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.

I held my usual Klawchat yesterday. The top 100 prospects package starts to roll out on Wednesday with the organizational rankings; the top 100 list itself follows on Thursday, with the org reports (including top tens) posting the following week.

This week’s episode was really half of a two-parter, so there’s no Judges’ Table and no elimination. But I do like the format change for reasons I’ll get into below.

* Isaac seems befuddled by his frequent near-eliminations, and thinks it’s because he’s losing to chefs who do much more refined presentations. He says, “I don’t tweezify my plates,” and if nothing else that’s a great word that needs to enter my Top Chef recap vocabulary. (The guy who got sent home last week was axed for tweezifying his plate, so I’m not sure what Isaac is getting at here.)

* The guest judge is Bill Chait, owner of Bestia in LA, and the man makes Debbie Downer look like a ray of sunshine. Jeez, Bill, you’re judging on Top Chef. You could perk up a bit.

* The chefs have a Restaurant Wars song and dance. It is not going to win an Emmy.

* Amar and Karen win the knife pulls to pick teams for Restaurant Wars. Amar picks Kwame. Karen picks Marjorie, calling her the “Top Chef MVP” for her versatility. Those are the easy top two choices, I say. Amar takes Jeremy. Karen takes Carl. Amar takes Phillip because Phillip wants to do front of house and Amar doesn’t. So Karen gets Isaac.

* Here’s the format change: This time, each team will do two services, lunch and dinner, and still gets just 24 hours to prepare. Every chef must take a turn at either executive chef or front of house for one service. This seems way more fair than the old system, where the eliminated chefs were nearly always from one of those two positions.

* Kwame feels Phillip can be “adamant.” That’s one way to put it.

* In the team menu planning sessions, Isaac’s ideas are all going over like lead balloons, and he’s kind of getting ignored/plowed over. Marjorie seems to be completely ignoring him, like he’s not even standing there. I would expect him to break the table in half at this point.

* I hate the part of Restaurant Wars where the chefs go pick their décor and flatware and such. Is this something any chef would normally do? It’s always lousy television. I’m here for the food, not the fucking wall art.

* Kwame: “Phillip wants to do mason jars and I think that’s so ten years ago Brooklyn.” I … nah, he’s right, I can’t snark this.

* So the Karen/Marjorie/Carl/Isaac team calls its restaurant Palate (okay, how about “Palette” with a wild color scheme?), and plans ten dishes plus a bread course for the two meals.

* Jeremy is making risotto. You know how that goes. It also looks like he’s making it ahead and cooling it on sheet pans … that seems like a really terrible idea.

* Isaac says he’s glad he’s not with the four “bros” on the other team, and that the two high-powered women on his team are “ego-less.” I don’t think Karen is ego-less, although Marjorie certainly seems to keep hers on a bare simmer.

* Phillip’s strawberry salad has a million steps, even though Kwame has to assemble it. This is beyond “adamant” – it’s self-destructive. You know someone else is making your dish, so make it simple.

* Marjorie marinated beets with baby greens pepitas and garrotxa; Carl pork and bacon terrine; Karen steak salad; Isaac shellfish stew with fennel.

* Jeremy crispy egg charred asparagus and truffle vin; Kwame corn and sage veloute; Amar roasted chicken breast with polenta; Phillip roasted salmon with crispy skin.

* Padma’s cleavage is on the menu. Almost literally.

* Here’s where the two-episode format kind of hurts the tension: When the judges arrive at District LA (Jeremy/Amar/Kwame/Phillip), Jeremy, the exec chef for lunch, pushes all other tables’ dishes back and puts the judges’ dishes at the front of the queue. This creates a pileup later that we don’t really get to see, especially since they seem to be having real trouble with the servers knowing what to do – or with the kitchen not giving them enough food.

* Their starters include Jeremy’s grilled asparagus, arugula salad, crispy egg, and truffle vinaigrette; and Kwame’s corn and sage velouté with pancetta and pickled corn, crispy sage. Both get high marks, although Bill is the only one who thinks soup is underseasoned. I’m starting to think he could tell you a double rainbow was too colorful.

* Marjorie has to try to push tables out the door. People are lingering like it’s some kind of prank, like the producers told everyone, “hey, when you’re done eating, don’t leave.”

* Tom has noticed that Jeremy isn’t feeding other tables. This seems like the kind of thing that gets your ass sent home, right?

* Somehow the judges’ table didn’t get utensils, and neither did some other tables. Did they hire servers off the street?

* Phillip’s main course is a roasted salmon with crispy skin, greek yogurt, and ratatouille. Amar served yet another roasted chicken breast (blech) with creamy polenta and wild mushroom ragout. Phillip’s salmon is good but the vegetables are undercooked, and Padma says she doesn’t like the ratatouille served over the fish (I totally agree – wouldn’t the heat from the vegetables continue cooking the fish and ruin its texture?). Amar’s doesn’t have enough sauce, and Tom points out that’s three times he’s sous vided a chicken breast. Unless it’s a heritage bird, or truly free-range and pasture-raised, the chicken’s breast will have no flavor of its own. It’s the worst protein to choose for a competition.

* Marjorie starts giving people booze to get them to abandon their tables. It’s kind of clever, actually. Sort of a Pied Piper act for grown-ups.

* Carl’s starter is a pork and bacon terrine with haricots verts, gem lettuces, prosciutto, salumi, and golden raisins. Marjorie served marinated beets with pickled cauliflower and shaved garrotxa (a semi-soft Spanish goat cheese). The terrine is just not good – Tom looks mildly disgusted by it. The rest of the dish was better, but that’s not salvaging anything. Marjorie’s beets were a little simple but done well. I love roasted beets and have had them in a few dozen restaurants by now, and the one thing that seems missing from her dish is something to add crunch, like pepitas or pistachios. It also sounds like it had no spice at all, so you’re getting sweetness and acidity but not much else. I had a great charred beet dish at Brigantessa in the Passyunk neighborhood of Philly last night, and it included a grilled head of treviso for that sharp, bitter flavor.

* Jeremy’s completely in the weeds now because of his decision to put the judges’ dishes first. When lunch service is technically over, his restaurant still has diners waiting for food.

* Karen’s main course is a grilled flank steak salad with shaved carrots, daikon, jicama, cabbage, papaya, herbs, and nuts. Isaac’s dish is a seafood stew cod with shrimp, clams, and mussels. Karen’s is the best dish the judges have had. Tom likes the added flavors from the Thai basil, mint, and cilantro – kind of like a spring roll herb combination. Isaac’s stew was solid, with big flavors from saffron and fennel, but no one seems blown away by it.

* The quick consensus from the judges is that Palate had much stronger entrees, while District had better apps.

* And … that’s it. The preview of next week makes it look like at least one team has everything go totally pear-shaped during dinner, so that could be fun in a sadistic sort of way.

If you’re looking for info on the top 100, it’s in today’s “Stick to baseball” links post.

This episode was definitely not my favorite. We got a challenge that wasn’t about cooking at all, then a challenge that was basically who can do the best Texas de Brasil impersonation.

* We do get some interesting background on Kwame before the Quickfire. When he was “about 19,” he was selling drugs to pay his tuition – I assume that last bit was connecting to the rupture between him and his father that he described in the previous episode – until his girlfriend told him he was “better than this,” after which he moved to Louisiana and became a professional cook. What I found really interesting about the monologue was when he said that he figured if he could be a successful drug dealer, he could be successful at something he really cared about. So selling drugs gave him the confidence to go be a great chef. That’s … weird, but good, I guess.

* Chad blow-dries his beard. I really have no words for this.

* Also, we see Karen and Marjorie sharpening their knives in the morning before challenge, a reminder to me that I just don’t do this often enough, mostly because I hate the sound of the knife scraping the stone.

* Quickfire: Food porn. Chef “Jacques La Merde” (merde is the French word for “shit”), an anonymous, minor celebrity on Instagram, is on in silhouette with his voice disguised, saying he’s “feeling pretty soigné today,” and keeps saying “bro,” just in case you weren’t in on the joke. The account has over 30K followers and posts pics of beautiful plates made from junk food. The quickfire challenge is for chefs have to do the same: make beautiful plates from junk food. Really. All nine plates will be (were) posted to Bravo’s Instagram account, and the one with the most likes wins the challenge. So it’s a plating challenge with immunity and it doesn’t matter what the food tastes like.

* Phillip says in the confessional that “You eat with your eyes before you eat with your mouth.” Then we get Isaac saying, “people who say they eat with their eyes first should be stabbed with a pork chop bone.” I’m Team Isaac, for what it’s worth.

* So half the chefs don’t seem to know what “soigné” means. It’s one of Chef La Merde’s favorite hashtags, and means refined or elegant if you want to sound like a total douche. The French word soigner just means to treat or take care of someone or something, but apparently we stole and distorted the word from them about two hundred years ago. They’re probably still mad at us.

* Amar loves spray cheese, saying, “That’s the original foam.” Silly me, I thought the original foam was whipped cream.

* Chef Jacques La Merde is actually Christine Flynn, a French Culinary Institute-trained chef who now works for the Toronto health food chain iQ Foods.

* Amar painted half his plate with fermented black bean paste to make it look like wood. That was the only thing I saw on any of these plates that looked clever.

* Kwame’s was the “first one that you could eat that would make sense. Pretty soigné.” That’s so much less amusing when it’s said out loud, isn’t it?

* Phillip going way overboard to take the ideal pic. Padma even has to hurry him along and count down “3, 2…” like she’s telling her kid to get upstairs for bed already.

