So, Jeremy won more challenges than anyone else this season? I wouldn’t have guessed that, other than that as the only contestant left who appeared in every episode he’s had more opportunities. I feel like I remember his failures (restaurant wars, hot chicks taco stand) more than I remember his successes.

* Tom is going to cook a meal for Jeremy and Amar, which he says the first meal he’s cooking on Top Chef … except didn’t he cook a meal in eight minutes once, determining the length of a quickfire?

* Still, he’s making a multi-course meal including fresh handmade pasta, so I don’t think the guys have any complaints here. He makes crab and sea urchin with finger limes (not actually limes or even citrus, but the source of “lime caviar”) for the first course. Squab, honey-glazed onions, turnips, smoked peaches for the second. Potato agnolotti with leeks and caviar for the third. Wagyu beef, chanterelle and lobster mushrooms, aged soy bordelaise, shishito peppers for the fourth. I’m full just watching this.

* He says the meal is about ingredients that get him really excited, and wants the chefs to think about the ingredients that do the same for them. This got me thinking about what ingredients I might choose; I’d pick some number from duck legs (skin included, of course), peaches, chocolate, wild mushrooms, short ribs, or eggs. I’d have said pie, but that doesn’t scale well if they’re asked to cook for 100 people.

* Padma does not age. Someone should look into this.

* All the chefs are in the house, so the two remaining contestants draft their sous chefs. Amar takes Kwame, Jeremy takes Carl, Amar takes Marjorie (thinking about the dessert course), Jeremy takes Angie (saying she’s the fastest prep cook). The challenge: Create a four-course meal highlighting four specific ingredients, one per course, of their choice. Serving at craftsteak in MGM, which is spectacular if you haven’t been – they serve the short rib dish that made me realize how much I love short ribs after years of thinking I didn’t like them.

* In walk their mentors, Charlie Palmer and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. JGV says he sees himself in Jeremy, which is a little weird given Jeremy’s laid-back, dudebro personality. The mentors are here to help prep and cook as sous-chefs, but will sit with the judges for service.

* So we get to see Palmer and JGV walking through Whole Foods. No big deal, I’m sure they do this all the time.

* Jeremy declines JGV’s advice on the foie gras duo. This doesn’t seem like a good thing.

* Palmer, while doing line cook work, says, “No one’s too good to do anything.” He also says there’s a difference between being confident in what you do and being a complete asshole, and Amar had crossed the line back in their time together.

* Amar’s making risotto! This also doesn’t seem like a good thing.

* I would really watch a five-minute online clip of Charlie Palmer trimming (the word is “frenching,” unfortunately) that rack of lamb.

* Amar says his style is fewer elements, better flavors, less explanation, as compared to Jeremy’s more technical and more complex approach. I happen to like both when I’m eating out, but recognize that they’re going to come from very different places.

* Amar admits he’s making sashimi after giving Jeremy shit over multiple crudos because “they always win.”

* First course: Jeremy’s dish is foie gras two ways (one warm, one cold), with chili, passion fruit, and marshmallows. Amar’s is seared tuna tataki with habanero coconut dressing, compressed pineapple, toasted peanuts, and crispy rice.

* The chefs’ parents and siblings are there as a surprise. Sad to see how badly diabetes has debilitated Jeremy’s mom, and Amar’s only got his mother and brother there as his father passed away a few years ago.

* Jeremy’s two-day foie gras torchon worked, as did his duo overall. Go figure – maybe he’s good at this whole cheffing thing?

* It seems like some of the judges/diners think Amar’s dish is a little too spicy? I would think this plays right to Padma’s palate. You hear more complaints on this show about dishes that aren’t spicy enough.

* Jeremy’s fish fillets didn’t all cook through, leading to a brief panic in the kitchen. I want to know why he made the fish look like some cheap St. Patrick’s Day entree.

* Second course: Jeremy’s branzino, slow-cooked with an herbal lime vinaigrette, lime zest, squash, and cherry tomatoes. Amar made an uni risotto with butter poached lobster, jicama, finger limes, and shellfish froth.

* Dominique Crenn (the French-born executive chef of San Francisco’s Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn) loves the risotto, and Tom says everything in it is perfect, which, given the history of risotto on Top Chef, is some pretty high praise. Reading between the lines of the comments on Jeremy’s dish, though, it seems like his green sauce overshadowed the fish. It looks like someone threw up a shamrock shake on the plate.

* Jeremy waited too long to fire the duck for the third course. Says it’s “duck hell right now,” and has no time to let it rest. Meanwhile, we hear Marjorie say to Amar that she thinks the lamb needs “two more minutes,” but he says it’s perfect even though it’s bleating as he slices it.

* Third: Amar’s plate is harissa-rubbed lamb racks with braised lamb pastilla (a Moroccan-Andalusian kind of meat pie), date-ginger puree, and a yogurt harissa emulsion. Jeremy made duck with roasted maitake mushrooms, smoked chili, buttermilk, and lemon.

* Amar’s lamb is indeed a little undercooked. Padma loves the lamb jus, which Charlie says he had a hand in making, although I thought he was making a “you lika the juice” joke. Dominique says the lamb is “poorly undercooked,” which sounds even worse when said with a French accent. Jeremy’s duck is definitely undercooked. There’s just raw meat everywhere.

* Does Tom look stressed describing these two dishes? He seems almost pained at how close the contest is so far.

* Amar’s mocking all of Jeremy’s “spears” and “cones” … he says that’s all been done before, and he wants to make dishes that are amazing, not interesting. It seems to me like Jeremy’s style of cooking generates a ton of waste, especially plastic, which really should be a thing of the past.

