Clay is kicked off the first episode of Top Chef: Miami

I had to wonder what kind of surprises Top Chef would pull out of the proverbial hat for the third season. Yes, the show has moved the location from California to Miami, but is that really enough to give the show the surprises that I grew to love in seasons 1 and 2? Let’s face it – there was some crazy s@&*$!# in the first two seasons. Will the producers be able to repeat the successes they had and bring the viewers even more twists and turns? I think the season premier tonight has season 3 off to a really good start.

We’re given some brief introductions to some of the 15 contestants. I tried to catch their names, but right now I can’t remember any of them, except the people who were in the top or bottom of the quickfire or elimination challenges. There seems to be some pretty colorful people in this group, and a whole suite full of strong personalities. From the short sound bites we get of future shows you can see there is going to be quite a bit of conflict in this group.

OK, back to the show. The contestants are brought to Casa Casuarina – the former mansion of Gianni Versace – for a welcome cocktail party. Tom and Padma surprise the contestants with their first quickfire challenge – create an amuse bouche from the leftover dishes of the cocktail party. They have 10 minutes to create something that makes a statement about who they are as chefs. It’s pretty funny watching everyone scramble around to come up with something fabulous without any heat, knives, or other cooking utensils. The top three chefs in the quickfire challenge were Hung, Sara Mair and Micah, with Micah winning the challenge and immunity from elimination. The bottom three were Dale, Clay and Tre.

The elimination challenge was also a nice surprise. The chefs had to create a surf and turf entrée, but not your typical surf and turf. They had to pick from some pretty exotic proteins including rattlesnake, eel, and alligator. There were only two portions of each protein, so the contestants drew knives to determine the order in which they would select the ingredients. I was kind of hoping for a free for all, but maybe something like that will come later in the season. The contestants had two hours to create their dish for the judges and guest judge Anthony Bourdain.

I think for the first time since the season 1 finale (and the only other time) one of the contestants did not complete the dish. Howie misjudged timing and left off one of the proteins from his dish. He thought for sure that he would be going home tonight, but he was wrong. More on that later.

The judges only had two favorites, Hung and Tre. There was some criticism of Hung’s dish that it was all beige. I agree that the beige was tough – I wouldn’t want to eat it but then again I’m pretty boring. The judges voted Tre the winner of the first challenge, and Gail mentioned that the winner of the first elimination challenge in both season 1 and season 2 went on to win the title of Top Chef.

The bottom four chefs tonight were Howie, Clay, Dale and Brian. Ultimately the judges thought that the lack of culinary skill of Clay was a bigger sin than Howie’s leaving the frogs legs off of his plate. Personally I think the fact that he quoted Anthony Bourdain back to Anthony Bourdain showed his chutzpah and gained some points with the judges, and that his other dish was pretty good did lend some credibility to his potential. Clay was sent packing and thus becomes the answer to the trivia question “name the first chef kicked off season 3 of Top Chef”.

[tags]top chef, television, bravo, tv, reality, food, topchef, reality tv, top-chef, cooking, chef[/tags]

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