* Elimination challenge: Neal Fraser, chef/owner of Redbird in LA, where they host occasional “beefsteak” banquets: Black-tie affairs, for charity, where guests only eat with their hands and are served beef tenderloin, whole roasted salmon, and a few side dishes. Fraser describes it as a “gluttonous feast,” which is not very soigné in 2016 when we know that people don’t need to eat all that protein, raising cows en masse is not environmentally sound unless it’s done very well, and overfishing and ocean acidification are depleting stocks around the globe. So, hey, let’s have a big celebration of overeating!

* The team of Marjorie-Isaac-Chad isn’t doing a beef dish at all. I do like her idea of doing bread as one of the sides because it becomes a vehicle for eating the other foods.

* Phillip just wants to cook lamb, so his team (with Amar and Jeremy) is not doing beef either.

* Amar buys a 25 pound, $575 halibut! I don’t even think that’s a very big halibut, but man that’s an expensive creature.

* Chad wants to make ahi tuna – originally he wanted another fish but Whole Foods only had a few pounds – yet can’t figure out how to serve it. You eat sushi with your hands and that is the quintessential fish for sushi. Maybe that’s too fussy for beefsteak, but if you’re choosing that fish, you have lots of raw and near-raw options for serving it.

* Isaac is making chicken sausage with bacon, which is their meat dish in place of beef. “It’s a good way of showing that chicken can be decadent … when it’s packed full of bacon!” So why not make a beef sausage with bacon? I’m thinking like the Bar at Husk burger, which I think is equal parts chuck, brisket, and bacon.

* Round one: Carl New Zealand lamb with prune, Amar halibut with mustard vin, cucumber, pickled red onion: jeremy roasted carrots with spiced yogurt, fried Brussels sprouts with bacon cilantro and sweet and sour sauce.

* The central group of judges and diners includes Colin Hanks, Simpsons executive producer Matt Selman (who appeared to be completely hammered), Top Chef Masters winner Chris Cosentino, Recipe for Deception host Max Silvestri, and our dear friend Hugh Acheson.

* Padma calls serving the halibut like this “a little pansy to me,” which was probably not the best choice of words. Hugh expresses the sentiment much more diplomatically, saying the food was “dainty.” Max says eating the lamb, where you grabbed the bone and tore the meat off with your teeth, was the one really satisfying moment.

* Hugh throws Padma’s half-eaten lamb at another table, which was absolutely the best part of the entire episode.

* Round two: Isaac’s chicken bacon sausage with grilled cabbage; Chad’s seared ahi tuna with citrus, pickled beets, radish, and black sesame; Marjorie’s assorted pickled vegetables and milk bread (which looks like Parker house rolls … I could eat those for days). The judges liked the sausage concept but it didn’t have enough fat. Colin Hanks says the “looked rad, (but) it did not taste rad.” Tom says of Chad’s dish that there shall be “no micro greens at a beef steak.” Marjorie’s stuff was good, of course.

* After Selman says – in that way a drunk person says something he thinks is hilarious but that is not actually funny – that a beefsteak should be about “sexism” (what?), Issac is quick with the response, “I wanted to put my sausage in your mouth.” Hugh, never to be outquipped, “You have a dry sausage, though, so I’m not sure I want to put it in my mouth.” I’m sure Padma thinks they’re all pansies by now.

* Round three: Kwame’s peel-and-eat shrimp with thyme, garlic, Cajun seasoning, and drawn butter; Carl and Karen’s roasted strip loin with romesco; Karen’s asparagus with chorizo and some undefined dish of potatoes and olives.

* Kwame seems to have actually messed a dish up for real: His shrimp ranged from overcooked to very overcooked and seems to have been oversalted. The beef dish was not “caveman” enough. Should they have just served roadkill? Actually – and I’m only saying this with the benefit of having seen the whole episode – if they could have gotten any sort of blood and made something with it, even black pudding, it might have gone over really well as a nod to the spirit of the challenge. But I didn’t think of that till after I watched, and blood isn’t easy to find.

* So the universal feedback is that nobody “got” the challenge. Maybe the problem was the challenge itself, right?

* Winner of the Quickfire Instagram challenge: Karen. Okay, who cares.

* Tom asks, “why didn’t we get decadence?” Well, selecting chefs for the show was probably about the chefs’ refinement and ability to build flavors or cook in new or unusual ways, so maybe you confused the hell out of them, or should have just invited Uncle Gus on the show instead.

* Amar, Jeremy, and Phillip had the favorite meal. Their lamb was the only protein served on the bone. Jeremy’s vegetable dishes were both good. Amar’s fish was done well, but was just not appropriate for the challenge. The winner, unanimously, was Phillip. Jeremy says right away, “nice dude! About time, huh?” Even though the other chefs find Phillip annoying, it doesn’t seem like they dislike him – or anyone in their ranks now, really.

* Marjorie, Chad, and Isaac on the bottom. Tom says, “If you’re doing to make us sausage, don’t serve us chicken.” I would have thought Isaac would have done some kind of andouille, something that lights you on fire and drips with pork fat, but the judges even said his sausage didn’t have a lot of taste. He says he makes it at his restaurant, so something was off. Marjorie’s vegetables and bread were delicious, with Tom saying, “I’d have to say you are the best baker to ever be on this show.” That is high praise.

* Padma says Chad’s dish “ate fine.” I hate that expression. It’s the “pitchability” of foodspeak – words that sound apposite and mean nothing at all.

* Chad is eliminated. Unsurprising – his dish really missed the mark and he never even seemed comfortable with his concept.

* Restaurant Wars next week! It’s a two-parter where they serve two meals and rotate roles, which might actually be more fair than the usual “exec chef of the losing team goes home.”

* Rankings: Kwame, Marjorie, Jeremy, Carl, Amar, Karen, Phillip, Isaac. I’m kind of floored Isaac didn’t crush this “RAWR MEAT” challenge, and his relative lack of range seems like a huge weakness given who else is left.

* LCK: Chad and Jason get 25 minutes to prep a beef dish, but only 5 minutes with their knives for butchering. Tom says he wants “to see your inner caveman here.” Chad goes for the head, Jason for the bone-in ribeye. Chad grinds up cheek, eye, and tongue to make chili. Jason is making chuleton with grilled onions, basil, mint, and braised olives, which seems like a dish perfectly suited to please Tom (if it’s cooked right). His response is kind of telling: “That’s like beefsteak!” Chad made a huitlacoche puree, no-bean chili, grilled cheek, and crème fraiche on top. Tom says the whole challenge was “fantastic” and both guys did a great job with their beef. And then he says Chad’s dish “ate really really well,” just to mock me. The winner is Jason. Tom thinks Chad underdid the cheeks a little, but still says it was a great dish. I can’t see Jason hanging with who’s left in the main show, though – Chad might have had a chance.

Second strong episode in a row, with almost complete emphasis on the craft of cooking, which is good because next week’s (Instagram users voting?) looks like a trainwreck.

* We start out with lots of scenes of the chatter among the ten remaining chefs, who are driving back up to LA in two vans. Most of it was just small talk, until some of the chefs started ribbing Kwame about his crush on Padma. He doesn’t even flinch: “what guy wouldn’t be attracted to Padma?” I can’t really argue with that, although at 5’9″ she’d tower over me even without heels. I did like his chianti-dry delivery of his supposed date line to Padma, saying he’d show up with flowers … and a Yorkie. “‘Surprise, I got you a dog!’ That wouldn’t be weird, right?”

* Season 4 and All-Stars contestant Antonia, now at Scopa and Black Market Liquor Bar in LA, is back to judge the Quickfire. Each chef gets to choose one ingredient, and thosee ten in total are the only items available to all chefs (although they don’t have to use all ten). We’re also back to immunity rather than sudden death, which is welcome. The chefs go one at a time, each getting twenty seconds to go grab an ingredient.

* Phillip grabs prime beef loin. Isaac grabs … a whole chicken? Marjorie asks (in the confessional) “why are you choosing another protein?” That made no sense to me either. I think only one of the chefs was really glad to see chicken, as it turned out. It’s versatile because it’s pretty flavorless.

* Chad grabs jalapeños, of course. Jeremy gets kosher salt, to which Isaac says, “thank God.” (I mean, if none of the chefs picked salt, would they really have denied that ingredient to everyone? How can you cook anything, especially any protein, without salt?) Marjorie grabs rice vinegar … I might have gone for lemons but any acid is good. Karen gets olive oil. Kwame takes garlic, which he says he can’t cook without. Amar takes cremini mushrooms. Carl gets a big basket of heirloom tomatoes. Jason, picking last, kind of annoys a lot of the other chefs by taking celery rather than an herb or other flavoring agent. I was surprised no one went for black pepper, butter, bacon, or onions. I’d never think to grab celery before onion, for example. I wouldn’t even take garlic before onion.

* Carl points out that this challenge is like “cooking at home” with just a few things in the fridge. Granted, our homes don’t have equipment this nice, but it’s nice for once to see a challenge that at least somewhat reflects the limitations home cooks face – and the common challenge of “I need to make dinner with what’s in the house already.”

* Amar says Charlie Palmer, one of his first bosses, always judged chefs and restaurants by how they cooked chicken. Now that I can see: it’s probably an easy dish for restaurants to half-ass, because if you go to a high-end place (especially a steakhouse) and order chicken, the kitchen is just not going to take you very seriously. I’m not saying that’s right; I’m saying that’s how it is.

* After picking chicken as his ingredient, Isaac cooks steak. I mean, he has the right to do that, but why not pick an ingredient you know you’ll use heavily?

* Jason is unapologetic about the celery and seems to enjoy the fact that other chefs are a little miffed. He’s right about its versatility and I could not agree more with him about the leaves. I buy whole stalks (sometimes called “heads” … sometimes “stalk” refers to a single rib) because I want the leaves and tender ribs in the center, and whatever I don’t use ends up in the next batch of poultry stock.

