not see the show until early Friday.

New post for Insiders today with a scouting report on Danny Hultzen. I also broke down the Zack Greinke trade on Friday.

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I’ll say up front that I greatly prefer the regular version of Top Chef to what I saw of Top Chef Masters in season three, which included some fairly absurd challenges (cooking with live bugs?) and often felt, to me, disrespectful to chefs who by and large have already achieved substantial success in the field. The higher level of professionalism on Masters also means there’s less opportunity for snark, mostly because we don’t get the same silly drama behind the scenes. That said, I just made Mary Sue Milliken’s quinoa fritters again last night, so I’m going to watch this season of Masters if only because I’m hoping to learn something new.

As for the chefs … I don’t think I’ve eaten at any of their restaurants, although I’m familiar with Chris Cosentino and am dying to get to one of his places – I just haven’t been in San Francisco proper in five years. Cosentino does have a stand in LA’s new Umamicatessan, called PIGG, and I’m sure you can figure out what they serve.

To the episode:

* Quickfire: The blackjack setup, where two-chef teams were each dealt two ingredient cards and had to incorporate both into a single dish, was cheesy and took up way too much time. They should have let chefs double down, taking a third ingredient for double the prize money.

* Speaking of those ingredients … bologna? That’s back to disrespecting the chefs. There were eleven ingredients that would all have fit well on a haute cuisine menu, and then there was O-s-c-a-r. Also, I haven’t eaten bologna in thirty years. It’s what I imagine human flesh might taste like.

* Dry aged beef and whole catfish seems like the most challenging combination – the chefs have to work with two proteins, each of which should be the star of the dish, and as it turns out they have to break the fish down in the allotted time of 15 minutes.

* Clark Frasier complains that quinoa doesn’t go with langoustine. Quinoa goes with just about everything – it has little taste of its own but takes dressings, sauces, and aromatics really well. His team’s dish ends up a mess, looking like someone spat the candied/popped quinoa on the langoustine.

* Duck breast and peaches seemed like the best combo of ingredients – fruit sauces, chutneys, and gastriques all work so well with duck – but lost to the beef and catfish. We shouldn’t be shocked that Cosentino would be good with proteins, I suppose.

* Random thought: Do chefs like these worry that the editing will make them look like doofuses? We get complaints from chefs in just about every season that the editing required to squeeze the two challenges into 44 minutes often makes them look bad (or dumb, or mean), so does that also apply to these chefs? We already have Art Smith carping about Cosentino’s youth and inexperience, which I found incredibly catty – who cares how old a chef is if he can really cook? Does your food somehow taste better if you’re on the far side of 40? And does Art not remember the cocky-as-all-hell Michael Voltaggio?

* Elimination challenge: As twists go, these individual lottery tickets, with small awards or penalties (like losing 30 minutes of cooking time) are pretty harmless, nowhere near as bad as the team-wide tickets.

* Missy Robbins cut a deep cash into one of her little fingers on a mandolin and ends up leaving the show; she needed a skin graft and couldn’t wield a knife for one or two months.

* I love Thierry Rautureau discussing the BOOfay. Speaking of Thierry, he’s back for a second go-round; he appeared on season 2 of Masters under the previous format, where he failed to advance beyond the preliminary round.

* Art: “I cook for billionaires.” Does he have “Chef to the 1%” T-shirts for sale?

* The twists from those gold team-wide tickets: Each of the two teams’ assigned cuisines – one Mexican, one Indian – is revealed after their initial shopping trip. Team Mexican sends Art, who looked about as lost in the supermarket as I’d be in an auto-parts store, on the initial trip, while Team Indian chooses to make do with what they’ve got.

* The dishes … Patricia’s cornmeal pancake with chicken and beef adobo and peach and corn salsa sounded phenomenal; I wasn’t clear whether this was her concept, or her execution of Missy’s concept.

* Lorena’s ceviche ‘tigre de leche’ got mushy because she made it too soon. It amazes me that chefs at this level can make fundamental errors like that – is it the time pressure? I can’t imagine it’s the food knowledge. Anyway, Lorena’s probably the one chef you all know, because you see her face every time you drive by a Taco Bell.

* Clark’s dish – green beans with fried shallots and goat cheese – looked about as Indian as pasta alla carbonara, which, for a challenge in which his team was required to cook an Indian-themed buffet. Excuse me, BOO-fay. Team India scuffled almost across the board; Mark’s curried corn soup with curried flatbread was bland, and the judges made the filling in Takashi shrimp and salmon dumpling sound like spam mousse. The one dish that sounded most appealing here was Thierry’s masala salmon and beef shoulder with spiced mango couscous and lemon-peanut chutney, but that’s also not terribly Indian. (Unfortunately, the recipe omits the couscous, which was much more interesting to me than the proteins.)

* Judges’ table: Unfortunately, the insufferable James Oseland is back at judges’ table; he’s incredibly nitpicky, and even when he says he likes something he looks like someone just slipped a moldy onion under his nose. When your comments on dishes from chefs at this level are so skewed toward the negative, I have to seriously question your palate or your intent. And overall, I think the judges are much less insightful and entertaining than Tom, Hugh, Padma, and Gail. I understand the reluctance to lay into any of the chefs, given their resumes, but I also think the judges are so reserved that they fail to inform us enough about the dishes.

* Chris wins again for his “pork and beans” with pork belly, chorizo, and chickpeas, earning tepid applause from teammates Art and Kerry. That’s now $16K raised for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

* Team Indian gets scolded for missing the target by a subcontinent or two. Seems like they lost because they didn’t shop again or change their dishes enough, so apparently it’s better to send the village idiot back to the store than to send no one at all. Chef Sue Torres of Sueños in Manhattan is sent home for essentially having to cook a cuisine she wasn’t prepared to cook, having shopped for a Mexican dish and failed to adjust it enough after the challenge changed. That’s not a good way to send a lower-case top chef home, is it? I’m hoping future challenges push these chefs to be more innovative, not to leap over more obstacles.

* Final three prediction: I agree with Missy that Chris looks like the favorite. Thierry and Patricia (who did a dish and a half in the elimination challenge, and earned plaudits for both) also seemed strong, although to be fair I don’t think anyone stood out the way that Chris did.