* Fourth and final course: Amar made a coconut financier, mango sorbet, passion fruit curd, tropical fruit salard, brulée meringue, and lime zest. Jeremy made a cheese course, a ricotta and mozzarella cheese cylinder with spiced fig jam, pumpernickel toast, and honey “bubble.” There’s no question I’d want to eat Amar’s dish rather than Jeremy’s.

* Blais says Jeremy’s technique led the dish, not the ignredients. Emeril calls it “intellectual.” I wouldn’t think that was a compliment, although he seems to mean it that way.

* Amar’s financier is a little dense, but everyone loves the flavors. A financier is a small sponge cake, like a madeleine but made with brown butter, lifted with an egg white foam, and cooked till brown around the edges; it’s often made with almond flour but I think Amar may have used coconut flour here, which could explain the change in texture.

* Blais asks Amar if the tataki was “too safe” a dish for the finals. Tom praises Jeremy’s torchon. In the second courses, Jeremy’s dish needed more lemon, and the tomatoes were the star ingredient … which should be a point against him, right?

* Amar gets big praise for making a risotto. Gail says it’s the best risotto they’ve had on TC in “many, many seasons.” Has anyone else made a truly successful risotto on Top Chef? Or won a challenge with one?

* Jeremy says he was going for med-rare to medium with his duck, but then tries to dance around the criticism that it was short or rare. Just acknowledge the mistake up front, dude. Amar’s lamb was rare to undercooked, when he wanted rare to med-rare, but at least he owns it right away. Both dishes were badly cooked meat surrounded by other great elements.

* Amar’s dessert had great flavors, but the financier was dense; Blais says the name might have been the problem because everyone expected the light texture of a financier. Jeremy’s cheese log was great, but the honey bubble was a failure. I’m still trying to fathom what a mozzarella cheese “log” would taste like but keep imagining that awful string cheese they sell in individually-wrapped landfill fodder.

* Padma says they still haven’t decided on the winner, by which she probably means Tom hasn’t decided.

* They’re praising Jeremy’s technique and details, but seem to like Amar’s flavors more. Padma even says it specifically – one chef’s meal was technique-forward, the other’s was flavor-forward. Technique is great, but don’t you have to love the food too?

* Jeremy says off-camera, “Top Chef is not about the money to me.” Kind of the wrong/privileged thing to say, especially when your opponent came from a third world country and has made himself into a successful chef from meager beginnings.

* The winner of $125,000 and the title of Top Chef is … Jeremy. “No fucking way.” You tell ’em, dudebro.

* This is the first time since I started watching the show that I can say I’m disappointed in an outcome. We don’t taste the food, so I don’t know who actually deserved to win, but I can’t escape the feeling that we’ve seen Jeremy’s kind of food on this show before, many times in fact. I don’t think he had a dish, even a winning dish, all season that made me say “I’d want to make that,” or even “That gives me a great idea.” (Actually the best dish all season from that perspective was Karen’s Asian steak salad from Restaurant Wars, which I made for dinner yet again a few hours before this show aired.) The chefs who impressed early in the season were long gone by the finale, and while Amar makes the food you’d be more likely to want to eat, the judges appear to have gone with the fancier techniques. They’re not wrong – how could I say they’re wrong when I didn’t eat the food! – but it’s not the outcome I wanted, to say the least.

* Gail gives Amar a kiss on each cheek, and he says, “Finally! I’ve been waiting all season for this.” Well, it’s a decent consolation prize for losing $125 grand, I guess.

Amar is the winner of Last Chance Kitchen, so Carl, who I thought was a clear top 3 coming down the stretch, is out. No Kwame, no Carl, and possibly no Marjorie in the finals? Is this a good thing? Is it fair to think that we might not get the best chefs in the finals when we haven’t tasted any of the food?

* The winner of this first challenge goes right to the finale. The chefs each get a pantry at random and must create a dish inspired by the limited pantry you’re dealt. Marjorie gets the royalty pantry, so she can choose from all four pantries, not just her own. Amar gets only the peasants’ pantry, so he can’t use any pantry but his. This sounds like a new worker-placement game, and like most games of that ilk, this challenge will take three hours.

* They’re serving 150 people in just three hours from the start of the challenge, but they do get help from the last four eliminated chefs. Marjorie takes Karen, Isaac takes Carl, Jeremy takes Kwame, so Amar gets Phillip. Jeremy can’t believe the first two chefs passed on Kwame. I still can’t believe Kwame didn’t make it to the finals.

* Is it just me or does the top of Padma’s red dress here look like lingerie?

* Marjorie has salmon and dry-aged steak available to her. I’d hope she’ll be judged along a higher standard given the inputs she’s getting. I do want to know how she was trimming that salmon – she sliced something off the top of the fillet, which I haven’t seen before.

* Amar’s protein choices are chicken livers and beef tongue. He’s downplaying the livers, but liver cooked properly can be delicious. It needs other flavors, but I’ve really grown to like it.

* Isaac is trying to cook his fish to order for 150 people, which seems very difficult to do, especially given what’s on the line this episode.

* The judges go to Amar’s station first for his sauteed liver and onions with root vegetable puree and crispy leeks. The judges all seem to like it, but whatever other flavors were in there, we didn’t hear about them. Liver and onions does not excite me but he apparently did something novel with it.

* Jeremy made butter-poached chicken with togarashi, zucchini puree, chicken cracklings, and pickled sweet and hot grapes. Gail loves the grapes, and of course everyone loves the cracklings. Crispy chicken skin has been ‘in’ for a couple of years now – I’ve even seen it in vinaigrettes – but I don’t think it’s just a fad, because it’s very satisfying to eat (thanks to the crunch) and because it fits in the new philosophy of using as much of the animal as possible. I nearly always save mine and cook them separately if I’m not cooking them with the meat.