* Amar mocks Jeremy for yet another raw preparation – tataki style beef, which is kind of like a Japanese carpaccio, usually very lightly seared or grilled just to warm the exterior, raw in the center, and seasoned with vinegar and a paste of ginger. Jeremy just heats the surface with a blowtorch, but Amar is correct that Jeremy leans a little too much on the raw preps.

* Karen says she doesn’t want to complain about the ingredients they had and in doing so manages to complain about the ingredients they had while Padma and Antonia are tasting her dish.

* Least favorites: Isaac’s seared carpaccio with shaved jalapeños and mushrooms and tomato concentrate was both unappealing to look at and underwhelming to taste. Antonia says Karen’s flavors in her grilled steak salad with grilled and raw celery and jalapeño vinaigrette were “beautiful,” but that there was “no focus” to the dish. I’m trying to figure out how a jalapeño vinaigrette would taste like anything but pain.

* Favorites: Jeremy’s tataki-style steak with shaved mushrooms and crispy garlic vinaigrette worked as planned, especially the slight texture change that came from warming the top of the meat (I guess starting to denature the proteins without fully cooking them?). Amar’s wood-roasted chicken breast – that takes stones, serving the most boring part of the chicken in a competition like this – with roasted tomato vinaigrette and mushrooms à la Grecque (with olive oil, lemon juice, and herbs) showed great finesse and technique. Jeremy wins. Amar looks pissed, and why not? He actually cooked. Jeremy just sort of prepared, no?

* Elimination challenge: Ten years ago this year, Top Chef premiered (pre-Padma!). Each chef must create a dish representing who s/he was ten years ago.

* Jeremy was in a metal band … and had hair. Anyone catch what kind of guitar that was?

* Kwame talks about how ten years ago, he was starting high school and it marked the beginning of the end of his relationship with his strict father. Over the rest of the episode he makes it clear that the relationship never recovered and they haven’t spoken in years.

* Jason ten years ago was in his first management job, but says he was kind of awful to staff and used to chew out cooks who screwed up the restaurant’s signature trout dish, which was actually quite difficult to make.

* Marjorie wants to make green curry, but the Whole Foods they visit is out of lemongrass (in LA? Really?). She buys jarred green curry paste instead, which struck me at the time as a colossal mistake, because chefs get killed all the time for buying anything that’s that processed rather than working from scratch. Turned out I was wrong about it, but that’s what I thought in real-time.

* Carl does a pretty good Tom impersonation but we need to see more of this to put a grade on it.

* Chad quit drinking a year and a half ago and has since dropped 75 pounds, which in and of itself seems like a good reward for getting sober, although of course he talks about the improvements in his life too. I would have liked more on how he quit drinking – a good success story needs that aspect too as a way to encourage others, I think.

* So Recipe for Deception premiering last night means we never have to hear that “I just got a culinary boner” dipshit again, right? I do appreciate Bravo warning me that I want no part of that show. If that’s the line you chose to use in the commercial that introduces the show to the audience, it must be all kinds of awful. Also, boner jokes are only funny if your age hasn’t reached double digits yet.

* Jason is dressed like a clown. Yellow pants, red shoes. He’s talking about his look as if it’s some kind of fashion statement, but looking like you bought Ronald McDonald’s hand-me-downs and got dressed in the dark is not a fashion statement.

* Marjorie decides to grill some lemons to pull out the bitter aromatics in the rind and use that as a substitute for lemongrass. The two plants are not related: lemons are a true citrus tree (Citrus limon), while culinary lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) is a flowering rhizome that is typically harvested as soon as its stalks are mature. Both contain the aldehyde citral, also called lemonal, which has the strong aroma of lemon but is only found in small amounts in actual lemons, showing up more in lemongrass, lemon verbena, and other lemony plants. So she might need a lot of grilled lemon to replace what she lost when she couldn’t buy lemongrass, but at least she has that one chemical similarity as a hinge between the two ingredients.

* Michael Voltaggio is one of the guest judges, yet when he asks Phillip how the experience has been, Phillip says right in front of Tom that he has had to “cook food that makes the judges happy,” which makes Tom make that WTF face he makes when someone says something incomprehensibly stupid. Marjorie says in the confessional that she thinks “the kid is delusional.” It’s hard to argue with that.

* Amar makes a dish for his former mentor from ten years ago, Long Island chef Gerry Hayden, who was very sick at the time with ALS and passed away in September, probably not long after the episode finished shooting. Tom gets very choked up as they talk – visibly so, and the editors just let the moment “breathe,” with the camera on Tom while he tried to keep some composure. All reality shows want real emotions like that and end up trying to manufacture them through challenges, false drama, and other silliness. This was one moment that I think will stand out for a long time from season 13. (The episode ended with a brief full-screen honoring Chef Hayden’s memory.)

* Kwame’s dad is half Jamaican. One of the only decent memories Kwame seems to have of that period was going to jerk chicken shacks with his dad, although even talking about that seems to weigh him down further. I don’t know what it’s like to have such a terrible relationship with a parent – I have a couple of good friends who’ve had to sever parental ties, for reasons such as a history of abuse, and I can at least see the shadow it leaves on a person’s soul even after s/he has made the right decision to end the relationship. Anyway, we don’t know exactly what Kwame split with his father over, but it was clearly something worse than we’re hearing, and it’s got Kwame in a bit of a mental tailspin here. In hindsight, he probably should have pulled back for another memory, maybe an earlier or later year – it’s not like the judges know where he was in 2006 – but once he’d committed to this dish he was pretty well stuck.

* Blais is wearing a blue camo blazer for the upcoming war with invading aquatic creatures from Kepler-22b.

* Talk about a table where I’d love to just sit and listen: In addition to the five judges, we get Mei, Antonia, Zach Pollack, and iconic baker/restaurateur Nancy Silverton, who looks like my great-aunt Antoinette in that black and white outfit and with her hair up in clips. (Don’t laugh: “Aunty” was once President of the Amateur Astronomers’ Association of New York and longtime physics teacher who died about eight years ago at age 100.) Chef Silverton’s La Brea Bakery, and associated cookbook Breads from the La Brea Bakery, often show up in discussions of what and who started the artisan bread revival in the U.S.

* The dishes … Marjorie made a seared halibut with grilled and roasted vegetables in green curry sauce; so it turns out the lemon trick worked out great and I had it all wrong. Blais even said her vegetables were so good that maybe she didn’t need fish. (Am I dumb for expecting rice? Probably. Stupid American.) Chad made a shrimp ceviche with tomato concassé, shrimp cracker, pickled serrano, olive, and caper. Both dishes were hits.

* Isaac made a duck gumbo with roasted jalapeño andouille sausage, crispy rice cake, and duck cracklings. Man, I want to make this and then eat it, especially now since I’m still fighting some sort of bad respiratory infection. Jason made poached trout with toasted beets, spring vegetable salad, and goat milk vinaigrette, but he didn’t season the fish correctly before poaching it and had to top it with what looks like an excessive amount of finishing salt before service. Tom clearly does not like it – he turns like he’s debating the etiquette of spitting it out. Volt says the fish is perfectly poached, but it “stopped right there.” I’m very much on board with having him back as a judge more frequently – his comments are very specific and, at least this week, never denigrating. Anyone seen the cookbook he and his brother wrote a few years ago, VOLT ink.?

* Karen made orecchiete with pork ragù and broccoli rabe. She left some radicchio leaves whole, which meant they stayed fairly bitter, but I think the judges liked the concept. Still, it’s fresh pasta in a pork ragu with earthy vegetables – it’s not that novel so it has to be executed better than this. Amar made a butter-poached lobster with sauteed bok choy, tapioca curry, and tempura onion rings. Volt likes the homage to Chef Hayden and everyone seems to agree that the lobster is cooked perfectly. I assumed he’d be in the top three at this point.

* Carl made a fricassee (a meat dish that starts like a stir-fry but finishes like a braise) of California vegetables, burgundy snails, and fried eggs, along with a spring garlic puree. This is a clear hit from plating to tasting. Phillip made a ceviche mixto with tiger shrimp, halibut, razor claims, and pressure-cooked squid. Chef Silverton says it lacks brightness of true ceviche, but then Volt drops the cleaver by saying it was a “not-so-fresh fish taste” per Volt. If someone describes your seafood dish with a catchphrase from a 1980s douche commercial, you should probably log off your knives and go. Instead, Phillip just blames the judges again for not appreciating his genius.

* Jeremy lobster ravioli with a shellfish sauce (looks like a foam to me) and king salmon. The salmon is well cooked but unnecessary, and everyone just seems kind of whelmed – not underwhelmed, but there’s no praise here – until Padma drops this non sequitur “good thing you have immunity” bit. Either they edited out Tom saying it tasted like the before picture in a Febreze commercial or that was a real overreaction. Kwame made jerk broccoli with corn bread pudding and smokey blue cheese, and presents it with no conviction or any emotion other than exhaustion. Tom says “this is just confusing the hell out of me.” Silverton says a dish “has to look visually appealing” and this doesn’t. Volt, with pretty good insight for someone who just walked in, infers how Kwame’s emotional connection to food in general and the specific nature of this challenge probably worked against him. Padma dismisses the two with a curt “see you later,” although “off with their heads!” may have fit the mood more.

* Top three: Marjorie, Chad, and Carl. Chad’s ceviche was very acidic and bright. Marjorie’s was technically well executed. Tom liked her story, liked the dish, and liked the audible she called with the lemons. Carl’s was very classic and timeless, per Gail, although that doesn’t usually win a challenge. Marjorie wins. She kind of does this Eeyore thing when talking to the camera but she’s been fairly consistently in the top 3 just about all season now, other than that weird hiccup in the beer challenge, where Blais loved the dish but the beer she used didn’t come through in the sauce.