Last night’s Top Chef season finale answered the question: is Paul the ’27 Yankees or the ’07 Patriots?

* Sarah begins by talking about momentum; is there really a “hot hand” in the kitchen? Maybe if you grab a pan preheated to 500 degrees without using an oven mitt. Not that I’ve ever done that.

* Meanwhile, Paul is clearly full of nervous energy once he learns he’s in the finale. Either that or he was mainlining Red Bull in between takes.

* Challenge: Hey, we’re cooking! Create a four-course menu in the restaurant of your dreams. No gimmicks beyond the selection of sous-chefs, which is done by having a selection of eliminated chefs plus two renowned chefs, Barbara Lynch and Marco Canora, each prepare a single dish for Paul and Sarah to taste; those two then select the dishes they liked and get the chefs who made them. I have no problem with this except that having the two expert chefs compete seemed a little silly.

* The group even includes a few of the chefs who were eliminated before reaching the final 16, among them the infamous butcher Tyler Stone, who has to be here just for the comedy potential; and Ashley Villaluz, who I remember because she’s really cute, even in those thick-framed eyeglasses. (Or, especially in those thick-framed eyeglasses.)

* Paul chooses first … and gets Barbara Lynch with the first pick. Hugh says this “is like getting Albert Pujols for a tee ball game.” I need Hugh to be a permanent addition to the Judges’ Table. Paul also gets Malibu Chris, who did an Asian-inspired dish to try to get Paul to choose him (bromance alert!), Ty-Lor, and Keith.

* Sarah gets Nyesha and immediately pigeonholes her (or says she will) as her saucier. Nyesha’s fierce, a shoo-in if they do another All-Stars show in a few years, and this feels like taking your best hitter and asking him to drop a bunt in the two-hole. Sarah tries to pick Heather by taking a dish that’s on Heather’s restaurant’s menu (good logic) but instead gets Tyler and then insults him in front of everyone. She ends up with Heather anyway as well as Grayson, so the team is pretty strong outside of Butcherboy.

* Marco doesn’t get picked. That’s got to hurt. Some head-hanging as he, Ashley, and the other guy whose name I can’t remember slink off.

* Meanwhile, I can’t decide if the editors just tried to make Tyler look bad, or if he did it all by himself. Asking your chef a ton of questions to make sure you’re not screwing something up doesn’t bother me – remember Restaurant Wars, Sarah? – but pushing the sous vide technique when Sarah said she’s not comfortable doing something for the first time in the finale or just flat-out disobeying her instructions is really out of line, and I don’t think you can edit that stuff in.

* But I do think the editors tweaked some of the footage of Barbara Lynch to make her look a little pushy in the early going. Later footage shows her very team-focused in the kitchen, and by the end, she was all praise for Paul, even saying “working with Paul is amazing” and she’s very “proud to have this opportunity.” How does Paul hear this stuff and still have no ego?

* The chefs shop at Granville Market, which is awesome. Every city should have something like that.

* Sarah, on managing Tyler: “(I’m) ‘trying to make Tyler feel like I actually give a shit.” Again, the red light means THE CAMERA IS ON.

* Contrast Tyler’s style to one clip we see of Ty-Lor asking Paul for a quick demo on preparing the radishes. Professional and fast. Could be editing, but in this case, I doubt it.

* They spelled Keith wrong (“Kieth”) on the assignment board. It’s a five-letter, one-syllable name people. And it’s not that uncommon: Keith Hernandez. Keith Sweat. Keith Richards. Keith Moon. Keith Urban. Maybe I was supposed to be a musician.

* First big hiccup for either chef comes when the crab for Paul’s first dish develops an off flavor overnight. Keith says the “crab sat overnight,” but where? On the counter? In the fridge but unwrapped? There’s a mistake in there that we never hear about. Paul was prepared with a backup plan, having bought spot prawns he wasn’t otherwise using, which is impressive. (Also good: Canadian wild-caught spot prawns are an environmentally-friendly shellfish option, as populations are abundant and traps do minimal damage to the habitats.)

* To the food: Paul leads with a chawanmushi with those spot prawns; the first group raves, but the second batch is all overcooked and is easily the worst dish either chef served. Second dish is grilled sea bass (loup de mer, which I think is really branzino) with clam dashi and pickled radishes, earning raves for aesthetics and depth of flavor; Tom says it’s “hard to fault this,” so I guess he’s in a good mood here. Third dish is a congee with eggs, uni, fried kale, and smoked albacore; Tom says not as interesting as other courses, Cat loves fish says it doesn’t fit, but it seems to have worked on a more subtle level, with Bill Terlato apparently saying it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. (I can’t take Cat Cora seriously as a judge. Is she really on par with the other chefs who appear on this show? She’s just here to promote her new Bravo program, right?) Dessert is coconut ice cream (frozen with liquid nitrogen!) with puffed rice, candied kumquats, mangosteen, Thai chili foam, and jasmine gelee; it’s a beautiful dish, and the judges were pleasantly surprised by the heat in the foam, with Tom saying Paul “really knocked it out of the park” but Hugh quibbling with the texture (too hard) of the puffed rice. Outside of the custard fiasco for group two, it sounds like Paul nailed it the rest of the way.

* Sarah starts very strongly with a squid-ink tagliatelle with dashi, coconut, and raw spot prawn dish that may have been the best-reviewed dish of the night. She follows with a rye-crusted steelhead with caramelized fennel sauce and pickled beets; judges love the fish, but she didn’t cook the beets at all (rookie error? Don’t you at least heat the acid and blanch the beets?) and there was probably too much fennel; there’s some irony here, as Butcher Boy was pushing her to sous vide the beets. That dish caused some legitimate drama when her fiance found a pinbone in his fish, but Sarah went into crisis mode and checked all dishes still in the kitchen to remove any stray bones. (I’ve still never found a great way to remove them without damaging the flesh – needlenose pliers are the best option, but I usually end up tearing some of the surrounding fish.) The fish was well-cooked and even Bev said she liked the crust.