* Isaac made seared black cod with caramelized fennel, eggplant, and red wine vinegar. He served it with toasted slices of bread, but they were too dry to soak up the sauce. I grew up Italian, so to me, one of bread’s primary functions is as the sponge you use to clean your plate before sending it to the sink.

* Marjorie made seared salmon in vadouvan beurre monté with a Meyer lemon purée and shaved vegetable salad. Meyer lemons and yuzu are two of the most overused ingredients on Top Chef. At least I can get Meyer lemons in Whole Foods – yes, they’re good, but 95% of the time regular lemons would work just fine – while I’m not sure I’ve ever seen yuzu in any form.

* Padma’s super cheerful this time. Tom likes that they’re not eliminating someone this challenge. I think he’s happy because he has a restaurant in Vegas and every time he goes there he remembers how much money he makes from it.

* Rick Moonen loves the comfort food aspect of Amar’s dish, while Tom likes the ingenuity and simplicity. They loved the Meyer lemon puree in Marjorie’s dish. Tom praises Jeremy’s poached chicken despite the natural blandness of poached chicken, crediting the grapes in particular. Butter-poached chicken isn’t any poached chicken, though.

* The winner is Jeremy, who goes to the finals and gets a $25,000 prize. Two of the three remaining chefs will end up going home. Padma makes a “Leaving Las Vegas” joke for which she should have to pack her knives and go.

* Illusionist David Copperfield is there. Can he make Donald Trump disappear?

* The second challenge is to make a dish that “leaves the judges spellbound.” I don’t like how this sounds. Is this Top Chef, or Top Showman?

* Jeremy sounds gracious in victory, saying of the double elimination here, “I’m sure it’s in the back of each one of their minds, it’s the end of the road. It sucks.” For a guy who cops a bit of a bro attitude, he’s come across as way more mature and thoughtful the more he speaks in the confessionals.

* I wonder how often the chefs just make a dish they make all the time at their restaurants and cook up a narrative for the judges or the cameras.

* Amar is making a cauliflower white chocolate ganache. This sounds … terrible, really. White chocolate is sugar and fat. It has no cocoa solids, so it has no chocolate flavor. If you wouldn’t add sugar to a savory dish, don’t add white chocolate. I hate white chocolate, by the way.

* Marjorie is using liquid nitrogen for the first time, which is a very bad idea. She tastes something she made with it, and “burns” her tongue, so she can barely taste her food. LN is around –196 degrees Celsius – that is, nearly 200 degrees below the freezing point of water – and can freeze human tissue on contact. This is not a toy.

* She plates first, trying to put on a show, talking as she goes … which has Tom looking totally bemused. They did tell the chefs they had to entertain, right? She’s nervous as hell, but she’s powering through it.

* Marjorie says she’s never used liquid nitrogen before and it makes her nervous, to which Padma says, “it’s making me nervous.” You’re twenty feet away, Padma. Simmer down.

* The dish is roasted duck breast a l’orange with braised endive, orange cells, caramelized romanesco, fennel puree. The screen said “romesco,” which is a sauce, but I think the item was actually romanesco, a close relative of the cauliflower with a bright green color and fractal form to its pointed florets. The endives are good, but the dish didn’t have enough orange flavor, perhaps because she was struggling with the LN.

* Isaac is up next, making his “chicken-fried steak” with crispy chicken skin attached to the steaks. He’s not talking to the judges, which shouldn’t matter but might, although he finishes with a cute if silly magic trick. The actual dish: dry aged ribeye with chicken skin, “quadruple” fennel puree, and yuzu hollandaise. The flavors are great but the puree wasn’t smooth enough.

* This seems like the perfect challenge for molecular gastronomy, or even just a Jacques Derrida approach. I had a dish at ink. last week that would have fit the challenge: a deconstructed apple pie that looked like a bit of a mess, but when eaten all together had all the flavors of a real apple pie. It included a “burnt wood” semifreddo and bits of apple gelée. Richard Blais’s restaurants often have dishes like this too, where your eyes tell you to expect one thing but your palate gets something totally different. That’s the kind of illusion I expected given the challenge.

* Amar serves his dishes under a glass cloche with smoke in it. The dish is roasted squab with the aforementioned ganache, whipped balsamic, and potato rings with onion flavors in the breading. He also had dabs of LN-frozen squab sauce with mole flavors in them.

* Judges’ table: Tom says Marjorie’s story was good, the duck and endive were great, it needed more orange flavor but was otherwise “terrific.” She had the most showmanship, I think. Amar’s plate “looked like a terrarium” (Tom) but worked, although the praise is about the flavors, and we don’t get any real breakdown of the various techniques he used. I also really wanted to hear something about that ganache, which sounded vile to me. Isaac tried the magic trick, which gets him some points. He needed more skin on the filet, but gets some points for going well out of his comfort zone.

* Padma boosts Marjorie for the performance. Amar’s dish had the best elements of surprise, the most technically difficult, but didn’t have her showmanship. Isaac’s concept was good, and Tom says it was better than real chicken fried steak.

* The winner of this challenge is Amar, so we have Amar and Jeremy in the finals. It does seem like he did the best on this challenge, but to have Marjorie gone is very disappointing given how well she did all season and how much more versatile she was than anyone else this season.

* Amar gets very choked up afterwards, having just lost his first ever boss, Gerry Hayden, and remembering his father, who died of brain cancer when Amar was a teenager.

* Jeremy’s reaction to Amar walking in is priceless: “I was hoping it wasn’t you, motherfucker!” Jeremy has done so well on the more sophisticated, fine-dining sort of challenges, but was so uninspiring in some of the earlier challenges that were either more basic or that let him do one crudo after another. I think I’m pulling for Amar at this point, as long as he doesn’t sous vide another chicken breast in the finale.