* Bottom: Kwame, Phillip, and Jason. Kwame “tried to bring a good memory out of some bad memories” and it didn’t work. Phillip is really acting like a narcissist at this point, saying, “I know this panel likes … really spicy” foods, like it’s just not possible that he’s cooking inferior dishes to those of these other very talented chefs. Tom, with his customary impatience for bullshit, cuts that off with “We just want good food up here.” Simplest dictum there could be. Jason just flat-out underseasoned the fish, which is typically a fatal error on this show. You do not give Tom Colicchio protein that is overcooked or underseasoned.

* Jason is eliminated. I would have preferred Phillip, especially given the whining, but given the face that Tom made while eating Jason’s dish, it had to have tasted pretty bad. Underseasoned fish is atrocious to eat.

* LCK: Take bland ingredients and make something flavorful, using the sponsor Soy Vey’s Teriyaki sauce (soy sauce; sugar; dried garlic, onion, and ginger; and sesame seeds and oil), which, while very sweet – and let’s face it, Tom ain’t using this in his restaurants – does at least include a lot of the base flavors you’d want in stir-fry dishes. I don’t know what will happen if you end up reducing it, though – it could get very sticky, or very salt, or maybe even both. Soy sauce is great but if that’s your only real source of umami you may end up with too much salt by the time you get enough glutamates.

* Angelina made terikyaki shrimp with potato and onion hash and a celery and orange salad. Shrimp a little overcooked. Jason made a salmon fillet with soft-cooked egg with broccoli and grilled sweet potato salad. Tom screwed with him a bit, asking if that’s how he liked the salmon cooked as if it were overdone, but Tom (like me) prefers his salmon around medium. Jason wins, just because Angelina’s shrimp was a tick overdone. I understand the need for sponsorships to pay for the web series, but this is too blatant a product promotion for my tastes (no pun intended).

* Rankings: Kwame, Marjorie, Carl, Jeremy, Amar, Chad, Karen, Isaac, Phillip.

Two new Insider posts from Saturday – a draft blog post on Delvin Perez and other Puerto Rican prospects and another post on the Ian Kennedy and Chris Davis contracts.

I thought this was the best episode of the season. The challenges were all well-designed and focused on the food. The dishes on the whole sounded really good – even one of the judges’ least favorites from the elimination challenge sounded like something I’d want to make at home. But there was one moment in the quickfire challenge that absolutely pissed me off.

* First we get some postgame drama from the previous challenge, with Jason killing Phillip in a big group discussion after the judging. Phillip comes off increasingly lacking in self-awareness every week, including his comment to Jason: “What you call gummy, I may enjoy. Does that make me wrong?” He’s shouted down with “yes,” because gummy potatoes are just disgusting (and I think are considered “wrong” by pretty much everybody – any decent cookbook explains that you shouldn’t overwork mashed potatoes for this reason). Plus it’s clear that in a challenge where all the chefs are on one team, they’re embarrassed to have a failure anywhere in the meal, even if it indirectly benefits them in the competition.

* Off to San Diego … their drive down from Palm Springs was totally fake. I can tell because we saw no traffic.

* Chad joined the Navy after 9/11, which is how he ended up in San Diego. He says he joined because he “wanted to kick whoever’s ass did that to us.” That mentality was apt in 1941.

* Javier Plascencia is the guest judge for the Quickfire; I didn’t realize this, but he has a new restaurant in San Diego’s resurgent Little Italy neighborhood called Bracero. Also, I keep wanting to call him Javier Placenta.

* The quickfire challenge is to make fish tacos in 20 minutes, and unfortunately, it’s a sudden death quickfire. I hate these gimmicks.

* In the scramble for ingredients, Jeremy called Wesley a “dick” for taking a lobster from him, which appears to have come because Jeremy was trying to take two and Wesley wanted one. I’m waiting for the inevitable episode where one chef kicks another in the balls over a slab of foie gras.

* And then Wesley can’t seem to hold on to his crustacean, putting it on Marjorie’s station and freaking out when he thinks someone stole it, eventually admitting, “I just misplaced my lobster.” He should be tagged with that in the future; instead of saying where he works, his font should say “Wesley: Misplaced Lobster.”

* Carl says he opened a taco stand in Nicaragua on a whim while staying there with his girlfriend. That’s kind of awesome, and apparently Nicaragua doesn’t have a very high standard covering who can sell food there.

* Chad makes his dish very spicy because Javier “eats habaneros like they’re apples.” More importantly, Chad says it correctly, with no tilde on the n. (Jalapeño, but habanero.)

* Is it really a bad idea to do your own tortillas? Marjorie is. I’ve never had a packaged tortilla that could come close to the worst fresh ones I’ve made. They start to dry out the moment they touch the air. Meanwhile, Wesley is doing a taco without a tortilla, more like a sushi roll, which does not strike me as something you can eat with your hands.

* And then, this happened: Angelina plated right on her cutting board, not on the plates, so she can’t serve anything to the judges. Is that not ticky-tack? If the dishes are done, they’re done, and they’re just a few inches away from the plates themselves. I don’t see any good reason why she couldn’t have served from there. The food was finished – and if it wasn’t, then she’d be judged on that, not on an empty dish. This isn’t failing to use a required ingredient, or continuing to cook or plate once time had expired. She made the dish. Just fucking eat it.

* Which brings me to my second point: Competition rules aside, I have a real problem with wasting food. The fact that Padma and Javier wouldn’t even taste that food – did it just go in the trash? – is beyond insulting. Taste it, give some feedback, and inform her she’s automatically on the bottom if you must. This was equivalent to taking her food and dumping it on the floor. Javier could easily have pled ignorance and just picked up one taco to taste it, even if it didn’t “count” for the show.

* Favorites: Karen’s oyster taco with kimchi-sesame salsa, pickled red cabbage, and avocado; Chad’s very spicy grilled thresher shark with oyster and sea urchin salsa, soy, and sesame; and, of course, Kwame, who made a wahoo taco with truffle cream and chipotle salsa. Winner is Chad, the hometown boy. Canking up the capsaicin appears to have been good strategy.

* Meanwhile, Phillip, from his orbit somewhere beyond Neptune: “Why is it that when I cook something perfect, I’m not in the top? I don’t understand. Am I not supposed to be making yummy food?” Well, you could start by not saying “yummy” because you’re not a three-year-old.

* Bottom: Angelina by default. Wesley goes on camera, saying failing to plate is “just stupid,” and then he knocks three trays and a pile of mangos on the floor. Angelina has to pick one chef to battle to save herself from elimination, and chooses … Wesley, because he “can get into his own head sometimes.”

* The quickfire elimination challenge is Caesar salad-inspired. It was invented in the restaurant Javier owns now, called Caesar, and the chefs must make any dish using only the ingredients he uses in that salad. I was a bit surprised to see anchovies in the dressing; I’m pretty sure Alton Brown said in his episode on the subject that they were not traditional.

* Wesley is struggling to fry an egg cleanly. Angelina calls out Wesley for double-dipping a spoon. This is kind of a race to the bottom at this point.

* Wesley eventually makes a proper fried egg, serving it with anchovy remoulade, grilled romaine hearts, croutons, and lime zest. Angelina made crostini with garlic, olive oil, dijon vinaigrette, lime, grilled romaine, and anchovy. Wesley’s was simple, with a perfectly cooked (!) egg, but Javier wanted more of the “garlic condiment of the lettuce” (I think that’s what he said – I listened three times and that’s the best I got). Angelina had a good idea but Javier says he wanted more sauce. Wesley wins, so Angelina goes home. I also think Angelina’s dish didn’t show much technique at all – it sounded more like layered ingredients but nothing like Wesley’s remoulade or grilled romaine.

* Elimination challenge: Emeril, Tom, and Blais show up with craft beer that they (including Padma) made in conjunction with Stone Brewing, a major microbrewer in the city. Each chef gets one and has to create a dish that includes or emphasizes the flavors the judge added to that beer. Padma’s golden ale includes jalapeño, ginger, and tamarind. Blais’ stout contains beets, chocolate, and ras el hanout (a Moroccan/Maghreb spice mix that includes about a dozen ingredients, like combining the spices for a pumpkin pie with those in a garam masala). Emeril’s beer, type unknown, contained coffee, cayenne, and tangerine. Tom’s wheat beer has lemon, coriander, and banana (for body). Wheat beer with coriander sounds very soapy to me – and I happen to really like coriander.

* They’re cooking at Juniper + Ivy, Blais’ first restaurant in Little Italy – his second, the Crack Shack, just opened right next door – and one of my favorite places to eat in the country. I think I even spotted one of my servers on the show. Anyway, if you haven’t picked up Blais’ cookbook, Try This At Home, I recommend it highly. (That links to my review.)

* If the episode is just an hour long, so 44 minutes of content without commercials, we could do with less footage in Whole Foods and more footage of actual cookery.

* Isaac says that banana is fatty (which it most definitely is not), so he has the idea to make it into a sort of mayonnaise that he calls “#banannaise.” Don’t try this at home, kids. Mostly because it will be gross.

* One of the guests at judges’ table – possibly the guy from Stone – says there are 106 microbreweries in San Diego, further proving that it is the greatest place to live in the continental United States.

* The dishes start with Padma’s beer. Chad made a carrot-roasted opah (moonfish) with ginger hominy, jalapeño purée, and tamarind-glazed carrots. Good marks all around. Amar made a sous vide chicken breast, crispy chicken thigh, jalapeño popper, and tamarind ginger chutney. This gets higher marks, particularly for how it complements the beer.

* Wesley sees that his lamb is overcooked, because he let it rest too long. But remember – Angelina’s mistake was “stupid.”