* Her third course was veal cheeks and sweetbreads with polenta and persimmon sauce that looked, um, “rustic” on the plate, and was probably her worst dish, with every component but the cheeks getting criticism somewhere, particularly the texture of the polenta, which she then blended to smooth out for the second seating. Hugh also thought the sweetbreads were overcooked. I love persimmons, and could see a persimmon sauce with a rich meat like veal cheek or sweetbread being outstanding, but pairing that with polenta (which I’ve never seen without some kind of cheese as a binder) sounds like an off-note in my head. But the hazelut cake with roasted white chocolate ganache was a home run, particularly the ganache. Padma – I knew I liked this woman for some reason, aside from her stunning good looks that is – looks at Sarah and says with distaste dripping from the corners of her mouth, “I hate white chocolate.” (I do too. It’s not even actually chocolate.) But Sarah roasts it in a low oven for a half-hour to start to caramelize all that sugar, prompting one judge to say that she “turned it into caramel.” The dish was really striking on the plate as well. I confess that I’d rather have this precise dish with an almond cake instead of hazelnuts, but hazelnuts have always been my least favorite nut – there’s a specific chemical in there that, as often as I’ve had them, I just can’t get used to, and it triggers a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. This sucks, as it ruins Nutella for me.

* Before I get to the results, two interesting notes. Paul refuses to blame Keith for the problems with the chawanmushi: He won’t blame Keith in the kitchen, in the confessional, or at Judges’ Table. This is how you lead.

* Also, I think the producers, for once, undersold a dramatic element – Paul’s father breaking down when he sees his son in the finals. We hear from a lot of chefs on this show that their parents questioned their career choices and often weren’t proud of their chef sons/daughters, so winning this show would be some sort of redemption. (I’ll leave the question of whether pride earned in this way is really that valuable to a therapist.) It came up with Paul and Bev this year, at least, but we didn’t get much follow-up here in the one instance where the chef and the formerly disapproving parent were reunited on camera.

* Judges’ Table: Judging appears to be close to a dead heat, with Tom saying it was the best food ever in a finale, something he reiterated in his by-the-numbers blog entry. But he said what I thought they were trying to say on the show, something that was edited down to maintain suspense: Paul’s menu was more ambitious and showed greater dexterity in managing and manipulating flavors and textures, right down to the less beautiful but more thrilling dessert. And Paul, the Chef of Destiny from pretty much the first episode, is Top Chef. I am pleased. But I’d still gladly eat at Spiaggia, Sarah’s restaurant. (And, for what it’s worth, I think Emeril would have picked Sarah.)

* And that wraps a very up-and-down season of Top Chef, but one that finished with two really strong challenges that returned the focus of the show to the food. The best chef won, and the gimmicks gave us lots to snark about. I can’t complain too much.

* I started these recaps as a lark because the one blogger whose recaps I was reading just missed the mark for me, and I had too many stray thoughts I wanted to write down as I watched. It turned into a pretty popular feature here – I’ve had scouts, agents, and even a player’s father comment on them when I’ve been out at games – and led to a great personal thrill, writing for the official Top Chef site on Bravotv.com. Thank you all for reading and commenting. I’ll pick it up again whenever Top Chef returns.

This week, no gondolas, no ice blocks, no skiing, just one small gimmick and a lot of actual cooking.

* Sarah is going to get killed again for her comments in the confessionals, and some of that criticism is justified. Saying “this is how it was supposed to be” in reference to these three chefs in the finals is all kinds of wrong – Paul, sure, but I’m of the opinion that Edward was probably one of the three best chefs on the show this season, and that Nyesha was wronged with her early elimination. Winning the World Series doesn’t make you the best team, but it makes you the champions. Getting to the Top Chef final three doesn’t make you one of the three best chefs on the show, but it makes you a finalist. I just can’t buy some kind of predestination aspect to the show, or the idea that this proves that these chefs were the best.

* Then Sarah says of the Quickfire challenge, “Asian food is not my forte, thank god Beverly went home because she would have nailed it.” The red light means the camera’s on, Sarah.

* Quickfire challenge: Cooking with one of three Top Chef Masters contestants (including last season’s winner, Floyd Cardoz), make an Asian influenced dish – but you can’t talk to your teammate, and must trade off in the kitchen every ten minutes, with the experienced chef taking shifts one and three and the current contestants taking shifts two and four. That means the experienced chefs do the concept and most of the mise en place, leaving the contestants wasting time trying to figure out what the big idea was and what’s already been done. Wouldn’t one sentence, or ten seconds of talking, have made this a much more reasonable test of the contestants’ cooking skills rather than their powers of deduction?

* I was surprised to see how easygoing the experienced chefs were – we knew Floyd was like that, but Anita Lo and Takashi Yagihashi were also pretty low-key; other than having strong concepts and hoping their teammates would continue those visions, they seemed to have no qualms about playing second fiddle.

* Paul ends up making a sashimi with mirugai (giant clam) with a yuzu dashi sauce, fried white fish, cucumber, scallions … but adds too much Thai chili at the last moment and blows the dish. I got the strong sense he would have won the challenge (and the $20,000 prize) otherwise. “Ashamed Paul Qui” sounds like a meme waiting to happen.

(Side note: My wife thinks Austin Scarlett of Project Runway deserves his own meme, along the lines of “MEANWHILE … IN JAPAN.” If you’ve seen him on camera, you probably understand.)

* Lindsay probably had the toughest challenge, with Anita coming up with a “scallops three ways” dish that was nowhere near evident to Lindsay after the first switch. The concept was great – reflect three different Asian cuisines on one plate – but it seemed like Anita chose a concept that would work for one chef working start to finish, not for a challenge with three blind handoffs. Lindsay only does two of the three intended ways, and her Chinese sausage overpowers the delicate flavors of the scallop.

* Floyd makes a curry, but Sarah says she’s not comfortable with curry. These two worked together better than the other pairs – it looked like Floyd focused on the curry itself while Sarah went after the proteins, crab and a rice flour-dredged cod. Emeril thought their dish needed more acid, but Padma loved the amaranth greens, which apparently grow quite well in warm climates and reach harvest size in 30 days, so I need to track down some seeds. Anyway, Sarah wins, giving Floyd the quickfire win that escaped him during his Top Chef Masters run (even though he won the whole season).

* Elimination challenge: For 150 guests at a “fire and ice” cocktail party, each chef must make one dish and one cocktail, and the dish must contain at least one hot and one cold element. They do get bartenders to assemble the drinks, so the chefs only have to make sure the elements are ready.