We start with Isaac just heaping praise on Kwame as a super-talented, very promising chef. Again, Isaac is just the freaking best. Maybe he could do video blogs next season.

* Quickfire: Traci des Jardins, who always looks pained even when she’s smiling, is the guest. The challenge is to make artisanal toast. Artisanal toast is very San Francisco, in that it’s pretty good, wildly overpriced, and borderline annoying about itself. Also, Italians have been doing this forever and calling it bruschetta (among other names), so shut the fuck up already about your “toast program.”

* Oh, joy, a sudden death quickfire – the bottom two chefs are up for elimination and will face each other, with the loser going home. Let’s definitely eliminate one of the best chefs of the season because of something my daughter eats for breakfast before school.

* Marjorie is making hers the way I make lots of “toast” dishes – rubbing olive oil with her fingers on sliced country bread. This is the ideal way to make grilled or broiled toast to as part of fett’unta con fagioli, which is the Italian version of beans on toast, usually white beans cooked with rosemary and garlic. It’s highly flavorful and very filling even as a main course, although it’s traditionally a starter.

* The dishes – er, the toasts: Jeremy did chicken liver mousse, pickled cherries, white raspberries, jalapeño, and arugula on ciabatta … Marjorie used a sourdough baguette and made dungeness crab salad with a pancetta fennel marmalade … Amar made a duck breast with foie gras, fig marmalde, crispy prosciutto, and a balsamic and truffle reduction on sourdough … Carl did grilled sourdough with burrata, blistered cherry tomatoes, and shrimp … Isaac made a butter-fried ciabbata, percorino, prosciutto, red pepper spread like romesco.

* Winner is Jeremy, and he gets a Rational oven as a prize. Carl and Amar have to face off; Amar’s was “heavy-handed,” while Carl ended up on the bottom because he put fish and cheese together – and I agree that those things do not go together, ever. In Italian Catholicism, it’s taught that you’ll go to hell for that.

* For the elimination, Tom is there as a third judge – as he should be – and the two chefs have 30 minutes to cook anything they want.

* Amar says, “I do not wanna make a crudo, I came here to cook!” I respect this. Crudo – the Italian word just means “raw,” although now it primarily refers to raw fish – has become such a Top Chef crutch that it’s gotten ridiculous, but as some of you have pointed out, it’s become a crutch because the judges keep rewarding it.

* Just from how he speaks, I think Amar snores.

* Amar did a pan-roasted sea bream, watermelon radish cooked in dashi, pickled mushrooms, plums, and brown butter. Carl made a salad of raw thai snapper, corn, nectarines, and chiles. Padma sneers, “Another crudo, huh?” but then votes for him. Tom votes for Amar, but Amar is eliminated when Traci votes for Carl.

* Elimination challenge: Hubert Keller cooks dinner for the final four. He hosted the first ever quickfire – and did anyone else notice how young Gail looked in that clip? Or Harold, who ended up winning the season, getting the boot? The actual challenge is to make a tribute dish to Fleur de Lys, Keller’s just-closed restaurant in SF. Keller cooks them an Alsatian stew called a bacheofe, with pork, lamb, and beef marinated overnight, with a rope of dough used to seal the lid to the pot.

* Carl wants to make a torchon of foie gras, a process that requires three days, when he only has three hours. The foie gras must be dry-cured or marinated so that it doesn’t have the texture of putty, and the fat used has to be melted and then given time to set up. Marjorie points out the folly of this idea.

* Tom can’t get over the risks Isaac and Carl are taking, making dishes that should require much more time than the chefs have for prep and cooking.

* Where do these chefs get the foie they always seem to use on the show? I don’t think Whole Foods sells it but we never see them buying it anywhere else.

* Isaac serves first. He made a duck ballotine (a type of terrine) with chicken liver forcemeat, lentils with porcini, figs, cherry and aged balsamic gastrique. Padma says, “That’ll be all,” as if he should return to the servants’ quarters.

* The flavors in Isaac’s were good, but the dish needed more sauce. He also cooked it too fast at too high a temperature, so the duck meat was overcooked and the skin wasn’t crispy. We’re off to a roaring start.

* Marjorie made roasted lamb saddle with artichoke puree, artichoke barigoules (braised in a wine/water broth), squash, tomatoes, and niçoise olives. She cooked the lamb boneless, and Tom seems very unimpressed by this decision.

* Keller said she nailed the flavors of Provençal cuisine. But the artichokes were underseasoned and the lamb was improperly cooked, so it sounds like her dish wasn’t really any better than Isaac’s.

* Jeremy made branzino (filet de loup) with potato puree, heirloom tomato, vin blanc, and pommes souffles. This was the only dish of the four that the judges actually seemed to like. He also shaved truffle over the potatoes, because of course he did. The dish tasted good and was technically strong.

* Carl’s foie gras torchon en gelée with black pepper, strawberries, and fines herbes. He confited the foie first, then wrapped it as a torchon. It … did not work.

* Keller says Carl set himself up to fail. Harold says it’s not doable in three hours. The center was almost raw, which makes it pretty clear where we’re going from here.

* Keller and Tom both think the chefs all tried too hard to impress because it was the last-ever meal to be served at the site of Fleur de Lys. I doubt the setting was what intimidated them so much as the part about not getting eliminated from the show.

* Judges’ table: The winner was Jeremy, of course. No one else made anything even edible, if we read between the lines of the judges’ comments.

* The other three chefs all have to wear it in front of the judges. Gail’s comment afterwards, that she’d rather eat overcooked duck than undercooked foie gras, seems like the tell on the elimination – and I have to agree, especially since I don’t care for any meat cooked only to rare. Raw liver sounds all kinds of disgusting.