* The next set of dishes go with Blais’s stout: Karen made a roasted duck breast with cocoa nib beet puree, ras el hanout, and roasted carrots. Wesley served his lamb with roasted beet purée and ras el hanout roasted carrots. The judges pounce, saying the lamb is dry and the beet puree too one-dimensional. Jeremy made duck breast with chocolate granola, pickled beet, and a pickled blueberry hibiscus reduction. The judges like the concept but it needed more fat and more chocolate.

* Emeril’s beer: Marjorie made roasted potato gnocchi with chicken ragù, made with coffee, tangerine, cayenne, and roasted mushrooms. She braised the chicken in the beer, but the flavor of the beer did not come through to the final dish at all, although Blais says he loves it anyway. (The J&I menu always has a couple of hearty pasta dishes along these lines.) Phillip made a roasted duck breast with rutabaga puree, fresh tangerine, and a sauce with coffee in it. Carl made a grilled short rib with ancho chile, coffee, and dried cherry salsa. The pairing with the beer is almost too close, and Emeril says it needed a tiny bit more salt. Just on the description, this sounded the most mundane dish of all – I’ve had short rib preparations with all of those ingredients before.

* Tom’s beer: Isaac made a corn and crab velouté (actually a sauce made with stock and a blond roux) with crispy potato, king crab salad, and his sriracha banannaise. The dish just reads weird to the judges, including the presentation of the crab salad on top of a chunk of a corn cob. Kwame made a chicken mojo with banana soffrito puree, garlic puree, crispy chicken thigh, and garlic green onion. Huge raves, of course. Jason made a pork and squid meatball with a carrot wheat beer sauce, salsa povera, and grilled squid tentacles. The meatball is compared to the stuffing from dim sum dumplings. Blais can’t stop commenting on how weird it is. Tom says, “This is bait, man!”

* Karen, Jeremy, Amar, Kwame were among the judges’ favorites. Their least favorites include Jason’s; Blais keeps calling it weird, Emeril says customers would have sent it back, and Tom says it was too “historical” (based on Jason’s own defense of the dish). Wesley’s was not refined enough, and he killed the lamb. Isaac’s soup was a “muck of a velouté.” Marjorie’s dish was good, but had nowhere near enough beer flavor.

* Judges’ Table: The top three are Amar, Karen, and, The Man We All Know and Love, Kwame. Amar’s dish was “powerful” with the most assertive flavors of the season from him. He went heavy on jalapeño, which seems to have been a winning formula in this episode. Karen’s beet sauce was “addictive” per Tom. Padma loved how Kwame took the banana element form the beer and “made it (his) own.” Tom says, “That dish could stand up anywhere.” Yet the winner is Karen. I really thought Kwame would win based on comments and how clever his use of the banana was; perhaps they’re trying to spread the wins out a little more so he doesn’t Qui the whole season?

* Jason, Isaac, and Wesley on the bottom. Jason’s sounds really terrible. The tentacles were slimy and the whole dish was incredibly strange. Yet Wesley is sent home; Tom says shortly before elimination that the “worst-cooked dish sends you home,” and overcooking your protein is a capital crime in front of the 24-hour short rib master.

* LCK: Grayson, Angelina, and Wesley are in a three-person battle, making hamburgers in fifteen minutes to make the burgers. Angelina says you need 10-12 minutes to make a great burger, which sounds about right; I usually give mine about 10 minutes on a grill to get to medium, 12 for medium-well, although managing the heat is key.

* The first thing to do is start heating the skillet, right? You want that sucker hot when the meat hits the pan. All three chefs make very thick burgers that will require the maximum time to cook.

* Grayson wants to use pork belly in her burger, but it’s not ground yet, which costs her a minute or so. Her burger sounds similar to Bar at Husk’s burger, which is 1/3 bacon. Wesley is doing lamb, my least favorite protein and IMO a terrible burger meat because it’s so lean. Even at medium, it’s probably past eating.

* Wesley serves that lamb burger with a fennel-jalapeño onion slaw, goat cheese, and ras el hanout, although Tom says it’s a little too compacted. Grayson serves her beef and pork belly burger with mushrooms, pickled red onion, and Wisconsin cheddar. It looks gloriously messy but the cheese didn’t melt all the way. There’s that minute she lost to grinding the pork. Angelina’s burger includes beef and pork and comes with avocado, chimichurri, heirloom tomato, pickled habanero, and fresh arugula.

* Angelina wins! Go figure. The previously-eliminated chefs seem pretty happy for her. She did take a bit of a beating in the main show.

* Rankings: Kwame

… Jeremy, Marjorie, Karen, Amar, Carl, Jason, Chad, Isaac, Phillip. I’m making a call on Isaac here, as he’s cooked almost entirely within his Cajun comfort zone and struggles to get outside of it. And while I mock Phillip’s “my food is yumm-ay!” commentary, he’s right about one thing – the judges don’t seem to love his food.

Sorry this is a bit late, but I spent the entire workday Friday on the phone working on the top 100 prospects package, which will run right after the big hand-egg match in early February. I missed the Lazarito workout because my daughter had pneumonia (she’s better now), but it sounds like it wasn’t a great look for the 100+ scouts who were there.

* Quickfire: Dates! I miss Arizona Medjool dates. The natural-foods grocer Sprouts was my go-to spot for Medjool dates, which are just … better, I don’t even know how to describe it. I carry dried dates with me on the road a lot because they’re so good and high in both fiber and sugar. I also love them Firefly (Las Vegas)-style, stuffed with almonds and wrapped in bacon, with a balsamic glaze and a little sprinkled bleu cheese (although I could skip that last bit). Anyway, the chefs can choose from three specialty varieties here.

* Chrissy Teigen is introduced as the guest judge (did someone really call her “John Legend’s wife,” as if she has no individual identity?) and is showing award-show level cleavage.

* Teigen says, “Dates are sweet and succulent and sticky,” to which Padma offers the forced-risqué line, “Like you.” Slutty talk from Padma seems to be an ongoing thing here but it does nothing for me, sorry. The chefs’ challenge is to tell a story of the best date each of them has ever had in a dish that highlights dates.

* As much as I love dates, I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with them, because pitting and trimming them is among the bigger pains in the asses in the kitchen. Olives are up there too, as are gooseberries (did that once – never again).

* Giselle is somehow struggling with burners, but it’s not clear if it’s her fault or she’s getting edited to look the fool because they’re trying to offer us some #foreshadowing.

* We get a bunch of stories from the chefs, with the longest story coming from Jason, but overall these people had some boring dates. I don’t think I could do any better, though; my other half isn’t a foodie and hates dates (the fruit, that is).

* Angelina has no date story, apparently, saying, “My boyfriend is the restaurant.” That’s … hot.

* Worst dishes: Chad’s pan-roasted halibut with orange salsa verde, pine nut, and zahari date froth, because the orange was bitter. Phillip’s tuna crudo with peaches and zahidi dates didn’t have enough date flavor. Carl made a date milkshake, which I’ve had at Joe’s Farm Grill out in Gilbert, Arizona. They’re really good, but not exactly the kind of thing to win a Top Chef challenge.

* Favorites: Jason’s roasted baby carrots with Deglet Nour dates, brown butter, cumin, lime, and pine nuts; Padma loved the char on everything. Isaac’s chicken ballontine (hey, Ruhlman has a recipe for that!) with medjool date sauce thanks to crispy chicken skin. Giselle’s date salad with pork sausage, arugula, watercress, and spiced walnuts showcased the date particularly well. The winner, however, is Jason, which they kind of foreshadowed with long story about the date he went on with his long-term partner.

* Elimination challenge: Art Smith, who appeared on Top Chef Masters a few years back, is the guest judge, and will be renewing his vows with his partner as one of 25 couples getting married in a mass wedding ceremony. Yeah, it’s a gay wedding, but do we even need to say that any more? It’s not like it’s an alternate-universe wedding. A gay wedding is just like a straight wedding, amirite?

The chefs will prepare the entire meal as one team, but will be judged individually on their dishes.

* Padma got ordained that morning to officiate the wedding, which … um … okay.

* Kwame is making sauces for two different dishes, which seems ambitious, although he has been the most impressive chef so far.

* Giselle is struggling to understand a dish in the discussion on the way to Whole Foods, so they’re clearly setting her up for elimination in the editing. When she says she doesn’t like the sound of Wesley’s idea for their dish, saying, “for me it doesn’t go (together),” Wesley mansplains her down with, “It doesn’t matter, it’s unbelievable.” I get defending your own recipe, but to say that to another professional chef’s face is beyond dismissive.

* Isaac is buying peeled garlic? What?

* A yoga instructor comes to the house to do yoga with the chefs in the morning, other than Isaac and Wesley, who do what I would likely to and go laze around in the shade instead. I’d probably have a book, though. I have nothing whatsoever against yoga, but don’t namaste me, bro.

* The editing of this episode makes Giselle look both incompetent and hapless. She may be below the others in skill – although even assuming that seems like a stretch – but she can’t possibly be as bad as she looks here, or she wouldn’t have made the show in the first place. She’s squabbling with Karen, her partner on the vegetarian dish, but we get Karen’s perspective on their disagreement without Giselle’s. Is Giselle too needy, or is Karen just not communicating well? I feel like a defense attorney this season.

* Angelina doesn’t seem to grasp Jason’s dish (they’re working together too), which, again, would be his fault as much as hers. They’re not on the same page, which means he didn’t adequately communicate his vision to her. What isn’t helping is that he keeps calling it “capunet,” which I think means capuns, a Swiss-Italian dish that sort of looks like what they’re making but usually contains dried beef and/or sausage in the filling, not braised chicken, and is finished by boiling in seasoned milk. What these two are really making turns out to be more like niños envueltos, a dish with which I was not familiar before this episode, a sort of stuffed meat roll but here wrapped in a chard leaf like capuns would be.

