Erik is eliminated from Top Chef Chicago
Last week was the first team challenge of Top Chef Chicago. It’s always interesting to see how people work together. In the end Andrew was named the winner and Valerie was sent home. You might expect to find an individual challenge this week, but no, it was a team challenge again.
The guest judge this week was a chef well known for fine dining Mexican cuisine – Rick Bayless. He was there when Padma gave the chefs their quickfire challenge – take the taco and reinvent it as a fine dining dish. Bayless said a lot of the tacos were good but were not fine dining enough. The bottom three chefs in the challenge were Erik, Lisa and Ryan while the top three chefs were Andrew, Richard and Spike. Richard was named winner of the quickfire and got immunity from elimination. He also found out that his taco recipe will be “stolen” and put on the menu of one of Bayless’ fine dining Mexican restaurants.
Padma tells the chefs to divide into two teams, red and blue, and then hop in the vehicles for a field trip. The red team was Jennifer, Zoi, Dale, Andrew, Erik, Spike and Ryan and the Blue team was Stephanie, Nikki, Antonia, Richard, Mark, Manuel and Lisa. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, Padma explains to the chefs so the next day, in their elimination challenge, they will be cooking for the people of this neighborhood. They won’t be doing their shopping in a store for this challenge. Instead the chefs will have to go door to door and ask the neighbors to give them the ingredients they have in their kitchen and design the menu around that.
The blue team decides to go more upscale, while the red team decides to go more traditional and with a menu designed more to please the people. Some of the people on the red team (Dale) question the fact that they aren’t going with a more elegant menu. The neighbors seem to be split on what they liked, but the red team really seemed to be up and happy with their performance. When the food was served they started mingling with the neighbors, drinking beer and playing basketball. Richard from the blue team said you always look at your competitor and second guess your own performance. He said in his confessional interview that they way the red team was acting you would think they killed the blue team in terms of performance.
Now I’m thinking at this point that the red team must have lost the challenge. Very little of the focus was given to the blue team so it’s just my guess that the blue team will have won the challenge. I was right – I mean, you could see this one coming a mile away. The judges said they had won the challenge by a narrow margin, mainly because Stephanie’s dessert and drink were so good. She was the reason they won the challenge so she was named the winner for this challenge – her second win this season. Could this be the year for a female Top Chef? Who knows.
When Padma called back the blue team, the red team was showing signs of concern but never really lost their confidence or arrogance. When they are called back to face the judges at judges’ table you could see they were truly surprised to be there. Spike explains that they were cooking for the people, not the judges, and Tom Colicchio said they shouldn’t dumb down what they are doing to appeal to the masses. Guest judge Bayless makes a comment later that good food is universal and will sell to everyone. One interesting thing during this judges’ table was Andrew speaking back to the judges. When Colicchio says someone has to go home from this team Andrew says that they would have to drag him out of there with security guards since “this is my house now.” He’d better be careful because the judges might decide to send him home based on his arrogance.
The three weakest dishes were created by Ryan, Zoi and Erik – the soggy Waldorf Salad, the pasta salad and the soggy corn dogs. Erik ends up being the chef eliminated this week from the competition. Colicchio said since he cooks corn dogs day in and day out he should have known they would not have held up to be served at the block party.
Read these other great entries
March 30th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Andrew is so hyper and obnoxious - “this is my house” uh, no. It is Tom’s house, he’s just letting you live it in butthead! Really, is that the way to endear yourselves to the judges? To act like that? Geesh.
And as for Erik, even I know that corndogs have about a three minute shelf life - duh!