* Padma does that cruel thing where she says someone’s name – Marjorie – and then announces that that chef is going to the finals, not going home. I would always assume this was at the producers’ direction, but maybe Padma just enjoys putting the chefs through a little emotional torture.

* Carl is eliminated. It’s kind of a shocker to have him and Kwame get bounced before the finals.

* LCK: First, the three chefs have to make one sourdough dish in 30 minutes. Carl makes apple and tomatillo gazpacho with shrimp, only using the ready-made bread; Amar makes beef wellington, starting with the raw bread dough, enough to impress Tom given the time constraints; Jason makes smoked salmon bruschetta with lots of stuff on top, which leads Tom to criticize the lack of seasoning on the turnips and radishes. Tom keeps praising Amar for a “ballsy move” in trying to make something so complex in a half hour. His favorite was Carl’s; second was Amar, so Jason’s big winning streak comes to naught. His eggs were a little overdone, apparently.

* Second, Tom implies it’s a raw challenge. Carl has a good line, saying his foie gras was “sort of a crudo.” The chefs have 12 minutes to prepare a fish dish, starting from a whole fish. Amar grabs the loup de mer because he’s familiar with it, while Carl grabs the snapper because it looks the freshest. Amar decides to make an onion soubise – like a béchamel with onion purée – to which Tom says “good luck with that!” I thought that took about half an hour to make sure you don’t brown the onions. Amar made a crispy loup de mer with onion soubise and yuzu caper brown butter. Carl made grilled red snapper with apricot and ginger marmalade. The real message here is that when the chefs have only 12 minutes to cook but all manner of ingredients, they make dishes you’d eat – food that sounds great, but that you might make at home or order at a restaurant that isn’t $100 a head.

* Rankings: Marjorie, Carl, Isaac, Amar, Jeremy. Obviously one of Carl/Amar won’t be there, but regardless of who comes out of LCK, I think this should be Marjorie’s to lose.

My ranking of the top 25 prospects for 2016 impact is up for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat yesterday afternoon.

* Quickfire: Chef Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook and Martin Yan Quick and Easy fame is the guest judge. The man is 67 years old and still full of energy, at least on camera. He explains that during the California gold rush, a lot of miners came from Guangdong (Canton), where his father also came from. The intersection of cultures led to chop suey, an iconic Americanized Chinese dish. (Wikipedia’s entry on the dish offers a more detailed explanation of the dish’s roots, tracing it back to a dish common Taishan made from leftovers.) The chefs must make a version of chop suey, cooking at a typical wok station, which is at least five times stronger than a professional kitchen burner. So we get a quickfire challenge that is just about cooking!

* I remember seeing Yan as a judge on ICA maybe ten years ago, and he was very big on “texture contrast” in every dish. I’d imagine in chop suey that’s as critical as anything, because you’re cooking vegetables so fast that they should remain crisp.

* Kwame is blanch-frying the vegetables in oil the wok, which apparently is a traditional technique. I can’t imagine cooking on a burner with that kind of power, because it seems like food could burn in a matter of seconds, and any aerosolized oil droplets would ignite right in front of you.

* Jeremy makes a Dungeness crab with bok choy, red chile, long beans, and onions … Marjorie makes lobster with ginger, thai chili, and orange … Carl does a Szechuan-style lobster with snow peas, ginger, and I presume a lot of chiles … Amar does pork (not chicken!) with vegetables and Szechuan peppercorns … Isaac makes General Tso’s chicken with cracklings, sambal, and orange … Kwame serves crispy beef with eggplant, long beans, carrots, cabbage, and noodles. Yan recognizes the oil-blanching technique right away.

* One other thing I remember from Yan’s appearance on ICA, because it’s evident here too: He’s just very kind. He couches everything he says with an almost educational context, and his criticisms are almost apologetic.

* The least favorites: Carl’s should have had more vegetables. I assume that’s an authenticity thing; when meat was expensive and limited, you’d fill up with cheap vegetables? Kwame’s blanch-frying technique made the vegetables greasy, and Yan says the eggplant soaked up the oil. Isaac used too much starch in his sauce.

* The winner is Marjorie, apparently because she had the best balance of all the ingredients.

* Elimination challenge: Guest judge is the founder of Umami Burger and 800 Degrees, Adam Fleischman. I’ve been to both places, as well as the now-defunct Umamicatessen; what the two existing concepts have in common is that they serve good food relatively fast, turning over tables quickly, and offer alcohol to boost profits. The challenge for each of the chefs is to come up with a fast casual concept that “would work in any city in North America.” Each must make one dish for 150 diners and potential investors, and to create an entire menu for the concept. Six of the eliminated chefs are there to be sous chefs. Marjorie, as the quickfire winner, gets to pick her own sous.

* Marjorie picks Angelina because she’s “a beast with prep.” She also gets to assign the other five sous chefs, although I wondered if she was spiteful enough to take full advantage. She assigns Jason to Jeremy, Chad to Carl, Karen to Amar, Wesley to Isaac, and Phillip with Kwame. That last one she did on purpose, since they’d sparred and she sees Kwame as competition, although I don’t think anyone wanted Phillip.

* Amar is making rotisserie chicken. Has he never heard of Boston Market?

* Kwame wants to do chicken and waffles that are easy to eat. I love the concept … and then he says he’s going to buy frozen waffles. What. The. Fuck. My man, Kwame, have you never watched Top Chef before? Frozen means pack your knives and gozen.