* These chefs are so damn collegial in the kitchen it almost made me want Heather back. Almost.

* Sarah goes with a baked cannelloni, made from scratch (which she says is crazy, but really, that’s the kind of thing you have to do to win on this show), with a spiced sformato (a thick Italian custard) that’s frozen on an “anti-griddle” so it will melt and form a cold sauce over the warm pasta. Her cocktail contains gin, kumquats, and mango, which sounds great if you’re sitting on a Caribbean beach but doesn’t really sound like it works with pasta.

* By the way, is an anti-griddle powered by anti-matter? If an anti-griddle hits a griddle, will the universe collapse upon itself? I heard “anti-griddle” and felt like Lady Violet did when Downton got its first telephone. Hugh Acheson said in his blog post that no one touched the anti-griddle during his time on Top Chef Masters, and Sarah nearly cost herself a spot in the finals because the machine over-froze her sformato.

* Paul makes a lobster stock, tearing claws off lobsters before killing them – I hear he also likes to twist the heads off live puppies, just for practice – using it as the base for a very elaborate dish with king crab, lemon ‘snow,’ and a Pan Am cocktail with kaffir lime, palm sugar, and rum.

* Lindsay, who says she’d pull a Ronnie Lott if she sliced her finger off while cooking today, goes with a halibut over a “fiery” celery root remoulade, tomato broth, tomato ice, and raw kale. I’m not sure if the kale was supposed to be raw, but I find raw kale totally inedible. Steam it, wilt it, saute it with cured pork, bake it, whatever, it’s all good, but raw kale has a very fibrous texture that I find really unpleasant.

* Judges’ table: Sarah gets dinged for the frozen mousse, and for the cocktail not working with the dish. The judges love her pasta, the cocktail on its own, and her overall ambition. Paul had some temperature issues, and Tom goes on about the arugula garnish, although I thought Paul’s comment (he wanted the fresh, peppery flavor) made sense, at least from a concept standpoint. Otherwise, he seemed to nail his dish in every way, yet again. Lindsay cooks her fish perfectly, but the raw kale costs her points and the dish overall was kind of boring (mostly per Tom).

* Tom tweeted right after the show about the arugula comments:

Arugulais what happens when you really don’t have anything negative to say

— Tom Colicchio (@tomcolicchio) February 23, 2012

* Paul wins the challenge, Lindsay goes home. It fits the general theme of Top Chef: You win for ambition, and you lose for failures in execution. Lindsay didn’t execute all that well (the raw kale, the supporting ingredients overpowering the flavor of the fish), and she showed the least ambition. Sarah failed to execute one major element, but her dish was much more ambitious than Lindsay’s.

* Sarah’s parting comment, that she knew it would be her versus Paul in the finals, will probably get even more criticism than her opening shots, but this one I understand: If you’re going through this competition, you envision yourself in the finals, and in this case, how could she envision herself facing anyone but Paul? Perhaps it’s not something you say on camera, but it is entirely logical to think that way.

* So, ignoring the fact that this challenge already happened several weeks ago, how dominant a favorite would Paul be against Sarah in the finals? It takes so little to cost a chef a challenge at this late stage that I hate to say he’s more than a 60/40 favorite, even though he’s owned most of this season.

If you’re here, you probably saw my guest post on Bravo’s site ranking the final four chefs, with the usual dose of sarcasm along with the analysis. If you’re new to the dish because of that post, welcome! I also chatted with our internal PR folks about how the Top Chef opportunity came to pass.

Top Chef: Texas goes to Vancouver … I would poke more fun at the show’s geographical confusion, but Vancouver is awesome, especially for food, so I’ll let it slide.

* No Quickfire this week, just three “events,” with the winner of each event going on to the final three (turns out we have two more episodes, not just one), and the one chef who doesn’t win any of the three events going home. I like this format – the playing field is even, and you actually have to be the best in something to move on.

* That said, some of the hoops involved in the events before the chefs could really start cooking were absurd. The first one gives the chefs 22 minutes to cook a meal on induction burners in a moving ski gondola, which poses no end of problems for the chefs. Paul mentions getting motion-sick; Lindsay points out that they’re cooking at altitude (so the air pressure is lower and water boils at a lower temperature) and that the burners aren’t perfectly level. There are a ton of ingredients, including a lot of proteins, but Bev makes it sound like there isn’t much hardware available. At the midpoint, each chef must jump out of the gondola as it makes its turn, choose another ingredient from a small and weird set available on a table at the station, jump back into the gondola, and incorporate the new ingredient into the final dish. This is slightly bonkers, yet less bonkers than what comes later.

* The guest judges here are all former Olympic athletes, nobody with any food expertise, and none of them was even half as prepared as Charlize Theron. I need to get my agent on this, stat.

* Bev chooses to go with a raw dish, a salmon tartare; cold dishes can win on Top Chef, but I think the judges look askance at raw dishes, something not helped by Bev almost apologizing for serving something raw. The judges despise weakness. Anyway, Bev does get points for her horseradish-anchovy crème fraiche and for mixing textures with the raw fish and crispy capers and panko bread crumbs.

* Paul can’t get the lamb to brown, so he calls an audible, debones it, breaks it down further, and sears again to try to cook it through. This has to be an induction-burner issue – I’ve never used them, but I imagine it’s a big shift from a gas flame to induction. I’m assuming next week’s elimination challenge will involve giving each chef a book of matches and an axe and sending them into the forest to cook. Paul’s lamb is underseasoned, although Gail liked his curried enoki mushrooms. He certainly had a ton of elements with a wasabi crème fraiche and juniper gastrique as well, but if the protein isn’t good, you don’t win, and Paul was on the bottom.

* Sarah was pretty strong start to finish in this episode, and she proved me wrong by getting out of the regional Italian cuisine box with everything she cooked. In the gondola, she cooked chorizo with caramelized onions, deglazed with prune juice (her extra ingredient), gooseberries (for acid – they are a complete pain in the ass to cook with too), pickled mushrooms, and almonds, with a pancetta crème fraiche underneath the sausage (the one element here that sounded weird to me – the dairy might cut the heat if the chorizo was spicy, but that’s another tart element on top of 2-3 others). The gondola is cold enough to freeze ingredients/elements that aren’t on the burners. The judges’ only criticism was that the prune juice didn’t come through in the final dish, although she finished third.