* Phillip is making what he keeps calling “mashed potatoes” but is spraying it out of an iSi canister to try to create a foamy sauce, which I can only imagine will make it gummy by overworking the starches. Maybe (this is pure speculation here) he could have whipped cream and folded it into loose mashed potatoes? I don’t know if this would work but it would avoid the gumminess.

* Isaac semi-brags that, “I should probably come with a warning label that says ‘does not play well with others'” yet everyone likes him, so I think he’s all bluster. He’s just crazy, but he doesn’t seem to be getting on anyone’s nerves.

* Padma is dressed almost demurely as the instant minister, although she did have her one look-at-me element with hot purple lipstick.

* Has anyone heard how many heterosexual marriages across the country fell apart after this episode was aired? I feel like the entire institution has been undermined here.

* Enough of that – let’s talk food. First up is Amar/Chad: Sherry-glazed pork belly with smoked orange marmalade, pickled fennel, onion, and smoked salt. It’s a huge hit and of everything in this episode, this is the recipe I’d most want.

* Jeremy, working solo: Citrus roasted carrots with harissa yogurt, shaved radish, and baby kale. He got some kind of color on those carrots, unless my television was on the fritz. Tom and Art both rave.

* Wesley/Kwame: Pickled shrimp with cucumber onion salad, citrus vinaigrette, cashews. Kwame’s nuoc cham, a Thai fish sauce-based dressing that must have been in the vinaigrette, is an immediate hit.

* Angelina/Jason: Niños envueltos – Swiss chard rolled up and stuffed with braised chicken, pancetta, cauliflower, and a sauce made from braising liquid and caramelized honey. Angelina called it “like a dolma,” and Jason gets pissed off and very condescending because it’s not dolma at all. (Dolma are Greek or Middle Eastern dishes of stuffed vegetables or rolled grape/cabbage, which Wikipedia says can also be called sarma.) leaves Judges love it.

* Isaac: Dirty rice and smoked chicken and jalapeno sausage. Tom says it’s “right.” I’m a bit surprised they didn’t ding him for making something in his comfort zone.

* Karen/Giselle: Charred eggplant puree with asparagus, smoked mushrooms, citrus vinaigrette, and kumquats. The asparagus is undercooked, the farro (I missed that in the description, apparently) is underseasoned, and the mushrooms were soggy. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

* Phillip/Kwame: Center cut NY steak with potato “cream” and tomato-eggplant relish. Shockingly, the potatoes suck: they have a gummy texture and a raw taste. The relish is good, of course, and Padma says it “saves Phillip’s dish.”

* Tom and my sister were married on the same day in 2011. Not to each other, though. That would be weird.

* Marjorie/Carl: Grilled apricots with cherries, mascarpone, and hazelnuts. (Stop calling it “mascarpone cheese,” and please stop calling it “marscapone.” It’s “MAHS-car-POH-neh.” It’s like cream cheese, but good.) Apparently this whole dish is fantastic, which will be totally forgotten the next time someone is eliminated for dessert and people start talking about a “curse.”

* Judges’ table: “Today was a proud moment in Top Chef history.” Okay, okay, don’t hurt yourselves patting your own backs. The winner was Wesley and Kwame’s shrimp dish. Kwame added tangerine and ginger juice to the nuoc cham, and used all of the juices in the sauce to pickle the shrimp, so it had big flavors but was very cohesive. The individual winner is The Man We All Know and Love, Kwame.

* Worst dishes: Karen/Giselle and Phillip/Kwame. Kwame acts like he might actually be eliminated, which is positively Swiftian (Taylor, not Jonathan) in absurdity. Phillip explains his dish to the judges as if this was the result he wanted, but then Jason chimes in, “I don’t think that’s how the dish was described to the team.” Marjorie piles on with, “you said mashed potatoes,” so the editors didn’t mislead us here – everyone thought he was doing steak and potatoes. No one is talking about the steak, by the way, which is in and of itself odd since that’s the main component of the dish.

* Giselle said the dish did not include “her” flavors, so Karen retorts that she found it “hard to collaborate” and, more insulting, “at least I was trying.” Will nobody ever learn that these arguments in front of the judges do nobody any favors? Suddenly, Giselle says “it’s shocking that Phillip doesn’t recognize his flaws,” while she and Karen understand what they did wrong … which is sort of like saying the apology is more important than the mistake. Phillip defends himself by saying that was indeed the dish he wanted to make, but Tom says he was “going for something we didn’t care for.”

* Jason is really pissed, even after judges’ table, which might make sense if he were directly affected by the elimination decision.

* Giselle is eliminated. While she was the weakest chef up for elimination, Phillip made gummy potato sauce and I kind of have a hard time with him staying – as if perhaps he stayed on reputation. The only good thing on his plate came from Kwame.

* LCK: Chefs have 20 seconds to look at the cart of ingredients, then have to write down two dish ideas they can execute in 20 minutes. Tom picks one for each to do – Giselle has to do lamb, fig, and pistachio, while Grayson has to do shrimp and jalapeño – but the women negotiate and end up doing their first choices, Giselle’s chicken with summer polenta and Grayson’s lamb with fig and mustard. Tom is having way more fun in LCK this season, and the women both seem to join in by acting a little goofy. The main show could benefit from some of this silliness. I also love how Tom comments on specific cooking times (Grayson’s rack of lamb should take twelve minutes max) or plating (he tells the camera Giselle is plating too soon, with five minutes left, so she changes her plan). He’s a highly successful and respected chef – I want more of his commentary.

* Grayson’s lamb rack comes with a fig and port sauce and a take on aligot potatoes (a French dish of mashed potatoes blended with certain low-fat cheeses). Giselle’s chicken comes with a corn and tomato salad and polenta. Chicken appears to be perfectly cooked but the polenta might not be hot enough. Grayson wins although it appears to have been very close.

* Rankings: Kwame, Jeremy, Jason, Marjorie, Isaac, Carl, Amar, Wesley, Karen, Phillip, Chad, Angelina.

If you missed them, I wrote up the Todd Frazier trade for Insiders and then held a Klawchat here yesterday.

Mild spoiler: The Quickfire in this episode was far more interesting than the elimination challenge, both in terms of the actual task set in front of the chefs and the food that came out of it.

* The Quickfire takes place in the desert, using solar stoves and solar ovens to cook. The guest judge is Jose Andres, the Asturian-born chef who was one of the leading proponents of tapas (small plates) in the U.S. and who has lately been an advocate for fuel-free cooking methods like these devices. The winner gets immunity and chefs are assigned at random to use either a solar stove (a parabolic device with the ‘burner’ in the center) or a solar oven (a glass tube located at the focus of two reflective panels that form a sort of half-cylinder).

* Grayson wants to make skirt steak, which cooks quickly and likes high heat, but she has an oven rather than a stove.

* Giselle explodes her oven by putting water in it, which Marjorie says was “dumb.” While I understand what Marjorie is saying – you’d never pour water directly into an oven, right? – the GoSun oven tubes are made of borosilicate glass (like Pyrex), which has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion. That’s why you can put Pyrex in the oven or the microwave without it shattering, or even stack them in each other while still warm. Otherwise, they’d break. Now maybe Giselle didn’t know that’s what it was, and it’s still bizarre to pour water into an “oven” of any sort, but I’m also shocked to see it shatter like that rather than break into large pieces. The only thing I can think of is that the liquid she added might have been very cold. Any physicists out there have a better explanation?

* Grayson’s oven isn’t getting hot enough. Isn’t there a thermometer or some kind of indicator on it to tell you if it’s working? The outside of these devices stays cool (I checked their site), so you can’t tell by radiant heat if you have the right temperature inside.

* Philip is going to plate his dish on rocks he grabbed off the hill and rinsed off. That’s … peculiar. I’m not afraid of dirt or anything, but there might be things crawling in or on those rocks that you can’t see.

* Least favorites: Grayson’s steak was a little bit dry, probably from prolonged exposure to the heat in the oven as she tried to get it to brown; Giselle, whose dish never came together after the explosion; Philip, whose raw oyster wasn’t ice cold, with Padma saying it looked “like snot on a rock.” Padma was in rare form in this segment; when Grayson said her oven didn’t get hot enough, Padma said, “”Did you not hear when Jose said to angle the stove towards the sun?” I’m shocked Grayson didn’t just tell Padma to go fuck herself after that.

* Favorites: Jeremy, who made a seared halibut with pickled mushrooms and tomato vinaigrette on a solar stove; Wesley, who made shrimp with coconut broth, pickled onions, and sauteed mushrooms on a solar stove; and Isaac, who made cornbread, taking the “most risk of anyone, to use the oven to bake bread,” along with smoked butter. I thought Isaac would win after that praise from Chef Andres, but Wesley takes it, getting immunity plus a $10K donation to World Central Kitchen made in his name. Chef Andres appears to decide on the spot to give Wesley a solar stove too, saying, “We can change the world with them.” Getting these to poor areas in third-world countries where fuel sources are unavailable, scarce, or highly polluting, is a great idea, but I wonder if impoverished people will use them if there’s actual training required.

* Elimination challenge: They’re on a golf course, and split into two teams, each to serve a four-course meal, working on refreshment carts without a proper kitchen.

* Giselle and Angelina are getting pushed together, but there’s real enmity between the two now. I don’t think I realized Angelina’s “this bitch beat me again” comment from last week was said out loud to everyone – I thought it was from a confessional clip and was piped over a live shot, mostly because who the hell says that out loud while standing right next to the target?

* The chefs leave their environmentally friendly challenge to go to Whole Foods in their giant SUVs. Cool.