* Marjorie worked at Per Se and learned pasta there; she now wants to adapt that to fast casual. She’s doing olive-oil poached tuna with pasta, a very classic northern Italian combination. Pasta’s tough for fast casual, though, because it doesn’t travel or reheat well, and I think too many Americans hear pasta and think “tomato sauce.”

* Isaac says that he “got a couple of ideas I shoot to myself, then I shoot them down cause they’re stupid.” He has to be a top 5 most entertaining chef in Top Chef history. I’d love to do play-by-play with him of any sport, regardless of whether he knew it, because I think he’d be hilarious – maybe more so if he knew nothing about it. He settles on gumbo, of course. Three hours is not a lot of time to make gumbo, given the time required for the roux.

* The other chefs are mocking Kwame for buying frozen waffles while they’re all in the checkout line at Whole Foods. This is beyond foreshadowing. Kwame is toast, pun intended.

* Carl’s concept is a Mediterranean place that will showcase some lesser-known flavors of the region. (Isn’t this a little like Zoe’s Kitchen?) He’s making the lamb stew of his imagination.

* Amar’s concept is called Pio Pio, which is an actual rotisserie chicken place near Orlando that is very good.

* Jeremy’s concept is Asian-style tacos. Tom points out that the taco market is already very crowded. He’s frying pork belly strips with nam pla caramel and serving with wontons or lettuce wraps.

* Adam and Tom look at Kwame like he’s a complete idiot when he says he’s using frozen waffles. I mean, you see people making their own waffles at crappy free hotel breakfasts all the time. You can’t make your own on Top Chef?

* Marjorie needs pasta baskets (inserts for the pots in which she’ll cook the pasta) and finds none. She decides to use the fryer as a boiler. I saw something like that at Sotto in Cincinnati and they made it work beautifully, although it was built for that purpose – it had two chambers, one for gluten-free pastas and one for wheat pastas.

* Kwame immediately gets the biggest line, because who doesn’t love fried chicken and waffles?

* Blais is back as the fourth judge, always a welcome sight.

* Carl’s concept is SavoryMed, which he even acknowledges might sound like a health-care company. Blais compares it to Chipotle without saying that name (Chipotle without the sick employees!). The dish is lamb and piquillo pepper stew over couscous with yogurt, feta, fresh herb salad. The menu would offer the modular approach of Chipotle and its imitators. The judges all love the dish and the concept. Tom questions the feasibility of an herb salad, but that is serious nitpicking.

* Isaac’s concept is called Gumbo for Y’all, and his dish is gumbo ya-ya with chicken and sausage. What I think really sells the judges here is when he describes the concept as one that suits takeout and even catering – go buy a bowl of gumbo, or a couple of gallons to feed a crowd. That’s a food that reheats well and even gets better the next day. Hold your surprise, but Isaac’s gumbo is good, by the way.

* Kwame’s concept name is Waffle Me, which is great, but it’s all downhill from there. Customers would customize their waffle, topping, and spice level. He’s serving a whole wheat waffle topped with fried chicken, maple jus, mustard seeds, and an ancho chili crust (on the waffles, I think). Blais says the dish is a “disaster of a business model” because the bites are way too small. The frozen waffles weren’t good, of course.

* Marjorie’s concept is called Pasta Mama. One idea is to have a pasta extruder in every store, but I assume she’d ship the fresh pasta sheets from a central facility? Making pasta fresh on-site seems like a tall order for fast casual. Tom notes and admires the use of the fryer as the pasta cooking vessel. Her dish is olive-oil poached tuna with spaghetti, chili, garlic, lemon bread crumb. Tom says the tuna is cooked well. He and Blais are already working on commercials.

* Jeremy has the worst concept name, “Taco Dudes.” Adam says the menu has too many unfamiliar terms on it, although Tom sees a social media campaign around them. I think I side with Adam – you don’t want a menu to intimidate a customer who has just walked in without knowing the place already. Jeremy’s dish is crispy pork belly with nam pla caramel glaze, lime aioli, cabbage slaw, and pickled habaneros. Jeremy starts describing the place as a gastropub with a rooftop garden and “hot chicks serving you.” That gets a look from Padma, as it should, because he’s apparently a pig. Are you selling tacos or boobs? The food is good, but the concept isn’t.

* Amar’s Pio Pio has a very simple format and menu; his dish is chicken with Spanish yellow rice, four bean salad, and a choice of four sauces – I caught two, romesco and a chimichurri sauce. Rather than serving whole chicken pieces, he’s shredded the meat and mixed the white and dark together, which I think is a terrible move because there are people who, for health or taste reasons, prefer only one kind. Plus shredding is more work for the kitchen. Blais says Amar didn’t sell the concept well enough and the chicken doesn’t have the rotisserie flavor it should.

* Top three were Marjorie, for the dish and the concept’s “great branding opportunities;” Carl, for a “very articulate vision” of the restaurant (yeah, because we’ve seen something a lot like it before); and Isaac, who I think had the best concept, and of course the judges loved the gumbo.

* Kwame’s chicken and waffles were “nothing special” compared to others the judges have tried, his portions were too small, and have I mentioned that he used frozen waffles? Amar’s concept isn’t novel, although the sauces were good. Jeremy’s concept was “half-baked” and the judges say they’ve seen plenty of Asian taco places before. One thing I’ll say in Jeremy’s defense is that I think the Asian taco concept is still largely limited to major cities, maybe even just major cities on the coasts; it’s definitely not in small-town America very much, although I see no reason it wouldn’t work everywhere.

* Judges’ table: Majorie and Carl at the top. She’s not Italian but the judges just loved the concept. Adam says it’s hard to do pasta in fast-casual environment but she twisted it and “made it your own,” whatever that means – it doesn’t explain how she could execute fresh pasta in that type of restaurant. Carl’s food looks healthy and colorful, and the menu focuses on flavors Tom says are popular right now.