* Lindsay panics that she didn’t cook enough salmon, so she cuts it in half and serves smaller portions, which the judges don’t notice. She seems to be increasingly prone to these mental miscalculations, or at least the editing is making it look that way. The creamy red quinoa ‘risotto’ with chorizo (recipe here, although I think the red farro should be red quinoa) sounds amazing, definitely something I’ll make at home, and she served that under the salmon and topped it with a horseradish vinaigrette. Lindsay wins with much praise for the quinoa and the perfectly-cooked salmon, although the judges say no one really screwed up. I think the final decision for Lindsay over Bev was hot over cold. I love a good salmon tartare, but Bev skipped the biggest challenge in the gondola – working with the burners.

* Second event: Free your ingredients from ice-block prisons (Michelangelo-approved?) and thaw them before cooking. Psycho jokes abound, which is too bad as Hitchcock made at least a half-dozen better movies, as the chefs attack the blocks with ice picks. No one gets stabbed, although if Marcel was on this season he might have wanted to keep his distance from the others. Meanwhile, Paul wins the Lady Byng Trophy for helping Sarah and Bev break apart their chosen blocks. Did anyone try slamming one ice block against another just to break them down into more managable chunks? Moral of the story: Next year’s chefs should pack blowtorches.

* Sarah goes with vegetables because they’ll thaw as they cook (good thinking), but her pea and spinach soup with turmeric and cream separates as she cooks it, and it seems like she couldn’t re-emulsify it with the hand blender.

* Beverly uses ice or snow to make up for the lack of liquid ingredients available to them, which I thought was pretty clever as long as the snow she chose was, um, white. Anyway, her seared scallops with a red wine-citrus reduction over couscous earned pretty high marks; Gail thought the sauce was heavy but Padma praised her for the rare Top Chef couscous success. Is couscous really that hard to cook? Maybe I haven’t been doing it right.

* Paul gets the prime ingredient, the king crab – maybe he felt guilty about this, so he helped the ladies afterwards – and poaches it (in what? I missed that), serving it with toasted almonds, mango chutney, and sliced brown butter. He wins. I think Bev was ahead of Sarah, not that it matters.

* Third challenge has Bev versus Sarah. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

* “Oh my God, she has a gun.” Third challenge involves humiliating the two remaining chefs by forcing them to do a mini-biathlon, cross-country skiing and then shooting targets to earn their ingredients. This really had zero value other than to make them look like klutzes – and I will confess right now I would have fared no better – but in the end, they both had plenty of ingredients, and the judging really came down to who did the better job in the kitchen, not who was more successful at the nonsense parts of the challenge.

* My wife asked a pretty good question – what if either chef had hurt herself while skiing? The two chefs did collide, but I think it was because Beverly was going the wrong way. I have no idea how that happens.

* Bev chooses to slow-roast her Arctic char, while Sarah braises her rabbit leg, both big risks given the time limitations, but risks tend to win on Top Chef, especially late in the season.

* Bev is looking for coconut milk and lemongrass, but finds none in the kitchen. Are we seeing – dare I say it – a little pantry bias here? Hide the kittens!

* Sarah mentioned roasting the rabbit loin, but I think her final dish was just the braised leg with sliced rabbit heart, cherries, hazelnuts, and a “kraut puree” of cabbage. I put Sarah at the bottom of my rankings for Bravo’s site because everything she’s cooked seemed to sit in a narrow range of regional Italian cooking, but this was outside of that box – she called it German, my first thought before she said that was Austrian, but either way we’re not in Lazio any more.

* Beverly’s char had a celery root/truffle sauce, an onion/beet compote, and shaved fennel. Gail praised Bev for taking a risk by putting strong, earthy flavors (more suited to game, perhaps) with the fish, but Tom felt the char disappeared because it was underseasoned. Obviously, I didn’t taste the finished product, but thinking through all of those flavors, I’m finding it hard to see how the char would stand up to the truffles, the onions, and the pronounced anise flavor of the fennel.

* Sarah wins, and given the judges’ comments it made perfect sense. Her elements worked together better than Beverly’s did. I’m pretty sure Padma was crying when Bev did her “thanks for the opportunity” soliloquy. I think becoming a mom has made her into a softie.

* Bottom line on this episode is that no one really screwed anything up, and despite some absurd conditions, the best food seemed to win each time. We didn’t have many bad decisions, and there was virtually no drama outside of the heavily-edited scenes from the car at the top of the episode. I’d really like to see the final two episodes just focus on the cooking, given who’s left and what’s at stake. No more hoops till next season, please.

The top 100 is up. Here’s the first part of the list (it’s spread over four pages), the top ten prospects for each organization, and ten eleven prospects who just missed.

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Fortunately, this week’s episode of Top Chef did not include any has-been comedians, just real cooking for some pretty elite guests.

* Last Chance Kitchen winner: It’s Bev! You knew it would be Bev. I’m sure her food was great, but forgive me my suspicion of anything that reeks of narrative. Sarah is still hepped up on bitchy pills, ripping Bev for being “off in Bevland” and saying she doesn’t want a ticket there. Apparently the food in Bevland is pretty good, Sarah. You might want to check it out if you ever get your head out of Italy.

* Quickfire: blindfolded pantry raid. Goofy, but certainly the idea that you should be able to identify ingredients by touch and smell has merit. Winner gets a choice between a new Prius or a guaranteed spot in the finals. This seems weak to me – you get to the finals by winning a quickfire?

* The footage of the chefs groping around the kitchen while blindfolded wasn’t all that entertaining, although Tom had an evil laugh going. There’s food on the floor and shellfish loose in the fridge. Cleanup on aisle artificial drama.

* Bev accidentally gets avocado, but she’s making fish, which is a pretty natural pairing. I felt like she could have won this thing if she’d cooked her fish through, but I think Tom feels about fish the way I do – if it’s not actually being served raw, it needs to be cooked to at least medium-rare. The shot of Bev running across the kitchen with the fish in one hand and her ten-inch chef’s knife in the other, tip pointed out, was terrifying. Her food may be great, but I wouldn’t want to share a kitchen with her.