* So let’s move ahead to the dishes, since all we get in between is shots of the various judges cooking. Karen and Jeremy made a ceviche of citrus-marinated halibut with kumquats, passion fruit “caviar” (that’s just the pulp, so spare me the euphemisms) and avocado mousse (smeared unappetizingly on the side of the bowl). They serve the ceviche in a plastic bowl set in another bowl with a little ice in between the two, keeping the ceviche ice cold, as it should be.

* Kwame and Chad serve a tuna and swordfish ceviche marinated in tangerine sweet potato ponzu with a sweet potato emulsion and peanuts. Jose says a was a “little bit warm” compared to the other one.

* I think there’s a “let’s all laugh at how bad Padma is at golf” thing here, but since I have never played a single hole of golf I’m not picking on anyone here.

* Mary Sue Milliken (of the famous quinoa fritters, a big hit in this house) and Richard Blais are among the guests/judges.

* Grayson/Angelina made grilled shrimp with guacamole and corn-chorizo hash. Jose wishes the corn had been left uncooked to bring “freshness” into it. Grayson makes the “executive decision to leave the corn sauteed in the hash” because the corn isn’t that “amazing” (I assume she means it wasn’t very juicy or sweet). That “executive decision” is what we around these parts like to refer to as “foreshadowing.”

* Jason and Marjorie also serve grilled shrimp, along with summer squash salad, roasted eggplant puree, and a tomato/celery salad. It sounds like they nailed this dish, both in execution and in getting the right temperature and flavor profile for the hot day.

* Wesley and Carl serve a roasted pork loin, with (cooked) grapes, green apples, greek yogurt, and green chili. First judges didn’t like cooked grapes so they added some raw for the second group’s plates.

* Giselle and Amar served a spice-rubbed grilled NY steak with bacon asparagus potato salad and salsa verde. Chef Andres says it did not come together as a complete dish, and then just slams it to the ground when he says it’s “not maybe something I would be enjoying.” Ouch.

* Neither Philip nor Isaac, each of whom is making a dessert, can keep his burners lit in the wind. Philip moves his portable stove to the driver’s seat, which seems like a rather significant fire (or explosion) hazard. All his bowls are blowing away in the wind too. This doesn’t seem to be very much about one’s cooking ability.

* Isaac made a grapefruit sabayon (isn’t it zabaglione when it’s dessert? I think of sabayon as savory) with agave-tequila whipped cream and a lemon shortbread-almond-grapefruit zest crumble. Jose wishes there had been a little bit more grapefruit.

* Philip makes a makeshift tent to protect his stuff and serves the dessert from under a blanket. His dish is coconut pudding with strawberries, basil and rum lime mint “air” (it’s foam you knob) with a touch of serrano and sea salt. Jose doesn’t like coconut and strawberry together, and when Blais asks “is this the texture you were looking for?” it’s pretty clear the dish flunked.

* The best dish was Karen and Jeremy’s ceviche, and since Jeremy handled the fish and it was his idea to do the bowls of ice, he gets the actual win.

* The worst dish was Grayson and Angelina’s shrimp and hash. With fatty avocado and fatty chorizo, there was not enough lime to counteract the lipids, while the shrimp was a little rubbery and the corn just was not that good. The judges do the usual “who do you think should go home?” bit but neither chef takes the bait.

* Grayson is out. Tom tells her, “It was the corn.” Grayson is “furious” and cuts Tom off twice when he’s trying to give her feedback. Am I the only one not sorry to see this experiment end? Grayson was much more fun the first time around.

* LCK: Two surprise ingredients for each chef. Garret gets tomatillos and crisp broad beans. Grayson gets gingko (ghinko) nuts and coconuts. Grayson is trying to cut the coconuts open with a chef’s knife – does she not have a cleaver? (I just bought this stainless steel cleaver for $10 last week, and it’s awesome.) Gingko nuts can’t be eaten raw, and they’re mildly poisonous to eat at all as one of the chemicals in the nutmeat, called gingkotoxin (4′-O-methylpyridoxine) is heat-stable; excessive consumption can cause epileptic seizures and even death. Handling the raw nuts can also irritate your skin. Remind me why we eat these things again?

* Grayson serves pork tenderloin with sweet & sour coconut shrimp, fresh herbs, and candied gingko nuts. Tom likes the texture the nuts add to the dish. Garret made a broad bean-crusted branzino with wilted fennel (or did he say melted? I could not have heard that right), chorizo, and tomatillo salsa. Grayson wins. She’s also far, far brighter here than she was on any of the regular episodes.

* Rankings: Kwame, Jeremy, Carl, Marjorie, Karen. Angelina is clearly the bottom chef remaining, although Giselle isn’t far ahead.

All my Insider links from the week are in today’s stick to baseball post, along with the link to my top ten new boardgames of the year plus the usual miscellany.

So the road tripping begins with this episode, as the crew heads to “Santa Barbara” … except they’re really going to Sanford Winery, which is up in the hills towards Lompoc.

* Frances … there’s more to that story about her dad kicking her out, right? That deserved some more explanation.

* We’re talking sea urchins, specifically uni, the gonads of the spiny echinoderms, which are eaten both raw (as sushi) and cooked, with a “briny, buttery,” “cucumber-melon” flavor, according to these folks. I’ve never had it raw, only cooked, in pasta with uni butter at a restaurant that’s now closed. I don’t particularly care about eating one part of the animal versus another – I’ve had heart, liver, thymus gland, tongue, “head cheese” – but can’t say I’m particularly drawn to sea urchins or their relatives, the sea cucumbers.

* Oh, it’s Dana Downer! Although she’s actually smiling in this episode, maybe because she just retired from Food and Wine.

* It’s a sudden death Quickfire, one of the worst gimmicks in Top Chef history, where the losing chef faces elimination. The chefs have 25 minutes to prepare a dish with uni and pair it with a Sanford wine.

* I noticed Kwame sampling the wine, but did we see any other chef do that? How can you pair a wine you haven’t tasted? With the exception of Chad (who says he’s recently sober) no one else has any excuse to not at least take thirty seconds to sip one or two of the wines.

* Frances worked in the Middle East for seven years and says there’s “no alcohol there,” although I think she was in Dubai, where you can get alcohol in the hotels that cater to foreigners but not elsewhere. She can’t pronounce the wine’s name so she says “whatever, I got a fucking wine.” If nothing else she’s a hell of a quote.

* Wesley says he’s used to cooking “subtle French cuisine,” which is hilarious because I’m pretty sure Jacques Pepin’s station doesn’t look like an F5 tornado just went through it after service.

* Giselle wants to make scrambled eggs with uni, but can’t find any eggs; it looks like Carl took a dozen eggs, which I guess is supposed to make him the bad guy here? This isn’t exactly the pea purée crisis redux.

* Isaac gets into the sea urchin with two cleavers, which amuses me for no particular reason. Chad says Isaac is “like swamp people on steroids,” which I think he meant as a compliment.

* Karen is whipping uni with egg yolks and wants to make an egg drop soup, but won’t the uni’s flavor just get overwhelmed in a dish like that? When you eat egg drop soup, the flavor of the egg isn’t exactly front of palate.

* Angelina says she’s playing it safe, which is always a good idea. (Note: It’s never a good idea.) She’s making pasta with uni butter, which isn’t just safe, but totally uninspired. The place where I had that dish wasn’t even going for haute cuisine – it was just a smart Italian restaurant.

* Grayson seems to be one of the only chefs here who gets the idea that the uni has to be the star ingredient of the final dish – the first time she’s acted like she’s been here before.

* Karen’s uni just dissolves in the soup. That’s not exactly what I was predicting, but the dish was just a bad idea from the start.

* Favorites: Grayson, who made a crab salad with cucumbers, grapefruit, and uni, paired with a Viognier (a white grape related to Chardonnay, per Wikipedia), is praised for the dish’s simplicity and her showcasing of the uni. Wesley’s uni with creamed corn, fennel, salmon roe, and scallop, paired with Chardonnay; Padma and Dana loved the building of flavors. Carl’s eggs and uni – he made am omelet with herbs and green chili, also paired with Chardonnay – are “such a great pair,” and the dish exemplified what the challenge was about. The winner is … Grayson. It’s like she got out of LA and remembered she was on a competition show.

* The least favorites: Angelina, who made one of Dana’s favorite dishes (cacio e pepe with uni butter and Parmiggiano) and made it too salty. Karen, because it was hard to find the uni in her soup. Giselle, who made a potato with uni and onion jam; the potato wasn’t completely cooked and there was too much onion flavor from the jam. Giselle is the bottom and picks Angelina for her sudden-death cook-off, which is probably the right call.

* An aside: I know jack about wine, but isn’t Chardonnay kind of a ‘common’ wine? I mean that in the sense of lacking sophistication, rather than just something popular, although the latter can often lead to the former. I was surprised how many chefs chose it, especially since its main note is usually the assertive flavor of oak.

* Giselle and Angelina have to cook ostrich eggs. Angelina mutters “you better kick ass…” but admits she’s never worked with ostrich eggs before. (Really? Come on, I have a dozen in my fridge right now.)

* Giselle makes soft scrambled eggs with avocado, chipotle salsa, and pepitas. Angelina made a spicy tomato jam with scrambled eggs, shiitake mushrooms, and carrots.

* Dana didn’t seem to like either dish. Giselle rushed her presentation and too many pepitas. Angelina’s dish was overdone in more than one way. Giselle wins but I wonder if this was by default since both dishes sucked.

* Elimination challenge: Pair up to make the ultimate surf and turf dish. Grayson is a team of one because she has immunity. No one wants Giselle or Angelina so they end up a pair.

* There’s a mad rush to grab proteins. It’s the same stupid shit every year. In what possible way is this measuring chefs’ skills? If anything it’s just favoring the stronger or faster, not the better cooks.