* Carl wins. He was the overwhelming favorite of the diners too.

* The bottom two are Kwame and Jeremy. Jeremy’s had a “few flavors missing,” and the concept was flawed. Tom can’t get past the “two dudes” name and explanation, saying that that story goes with fish tacos rather than pork. But the whole concept – in a gastropub, with a roof garden, with hot chicks – was a mess. Kwame’s dish required “too much technical precision” for fast-casual … and hey, frozen waffles, dumbass. Tom points out that the menu showed sweet-potato waffles, for example, and if Kwame had made those, he would probably have fared much better.

* Kwame is eliminated. Frozen anything gets you sent home. He gives a thoughtful thank-you speech to Tom, where he started at Craft as a waiter. You could see Tom was both very surprised and touched.

* LCK: Tom starts by saying Kwame is there because of the frozen waffles, so it’s a breakfast challenge, even though he says chefs hate working that shift and concedes that at home he’ll even serve frozen waffles to his kids. The chefs have fifteen minutes to make a creative breakfast.

* I grew up eating Eggos quite a bit and they do still have a nostalgic appeal to me, although if we have waffles in the freezer at my house, they’re probably leftovers from a weekend breakfast I made from scratch. Just lay them out on the counter on a cooling rack until they reach room temperature, then put them in a freezer bag. If you put hot waffles in the bag without cooling them, you’re trapping all that steam you want to lose first and the waffles will get soggy.

* I think it’s weird Kwame doesn’t have a waffle recipe off the top of his head. Even I do. They’re really just pancakes with more fat.

* Kwame is making egg bhurji, an Indian dish with lots of savory flavors and spices. Jason is making migas, a Spanish dish usually made from leftover bread that’s stale. He’s using fresh bread and just tearing it, rather than throwing it in a food processor to grind it a bit.

* The chefs in the peanut gallery are all acting very silly, or just drunk. Probably drunk, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

* Jason deep-fries the eggs rather than skillet-fry them, which is easier to manage and also gives the white a nice crispy, brown edge. Is poaching an egg in 15 minutes too risky because you can’t redo it? I think the Alton Brown method I’ve used requires about 12 minutes, so it’s doable, but you’ve got just one shot.

* Jason’s migas has sausage, pine nuts, currants, and thyme, and it’s kind of like a big hash where you break the egg yolk and toss it all together. Tom loves it. Kwame serves the egg scrambled with the bhurji like a thick sauce over brioche with cilantro. Tom seems to like it too. He’s surprised there’s no curry in the eggs but I think the sauce is so flavorful that he thought the eggs were spiced too. (Side note: Every recipe I found for eggs bhurji includes hing, the spice also known as asafoetida, an Indian spice famous for its fetid smell. I’ve actually never seen the spice here, although I imagine it’s easy to find in Indian groceries.)

* Tom loved both, but says “if I had to travel” to go eat one dish again, it would have been to Spain for Jason’s. So Kwame, who seemed like he was lapping the field before the ten-years-ago challenge, doesn’t even reach the finals.

* Ranking: Marjorie, Carl, Jason, Isaac, Amar, Jeremy. Carl’s stayed very strong throughout the season, but I think this is Marjorie’s to win right now. Jeremy was saved by Kwame’s disastrous choice this week, but he’s had more flops this season than any two other chefs remaining combined.

I have a new draft blog post on possible first-rounders Robert Tyler and Kyle Lewis up for Insiders.

So the remaining seven chefs are all acting like they’re going to miss Phillip … no, they’re not. I think they all made it clear they didn’t really like him, and how could you, given how he acted? Kwame says “I understood him,” after which Marjorie, the one honest soul there, says, “I didn’t.”

* Quickfire: They’re in Oakland and MC Hammer is here. (Where’s MC Slammer and Vanilla Sherbet?) I don’t see the point of having Hammer here, although at least he drops a “Go A’s, go Warriors, go Raiders” on us. The challenge is for the chefs to come up with their own rap names and create a dish that visually and conceptually expresses that name. Hammer says he made sure it “personified how hard I hit the stage.” Yeah, nothing says “hard” to me like “Help the Children.”

* It’s actually kind of painful to watch this. Kwame seems like the only chef there with any sense of rap culture at all, given the name he picks and what eventually happens during judging.

* Kwame says he did shows when he was a teenager and dropped a couple of mixtapes, when he had “a very short-lived rap career” where he’d give away food at the shows to get people to show up.

* Carl picks the name “Dr. Funky Fresh,” which would have sounded dated in 1988. Marjorie’s “Miss Punch-a-Lot” is almost as bad.

* The dishes: Karen (rap name: “Pink Dragon”) made a hot and sour soup with pork meatballs, shiitakes, and morels … Carl (I had to mute him rapping) made a beef tartare lettuce wrap … Amar (“Santana Lovah”) made a soy-glazed sea bass with dashi broth … Marjorie made a fried chicken sandwich with honey sriracha and marinated watermelon radish salad … Isaac (“Toups Legit”) made scallops with BBQ sauce and grits … Jeremy (“Spicy J-Rock 305” … what the fuck is that) made spicy dungeness crab in broth with grilled summer squash and halibut cheek … Kwame (“Baylish”) did a seafood broth with grilled lobster and dungeness crab.

* Kwame drops a few rhymes and at least sounds somewhat current – way better than Carl.

* Least favorites: Amar’s plate was just fish; the bread on Marjorie’s andwich just “sucked up the spices;” Kwame’s dish was fine but other plates were “simyular” to his yet better.