* Ed gets pork casings instead of pancetta but makes lemonade, figuratively, by using the casings (pig intestinal linings, high in connective tissue) to make a broth for his soup. That’s the kind of cleverness the show should be rewarding, in my didn’t-taste-the-food opinion.

* Paul’s shrimp is also a touch undercooked. I don’t like raw shrimp, and I think undercooked shrimp has a really weird, unpleasant texture, so I could understand Tom’s immediate, negative reaction to the dish. Do you ever wonder (as I do) if the judges subconsciously hold Paul to a higher standard, because he’s so far ahead of the group?

* Lindsay makes fish with bulgur wheat at charred greens on top, putting her right in the middle of the group.

* Sarah makes corn soup with roasted mushrooms and peaches. Tom loved it, and she should get points for a non-obvious flavor combo, although nothing there was as clever as Ed’s broth. She wins, which I think is her first Quickfire win, and takes the guaranteed spot in the final four, which Ed labels a lack of confidence. I would have called it lazy, but your mileage may vary. And does anyone doubt that Sarah’s motormouth would have been in fourth gear, ready to run over any other chef who made that same choice? (Hat tip to my wife for raising that last point.)

* Elimination challenge: make a dish to impress your mentor. At least two of these mentors have been on before as judges or as Top Chef Masters. Waterworks commence immediately. Tito, give me some tissue.

* Ed can’t get fresh oysters so he chooses canned smoked oysters instead. Chefs on this show often pick ingredients they should know you can’t always get at whole foods, and never seem to remember how often a chef has been sent home for using one substandard ingredient, whether it’s canned or precooked or just not top-quality. Everyone loves his pickles and crisped pork belly skin, though.

* Lindsay makes errors of self-doubt by overloading a Mediterranean fish dish with a cream sauce and some dried herbs that she probably added too late for them to hydrate and mellow. You don’t get a lot of cream in Mediterranean fish plates because the regions where fish is central to the cuisine have typically had less cattle husbandry.

* Beverly takes a huge risk by cooking to order in the wok for eight people, making gulf shrimp and BBQ pork Singapore noodles. That’s a sensible risk given the history of the show, though – there’s substantial upside in showing you have a skill most others don’t, and can organize yourself to the point where you can pull this kind of fast, last-minute cooking off successfully.

* Paul takes a bigger risk by serving a cold sunchoke and dashi soup that’s assembled tableside with what was apparently a very delicate balance of seasonings across all of his ingredients. (Before Paul, when was the last time someone won an elimination challenge with a chilled/cold dish?) Hugh hasn’t blogged yet this week, but Gail wrote that it was the best Top Chef dish she’d ever had, and that the decision here wasn’t particularly close.

* Judges’ table: I told you who won. He and Bev move on, only to go to the stew room where Sarah gives Paul a big hug and Bev the finger. Paul showed wisdom in knowing when to stop adding ingredients or flavors. Comments like that from judges make me think Paul would succeed in any season, not just in this weak crop.

* No mentors at JT, just Tom, Padma, Hugh, and Gail. Gail loves everything but the smoked oyster sauce, and can’t explain why. Hugh points out that Ed had a great dish under there and buried it with one bad choice. Tom gets all double-u-tee-eff on Ed for using canned oysters. Hugh has the money line, of course: “you need to go to the store and see what’s great in the market and cook from there.” Everyone should cook like that.

* Ed is eliminated and says he was knocked out by Beverly. Uh, no. You were knocked out by a canned oyster. But I’ll still try your braised brisket with bourbon-peach glaze recipe from the latest issue of Bon Appetit.

* Final three: Paul and Lindsay are still standing, and I will take Bev over Sarah.

Recapping the worst episode of Top Chef I’ve ever seen…

* First order of business is to discuss the guest judge this week, Pee Wee Herman. I was too old for his original kids’ show, and never quite got the hipster-chic of it. I really don’t care about the public-indecency arrest, nor do I think it’s germane to a discussion of his appearance on this show. The real problem with Pee Wee Herman is that the character isn’t funny – and an unfunny guest judge who spurs the other judges to try (and fail) to be funny creates a very awkward show that, for me, was unpleasant to watch even before we got to the elimination-challenge foolishness.

* Quickfire: Twenty minutes to make pancakes. I love this challenge, because pancakes are such a classic dish, very American, often badly done, like lead in the stomach, tasting just of buttermilk or of the artificially-flavored syrup in which they are drowned. A pancake is one of the quickest of quickbreads, and while I prefer waffles – better surface/interior ratio, so you get more browning and more crunch – I like the way this gave chefs a blank canvas.

* Was it just the editing, or were most of the chefs just eyeballing their batter? I’m obsessed about measuring ingredients for doughs or batters of any sort, usually with a scale.

* The ricotta pancake thing, for me, is a little played out, and two chefs employed it – lemon-ricotta from Lindsay, ricotta-buttermilk from Grayson (who used chiffonade of basil in her fruit topping, which I love, as it has a surprisingly sweet flavor). Ricotta does produce a really light, fluffy end product though, including the zeppole at Via Napoli in Epcot, so maybe I’m criticizing a trend that is more of a new technique. But we didn’t get a lot of unusual flours, which surprised me because it seems like an easy way to change flavors and textures.

* Probably worth pointing out how incredibly forced the laughter from the chefs was during this entire episode. Grayson at least seemed to have some nostalgia for Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but that was it. Herman’s “the best pancakes I’ve ever had” gag was lame – anyone who didn’t see that coming shouldn’t be allowed to drive.

* Ed wins by going Jackson Pollock with the batter so he serves mostly the crispy edges of pancakes without the doughy interiors. This reminded me of a customer-from-hell incident my wife and I witnessed in a Cracker Barrel in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1998 (a story I may have told before, so bear with me). The burly guy in the next booth, dining alone, orders the pancakes “extra crispy,” and right before the waitress leaves to put in the order, shouts, “did I emphasize crispy?” So, in a development as obvious as a Pee-Wee Herman gag, the guys sends back multiple plates of pancakes because they’re “not crispy enough.” To this day I really have no idea what a crispy pancake would look like or whether that clown ever got what he wanted, or what he deserved for treating the server the way he did.