* OK, now that I’ve got that off my chest, I don’t have much more patience for chefs who complain about the proteins they end up with because you’re kind of supposed to be able to cook anything, right? Kwame and Chad end up with lamb and crab … yeah it’s weird, but so what? Show off. Why go traditional? I’d think the judges would be more impressed by a clever lamb/crab surf-and-turf than an expected combo like steak and lobster.

* Also, surf-and-turf is incredibly passé. It’s a sign of an era when consuming lots of animal products was considered a sign of status, rather than a sign that you don’t give a rat’s ass about the world.

* Tom shows up. Cue dramatic music. Teams are no longer together, but are going to cook against each other – surf vs. turf. Grayson gets to choose who to go against (she picks Wesley/Amar, because she wants the challenge) and can go surf or turf. Suddenly Giselle and Angelina have to be happy with their pairing.

* Carl, in confessional, says, “I should have picked Giselle!” The sad part is he’s probably right – she and Angelina have quickly emerged as two of the weakest chefs here.

* Even though they’re competing, Kwame helps Chad butcher his lamb. That’s impressive.

* Guest judges include Jon and Vinny from Animal, Cat Cora, Michael Cimarusti from Providence restaurant, and our friend Richard Blais. Wesley took over as executive chef for Blais at The Spence in Atlanta earlier this year, now that Blais has relocated to San Diego, with two restaurants there in Little Italy.

* Wesley is using stencils for plating, which is too clever by half. Get the dish done first, then worry about artwork. And sure enough, he doesn’t get everything on the plate, and the meat isn’t tender enough even though he used sous vide to try to soften it up. (We could have used some more detail on that, just from an education perspective – why it might not have worked, or whether it was even a good idea.)

* And now the dishes … First up is Amar, Wesley, and Grayson. Amar serves olive oil-poached halibut with an “eggless Bearnaise” (isn’t this just a tarragon beurre blanc?), asparagus, and morels. Tom says the fish a tick overcooked. Cat, who calls it a hollandaise, says there’s “no complexity” to the sauce. Wesley serves a sous-vide and smoked ribeye with asparagus puree and morels. No one likes it. Grayson serves a spiced carrot puree under a tangy lacquered pork belly with cara cara oranges (a red-fleshed navel orange with nuanced flavors) and cacao nibs. Blais says the purée is “fascinating and dynamic.” Grayson takes the first five voters, so she wins the challenge.

* Blais says that Wesley’s dish is “what gives sous vide a bad rap.” I know it’s a widely accepted technique, but putting food in a plastic bag and cooking it in warm water isn’t exactly an obvious approach for most home cooks. Tell us more about when and why it’s a good idea.

* Second service is Jeremy vs Philip. Jeremy made spot prawns roasted in their shells with potato gnocchi, English peas, and preserved lemon. Tom says it’s “all about finesse.” Philip served a center cut ribeye over rutabaga puree with a nori beurre blanc. Cat raves about the meat, saying she “probably could have cut it with my fork,” but now we’re getting technical about whether it’s a beurre blanc. Jeremy wins by a sliver, although there’s praise all around for Philip.

* Since it’s now come up twice: Beurre blanc is one of my favorite sauces to make at home because it’s simple and very potent, ideal with fish and most cooked vegetables. You cook shallots with white wine and vinegar, reducing till it’s almost a glaze in the pan, and then whisk in too much butter to believe. The butter must be cold to form and maintain an emulsion in the pan. It’s also highly extensible – I’ve swapped in all kinds of citrus juices for the vinegar, seasoned it with herbs at the end, even used beet juice to make a sort of “beurre blood.” Unlike egg yolk-based emulsions like Bearnaise and hollandaise, beurre blanc comes together faster and is far less likely to break.

* Third service is Angelina vs Giselle. Angelina made marinated mussels with a light escabeche sauce, fennel leek puree, potatoes, and radishes. The mussels are dry and flavorless, and Tom says she “tortured” the ingredients. Giselle made quail with cucumber radish salad and a tamarindo sauce. The judges like the serrano chilies she seems to have used in the sauce. Giselle wins.

* Angelina’s response afterwards: “This bitch beat me again.” I can only imagine what Madeleine Albright would think of this.

* Fourth up is Kwame vs Chad. Kwame made a rock crab salad with turmeric, asparagus, and radish. Tom called it “Playful and fun.” I’m just surprised to hear turmeric, which I associate with color but not flavor (or at least not a positive flavor), cited as the first item after the protein. Chad made a spicy bean, honey, and orange lacquered roasted lamb with asparagus and mint puree. The lamb was cooked perfectly, and the puree was “rockin’.” With four votes apiece, Tom breaks the tie with … “Kwame for President,” which I can only assume is an allusion to the late Ghanaian President and dictator Kwame Nkrumah.

* Other than Giselle and Angelina, every team seems to be getting along. I’m not sorry to see a lack of enmity here – too often that ends up taking screen time away from the food.

* Fifth service is Isaac against Carl. Isaac serves a fennel-crusted halibut with English peas and a brown butter hollandaise (that sounds like a really good idea, by the way). The halibut is a tick overcooked and needs a hit of acid. (Don’t we all.) Carl made a roasted chicken thigh with prosciutto, English peas, and a white wine dijon sauce. Cat says it’s very reminiscent of home and they’re all talking about the chicken like it’s fried, so I assume he did something to crisp the skin. Carl wins although Isaac gets three votes.

* Sixth service is Karen vs Marjorie. Karen is missing a piece of fish … and Padma ends up with the plate without it. Karen looks like she wants to die; I can feel her mortification through the television. Her dish was a seared rock cod with carrot-orange puree, blood orange vinaigrette, and roasted carrots. David Lentz, chef at the Hungry Cat, says it’s “one of the best dishes” of the day. Everyone loves it, except Padma, who looks forlorn as everyone else raves. (I think we got more shots of Sad Padma on the screen than we did of the food itself.) Marjorie made a roasted pork loin, olive oil crushed potatoes, citrus gremolata, bok choy, and carrot. Dana just murders this dish, and Marjorie overcooked the pork. Karen wins despite the mistake.

* Seventh and final service pits Jason against Frances. Jason made a marinated grilled pork loin with “steamed crudit&eacutes,” and a Thai egg. Who the heck calls anything “crudité” in 2015? That’s 1970s cocktail party shit. Tom says he needed to develop more flavors. Frances made a ginger-glazed black cod with jicama and cucumber salad. The skin is rubbery, and with dripping disdain David says, “just take the skin off if it’s going to be like that.” Nobody likes hers either, with Tom calling it a “hodgepodge of stuff on a plate.” (I thought Hodgepodge was a rabbit, not a black cod.) Tom has to break the tie again and picks Jason.

* Wesley is having a big pity party out on the veranda there in the beautiful weather, where Kwame is simultaneously trying to give him a pep talk and tell him he’s being a big whiny baby.

* Judges’ table – the favorites: Jeremy, Kwame, and Karen. Karen is immediately DQ’d because she didn’t serve Padma fish. Kwame’s dish was strong, creative, and respectful of the ingredients; I get the sense he did more with less. Jeremy had never worked with spot prawns that quality and gets raves for his treatment of it. Kwame wins and gets his own barrel of wine from Sanford Winery.

* Bottom three: Frances, Angelina, and Wesley. Wesley didn’t start plating in time, and Tom kills him for playing with stencils. Wesley explains that the steak had no marbling (finally, some real explanation), and thought sous vide would soften it, but Blais says “it didn’t eat that way.” Angelina’s mussels dried out once they were out of the shell; Michael said they would have loved it had the mussels been cooked right. Frances added acorn squash because she thought the dish was too simple with just black cod and jicama relish, but that appears to have overcomplicated things, although everyone killed her on the rubbery cod skin anyway. Blais hits them all on time management – he says they had plenty of time but didn’t use it well, especially Wesley.

* Frances is out. That’s too bad for us because her commentary was entertaining. Meanwhile, the chefs are packing up right away and going to Palm Springs.

* LCK: Frances and Garret start trash-talking each other right away. Challenge is to cook a vegetable three ways, using the whole thing, with all trimmings on the station to be factored into the grading. The chefs must use Hidden Valley Ranch seasoning in one of the three ways; I guess even Top Chef has to pay the bills. Frances says, “I’m from Third World country (sic), you use everything!” She picks broccoli, which is a fairly easy vegetable for this challenge – the stalks and leaves aren’t just edible but are good. Garret picks beets. He slices the bulbs into discs and grills them, which … I actually don’t know how that would work. They take so damn long to cook otherwise. He also fries the beet peelings in the deep fryer to see if he can use them rather than creating more waste. Frances cooks the broccoli scraps, pur&eacuate;es them, and seasons with the HVR to make the sauce.

* I was fine with all the taunting going back and forth until Garret said, “suck it Frances.” That’s a terrible expression in general, especially for a man to say to a woman. Trash-talking is fine until someone loses an eye.

* Garret made pickled beet stems, chiffonaded greens, beet vinaigrette, fried skins, and grilled beet bulbs. Tom was obviously impressed because beet skins would ordinarily be food waste. Frances made a broccoli puree with chili and yuzu, pickled broccoli stems with yuzu and olive oil, and stir fried broccoli florets.

* Tom: Garret’s grilled beets were bland, while Frances overspiced a few things. Garret wins – the fried skins appear to have won the day for him.

* Quick power rankings: Kwame, Carl, Jeremy, Amar, Karen. Kwame’s the one holdover in my top three this week, but through three episodes he’s the only chef who’s stood out every single time. Bottom three: Angelina, Giselle, Wesley.

* Don’t forget to check out my annual cookbook recommendations and my 2015 gift guide for cooks as Christmas approaches.