Ilan wins Top Chef; Marcel packs his knives and whines

What a finale for Top Chef! Surprising was probably the word I think best describes it. The show begins with Ilan and Marcel taking a walk on the beach. If they hated each other as much as they kept saying then why would they go out together? Marcel gets stung by some type of fish and was told he should urinate on the wound. Did we need to see the backside of Marcel as he peed? But I digress. It was funny when Ilan offered to pee on Marcel – now THAT would have made for good television but I don’t think even Bravo is ready to air that.

The guys draw knives to see who cooks first in the final challenge and where they will be preparing the meals. The challenge: cook the best five course meal that they’ve ever cooked. Ilan draws the knife to go first, so Marcel gets to select his Sous Chefs for the challenge. The candidates from which the finalists get to select are Michael, Mia, Betty, Frank, Elia and Sam. Chef Tom asks each person to say who they would want to work for. Mia, Frank and Sam say they’d work for Marcel while the others say Ilan. Marcel chooses Sam first, and then Sam tells him to pick Michael. Ilan goes with Elia and Betty as his team members.

Things go well for both finalists during the four hour prep. Sam and Michael seem to be enjoying working for Marcel (or at least tolerating it), while Betty and Elia are having a love fest with Ilan. Things continue to go well for Ilan during his one our prep before the meal. The service goes pretty smoothly as well, although Betty gets a bit hectic and nervous and starts to break the heads off the shrimp.

Marcel, on the other hand, doesn’t have as good of a time in the kitchen during his prep for the meal. When he’s getting his materials for the dinner to bring to the restaurant he notices some items were not packed on the carts. They also forget to bring two pans of fish with them. It’s a good thing for Marcel that he had Sam on his team, because Sam pulled his butt out of the fire helping him change the dish on the fly. I’ll give Marcel credit though, because at judges table he didn’t hide the fact that Sam played a major role in that dish the way Tiffani hosed Dave in season 1 with the dessert course.

Overall both chefs produced a great meal, so the judges were having some difficulty in deciding who was the Top Chef for this season. They commented on Ilan playing it safe with only creating dishes with a Spanish flavor, but Ilan reminds them that he did step out of the box during the competition to create other types of dishes. Personally I am having a hard time of thinking of dishes that he created that were not Spanish influenced that were successful. Maybe the judges took into consideration his Quickfire dishes too. Marcel is very creative and a big thinker when it comes to his dishes, but he just didn’t execute them to the level necessary to beat out the safe effort by Ilan.

I was thinking about last season’s finale of Top Chef as well (it was just on Bravo this week so it’s fresh in my head). Harold plays it safe with his menu, while Tiffani goes out on a limb with her ambitious menu. Harold was working with people who truly liked and respected him and wanted him to win while Tiffani had offended many people along the way and her teammates weren’t really behind her 100%. It almost seems as if this season was a mirror image. Ilan plays it safe and wins. Marcel goes out on a limb but doesn’t win. The similarities to the first season finale are really clear.

So I guess if you’re looking to be on Season 3 of Top Chef and want to win be very likeable, have excellent and solid skills, and stick with what you know works well. Take some risks, but balance it out with what you know. Too much risk does not equal too much reward in this case.

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

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