* Elimination challenge: This was a new low for Top Chef, surpassing the previous low, set when Pee Wee Herman walked into the kitchen at the start of the episode. The chefs had to head out on bicycles to find their ingredients at the farmers’ market in the Alamo district, and then had to find restaurants that would allow them to cook their meals in their kitchens. This is ridiculous for more reasons than I can list, but I’ll start with these.

1. The show is called “Top Chef,” right? So what part of this challenge is remotely relevant to being a chef? It had little or nothing to do with cooking, or even running a kitchen, which I could argue is a relevant consideration for evaluating someone’s cheffing skills.

2. Requiring the chefs to ride all over town on bikes is a pretty big handicap for anyone who’s not in shape, or has bad knees, or is otherwise physically limited. And given how hot it was during the filming of this season, weren’t they asking for someone to get hurt or pass out?

3. It had to be more structured than the editing made it appear. The show’s producers arranged this with restaurant owners beforehand, right? I mean, clearly these restaurant chefs/owners aren’t that surprised to have a TV crew and a random cook show up and ask to use their kitchens, and the chefs keep showing up at the same places, which can’t be a coincidence. So did the contestants get a list of restaurants to hit? And were the restaurants separately compensated? (Or was it just for the free publicity?) They had to know beforehand so they knew they would be asked to write up bills for the chefs. And if I’m right, why not make that clear to the audience?

4. None of that part of the show was even a little entertaining, let alone instructive about food or cooking.

* Moving along rapidly, Ed decides he wants to get proteins at the restaurant, which seems kind of foolhardy; don’t you build your dish around your proteins? He ends up using chicken breast instead of what he hoped for, shrimp, and is nearly eliminated because of it.

* Grayson says, “game night at the Schmitz house, usually one of us breaks down and cries.” I hear ya, girl – Ticket to Ride matches can get pretty fierce.

* Lindsay falls way behind the other chefs in getting ingredients – again, what are we judging here? Then she loses the kitchen she arranged to use because they don’t hold her spot and Sarah shows up. We sure learned a lot about Lindsay’s culinary vision by watching her get screwed over like that. The judges criticize her dish for having a little too much goat cheese, and Pee Wee Herman keeps talking about how amazing it is to have food served in “little boats,” so apparently he’s never seen an endive in his life.

* Sarah makes a “chicken skin vinagrette,” but it wasn’t just from the fat rendered from the skin, since she crisped it on the grill. I haven’t seen a recipe yet but am very interested now. The judges loved her okra, crush her for not seasoning her perfectly-cooked soft-boiled eggs. Outside of that – and chefs do get the axe all the time here for improper seasoning – this could have been a winner as a reconceptualization of a classic dish, a formula that always plays well on Top Chef.

* Ed got a little weird about sharing the kitchen with the guy who actually owned the place, although he was better humored about it at judges’ table than he was in the confessional. I get the criticism of the chicken’s texture if he pulled it too early and didn’t allow it to carry over, but Gail’s comment that poaching in beef fat isn’t flavorful made zero sense to me. Everyone knows the last time McDonald’s fries were good was when they still fried them in beef tallow.

* Grayson makes stuffed chicken breasts, which I’m not crazy about since they tend to dry out fairly easily, especially cooked without skin, because you’re trying to get the stuffing to at least get hot if not actually cooked through, by which time the breast meet is dry. Tom loves the combo of ingredients and loves her butternut squash but not in concert with tomatoes. Weird that Grayson would get large chicken breasts at a farmer’s market – you’d expect smaller ones if they’re really free-range or pasture-raised.

* Paul remains wildly ambitious even when working in someone else’s kitchen. It also seemed like he got along the best with his hosts, which says the easygoing manner we’re seeing post-editing is probably legitimate. He worried, as usual, about the sweet/sour balance, which the judges liked as long as you got all of the elements at once. Only David Tyree could stop him now.

* Can I just emphasize again how terribly unfunny this whole episode was? If Pee Wee Herman isn’t able to provide humor, what the hell is he doing here? Charlize had better insight into the food, and she’s hot. Just bring her back next time instead of letting some has-been comedian be a guest judge.

* Winner: Lindsay. Sounds like she just had the least flawed dish. Paul gets the thumbs-up as well, so I assume it’s fair to call him the runner-up this week.

* Loser: Given what we saw, which of course is a limited look, I expected Sarah or Ed to go home over Grayson. Grayson had a hell of a run though; she seemed early on like she lacked the range, but proved that she could succeed within her limits, and (not that it matters for judging) came off on TV better than anyone other than Paul.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Editing made Grayson look like the winner, but Ed betting the pack of cigarettes that it’s Beverly makes me think that’s who really won the LCK finale. Tom has the line of the week, funnier than anything PWH said, to Grayson: “I would not wake up this early in the morning just to fuck with you.” One preposition makes all the difference.

* Other LCK observations: Interesting to hear eliminated chefs, mostly men, now praising Beverly … Please stop saying “Asian” like it’s one fucking cuisine. Bev is Korean and her dish was more Thai than anything else; they’re no more similar than two European cuisines from different countries. It’s beyond annoying to hear Asian cuisine dismissed like it’s a gimmick, or some narrow style that could be summarized in a Dummies book.

* Final three: I’m sticking with Paul, Ed, and Lindsay.

Recap of last night’s Top Chef: Frozen Food Infomercial…

* Charlize in the stew room! I’m impressed – if nothing else, it looks like she didn’t big league anyone, and really is just a fan of the show. So she and I have … one thing in common. We can build a relationship on this, right?

* Quickfire: Prep three ingredients, then make a dish incorporating all of them. Guest judge this week is Cat Cora, who might be the least impressive TV chef I’ve ever seen. I did watch Iron Chef America for the first year or two that she was on it, and found her stuff less imaginative and a lot less appealing than any of the other Iron Chefs at the time; Boston chef Ken Oringer (of Toro, Clio, Coppa, and La Verdad – he’s legit) just destroyed her in one of the last episodes I watched before I gave up on the show. Cora may be a wonderful person, but given what I’ve seen from her on TV I’m not sure why she’s here.