* Favorites: Carl, Isaac, and Karen. Hammer’s comments are kind of worthless and I truly don’t see why he would be a guest judge here. Why not invite Alison Barakat of Bakesale Betty’s and challenge everyone to make a fried chicken sandwich?

* The winner is Isaac, again, and he gets immunity.

* Elimination challenge: Guest judge Jonathan Waxman, who seems to pop up once a season here. Each chef must cook a dish from a specific place and time in history. The chefs get to pick off a globe that has at least ten options on it, so even the chef picking last gets a choice. Isaac picks the Viking age. Carl picks ancient Greece. Amar chooses Paris’s Belle Époque (roughly contemporary with our Gilded Age). Marjorie picks ancient India. Kwame takes the Han dynasty of Beijing. Jeremy chooses the Gold Rush in San Francisco. Karen, picking last, takes the Empire of Japan. No one wanted the Italian Renaissance?

* The chefs get two hours to research at the SF library … which does not make riveting television.

* The chefs go drinking at an old-fashioned kitsch tiki lounge. And suddenly Jeremy is banging the drums and giving us the metal horns. Honestly, I kind of wish his food read more “metal.” He’d be much more interesting.

* Amar gets to make classical French cuisine, which is a mixed blessing – I’m sure it’s food he knows, but it’s also food every chef who’s going to judge his food knows.

* Kwame’s dish has four ingredients: duck, eggplant, a duck “jus,” and lapsang souchong, a black tea that is dried by smoking it over burning pine wood. He goes to serve a “sample” to Tom/Jonathan and his duck is raw in the center. He says he roasted the duck for 16 minutes … is it just me or is that barely enough to get the duck to room temperature?

* Waxman’s enthusiasm is great, especially when Tom can seem a bit cantankerous in the kitchen and many guest judges don’t bring much personality at all. Also, Waxman agrees with me and says he would have chosen Italian Renaissance “in a heartbeat.” Of course, he did write a book on Italian cooking, so he may have a better handle on it than I do.

* The dishes: Carl made marinated mackerel and calamari with olives and grapes, seasoned with garum, an ancient Roman fish sauce that, as far as I know, no longer exists. (He probably used Asian fish sauce or colatura, a modern Italian descendant of garum.) It’s a big hit. Marjorie made a lamb kebab with heart jus, curried split peas, and paratha (an unleavened Indian flatbread). Padma likes the balance of spice/heat in the dish, but the paratha was too greasy. I’m wondering if Marjorie only fried it, rather than baking it partway and then frying it. Waxman says her lamb should have been cooked all the way through to be authentic.

* Isaac made a cumin- and mustard-seared venison with caramelized onion “grautr” (I assume this is grøt, a sort of porridge often made with barley) and pickled beets. There’s a great texture/flavor to venison. Kwame made a coriander-crusted duck with black sesame jus, lapsang souchong “cream” with silken tofu, and eggplant. Waxman loves the coriander. Tom says duck is nicely cooked, which is a nice comeback from the kitchen debacle. Of everything we saw in the elimination challenge, this is the dish I’d most want to eat.

* Jeremy made halibut with shellfish chowder. Tom says it’s not a chowder and is more like a sauce. Waxman says it’s not authentic at all, since miner food would likely have been rustic and hearty. Karen made soba noodles in a mushroom dashi with pickled mushrooms and wagyu beef. Padma says the broth more Chinese than Japanese. Waxman says she should have stopped with the clear broth, and Gail says she should have kept the dish simple.

* Amar made roasted squab with sweetbreads, foie gras, tourné vegetables, and a lot of truffle sauce. The sauce seems to be the key, and Tom says it’s a very concentrated sauce for only three hours of cooking time.

* Marjorie, Karen, Jeremy are on the bottom. The other four all did well.

* Kwame, Amar, and Carl were top three. Waxman loved Kwame’s sparseness and restraint. Amar showed off a lot of technique. Tom praises Carl’s dish, saying how every ingredient mattered. The winner is Amar. His dish may very well have been the best, but he also got the easiest challenge, cooking in a style any chef who went to culinary school or trained in a high-end restaurant would have learned.

* Karen’s dish had too many components, plus it wasn’t really authentic. Waxman said it’s a chef’s job to edit, and she didn’t. Marjorie’s lamb didn’t have enough char. Padma says the paratha got too crispy when Marjorie fried it. Jeremy’s dish didn’t have the flavor depth of a chowder; it was definitely not a miner’s chowder and was too fussy.

* Karen is sent home. How is it not Jeremy? I understand Karen’s dish wasn’t very authentic, but neither was Jeremy’s, plus it seems like hers tasted better.

* By the way, that’s easily the most emotional goodbye from other chefs we’ve seen this year. She’s struck me as a little glib on screen, but she must be much more genuine in person than I thought.

* LCK: Teppanyaki challenge. Ten minutes to prep, ten to cook and put on a show. We end up with the chefs doing shots of sake. It’s just so much more collegial in LCK than on the main show.

* Karen calls and audible and changes her dish to lobster fried rice when her omelet cooks a little too fast. She serves it with a quail egg, mushrooms, and asparagus. It looks very messy but like it has a zillion flavors. I would also eat this.

* Jason says he’s a “natural performer” and is into drag … with an actual character he’s named Sissy Chablis. He makese seared wagyu NY strip with shiitakes, asparagus, and quail egg, topped with “dancing” bonito flakes. It seems like his dish was a little better executed and he gave a little more entertainment, so he wins again, his fourth in a row.

* Rankings: Kwame, Marjorie, Amar, Carl, Isaac, Jeremy. How many chances can Jeremy get? Outside of his crudo dishes, he hasn’t really excelled, and he seems to be trending downward as the challenges progress and the competition gets better.

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

And now, Restaurant Wars, part two…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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