* And then she criticizes the deep-fried bacon for not having “flavor.” Really? Deep-fried bacon lacks flavor? If you want to criticize them for not rendering the bacon at all, I guess that’s valid, although bacon fat is loaded with flavor, so really, what the hell was she talking about?

* Back to the quickfire … Padma looks like she’s wearing her boyfriend’s clothes, assuming she’s dating a lumberjack, or perhaps is just wearing his tablecloth. Then she refers to the prize money as “ten thousand smackeroos,” so someone forgot that she’s not at home talking to her baby.

* Chris J. and Grayson are one team, and their styles don’t meld that well, with Grayson – who nearly botches the fresh pasta beyond repair; I’d love to know what she did to rescue a dough so dry it was tearing in the roller – telling Chris to get a move on, and Chris saying, “Fast is slow, and slow is smooth,” reciting something he apparently once read in a fortune cookie. “Good fortune happy lucky big time for you and family.”

* Paul and Ed, the dream team combo, end up DQ’d because Paul forgot to cook the shrimp. He didn’t just forget to add them, as Bev did with her curried rice krispies – he didn’t even cook them. He might have been the last of the six chefs I’d expect to brain-cramp like that, even if he was once a dope dealer.

* Despite all their issues, including finishing in the final seconds, Grayson and Chris win, leaving Lindsay and Sara as bitter as raw radicchio. (Foreshadowing!) Sara says in the confessional that her dish was better, which would be entirely plausible if we’d ever seen her touch Grayson and Chris’ dish. No immunity, though, which makes sense since we’re almost to the finale.

* Elimination challenge: feed 200 people at a block party with your take on a traditional block-party dish, which is then twisted into a commercial for Healthy Choice, which pushes low-calorie, low-fat, low-salt, dishes made with cheaply-sourced factory-farmed ingredients and pretends they’re good for you. Anyway, how come I never get invited to these parties? I need to get my agent on this.

* Anyway, the chefs pick their dishes, and are then told to lighten them up because the sponsor says so. Healthier versions? Come on, it’s Top Chef, not The Biggest Loser. I want fat served on a bed of fat, topped with hollandaise.

* We keep hearing about how the chefs reduced the salt in their dishes. Is it unfair of me to expect a show that’s all about food, with chefs and judges who talk about fresh ingredients, to understand that for a person with normal blood pressure, salt is not a problem? If you’re not eating processed foods, and your blood pressure is fine, you’re not eating too much salt. I could understand saying that part of the challenge for the chefs is to force them to amplify flavors without salt, but please, stop repeating the myth that salt is unhealthful.

* The chefs only get two and a half hours, including prep time. They did know ahead of time, so they could plan accordingly, but on the flip side, the mise en place must have taken up half of that time.

* Lindsay and Sara are making meatballs. Sara switches to turkey, but other than seeing them come off the grilltop a little flat we don’t get much more info on them. Lindsay goes with veal and lamb. Why lamb in meatballs? That has to be the fattiest meat option available. I don’t really like lamb – just lost my taste for it all of a sudden – but when I’ve had ground lamb dishes, I always find them a little greasy. For a low-fat challenge, it seems like an odd choice. Lindsay binds her meatballs with Greek yogurt, which sounds weird, but she gets props for using chickpea flour, which I think is an underutilized kitchen weapon – I’ve used it for a slew of things, including savory crepes and fresh pasta. I’m also eager to try her quinoa and black pea salad with a garlic-parsley vinaigrette. (But did she really use garlic powder in the dish?)

* Grayson and Chris end up with chicken salad sandwiches, Grayson’s choice because Chris was too busy pondering the true meaning of “block.” Chris kills the mayo and uses a tofu emulsion, reminiscent of Alton Brown’s egg-less Caesar salad dressing, so not only is it lower in fat but it’s now friendly to people with egg allergies. Grayson is crunched for time, as always, but her choice to make the sandwiches to order turns out to be her trump card over Chris. I did think Chris’ watermelon salad side dish, with a frozen pineapple slush poured on top, looked far better than Grayson’s trendy watermelon salad with feta and whatever you lost me after you put goat cheese with watermelon.

* Paul and Ed push the envelope, of course, with their takes on a Korean dish called galbi, grilled beef ribs first marinated in a salty-sweet mixture and often cooked table-side in restaurants or at cookouts. I’ve never had it, but you pretty much had me at “beef ribs.” Ed refuses to tone down any of the fat other than trimming the short ribs, which is kind of a fool’s errand because there’s so much fat laced in the meat itself, and then pairs it with a white-flour steamed bun. Paul switches to ground turkey, mixes in eggplant, and serves it in a lettuce wrap with a white-peach kimchi and a nonfat yogurt-miso sauce. Paul says at judges’ table that he added eggplant for the fat, which I assume is just nerves talking because, um, it has almost no fat. Ed, meanwhile, has to deal with kids stealing his bread, which is also probably a sign it’s not health food.

* Winners: Paul, Lindsay, and Grayson. Tom loves Paul’s kimchi. Grayson stands up to Tom at judges’ table and I think rendered him speechless. Paul wins again, no shock, but he did have the most out-of-the-box dish, including the things he did to maintain flavor while losing fat, and apparently executed it.

* Losers: Ed, Sarah, Chris, although the judges say nobody really flopped. Sarah kind of gets a pass for a good dish that wasn’t as good as her competitor’s; the biggest complaint was uneven mixing of the salad, which sounds like a terrible nitpick. Ed loses to Deep Blue, but also gets points off for punting on the healthful part of the challenge and bullshitting the judges. Chris J. is the pretty obvious choice for elimination here, and I think he was the worst remaining contestant, at least in odds of winning the whole thing. Grayson blames herself for picking chicken salad, which didn’t play to Chris’ strengths, but he was there for the decision on what to cook and didn’t come up with a valid alternative.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Mystery Box challenge. Bev and Chris make almost identical dishes. Tom doesn’t say so, but I think the deciding factor may have been the white anchovy, which Bev integrated in her dish, but Chris didn’t after suffering chef’s block.

* Final three: I’m sticking with Paul, Ed, and Lindsay. I still think Sarah is too limited – both of her dishes in this episode were Italian-plus, at best – and Grayson is probably the weakest chef remaining. Looks like we’ll get a re-entry from LCK after next week’s episode.