Lia is kicked off Top Chef
I had previously complained that there was just something different about season 3 of Top Chef. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there’s a different feeling to the show. I think I’m starting to figure out why it’s different to me. The first reason has to do with the focus the producers and directors are putting on the personal relationships between people. Yes in the first two seasons we saw some of this non competition behind the scenes, but not like we see it this season. Could you imagine seeing Ilan or Marcel in a bathing suit in a hot tub? And we really didn’t know if the contestants made friends, not like tonight when we find out that Casey and Lia might just be BFF. Come on, I want to see the cooking and the interaction IN the kitchen, not in the apartment. It’s not Big Brother, it’s Top Chef.
Now that I have that off my chest, here’s my overview and comments on tonight’s show.
Padma greets the chefs for the quickfire challenge with the guest judge Maria Frumkin, a famous chef and restaurant owner. Tre mentions that she is an excellent pastry chef, and I guess the fact that she owns a restaurant called The French Bakery Café should have been a dead giveaway to me (but it was not). The challenge had the chefs using a frozen pie crust to create a dish of their choice. Padma mentions that the challenge is about timing, and that they would have 90 minutes to create their dishes. Frumkin puts Lia, Dale and Hung in her bottom three, and Tre, Sara M. and Joey in her top three. Joey didn’t let anyone else know before today that he had a bit of pastry experience. After the debacle with the pineapple last week I give the guy a lot of credit. He’s sharp and shrewd, two characteristics I would not have said he had even up to last week. Joey is named the winner of the quickfire challenge and gets immunity.
The elimination challenge was also to be about timing. Padma lets everyone know that they will be cooking a Latin lunch for the cast and crew of the Telemundo show Dame Chocolate. She throws in that these people know all about timing and tight schedules, being in television. The contestants are given 30 minutes to cook and 3 hours the next day to prepare their meals.
The day of the elimination challenge comes and the chefs enter the kitchen at a snail’s pace. Everyone is laid back and relaxed, and some of the “confessional” type interviews have the chefs stating they had plenty of time to accomplish the task. Chef Tom Colicchio comes in and throws them a curve ball. He states that he received a call from the set and that lunch was going to have to be moved up and that there would only be one and one half hours of time for the chefs to prepare lunch.
OK, here’s my sidebar on this. Did you not see this coming? Padma tells the chefs that the challenge is about timing and that schedules change on a television set all the time. Hello? Could she have been any more obvious, or was it just me? You just knew there was a twist coming when you saw the chefs taking their sweet time putting on their aprons and pulling out their knives. Anyone who’s watched Top Chef knows that things don’t always go that easily and that if a challenge seems too easy, or that there is plenty of time to cook the other shoe is on the way to the floor.
Some of the chefs were able to go with the flow, while Hung just went berserk. He looked like the Energizer Bunny on speed. He’s flying all over the kitchen and comes this close to cutting Casey with a knife (accidentally). Later on Colicchio calls him out on this and tells him he needs to slow down and calm down a bit.
The top dishes in the challenge were created by Joey and Howie. Speaking of BFF, Joey mentions that he and Howie are now best buds after the incident a few shows ago. The judges name Howie the winner, and Frumkin gives him a bottle of Argentinean wine. Howie turns around and gives the wine to Joey, since that was his favorite dish that week. Now everyone say it with me, awww……how sweet.
The chefs on the bottom were Lia, Sara N., Casey and Hung. Hung was very surprised that he was in the bottom, because in his mind there is nothing wrong with his cooking. It’s the same attitude he had in the Gin challenge last week, calling out the master mixologist. Get over yourself, you’re a great chef but you’re not always the best. You’re human and you do make mistakes. The judges told Sara that her dish was more of a chip and dip than an entrée. Lia’s dish was bland and lacked texture in the judge’s opinion. Casey overcooked her rice and the judges did not like her sauce. Padma compared it to cough medicine.
Now here’s my sidebar about Casey. Last week when she had immunity she had problems with her sauce. She mentioned that she realized that she needed to season it but got distracted with doing other things and forgot to do it. This week she said she realized too late that the rice was boiling over and couldn’t get to it in time. Does this seem like a pattern?
In the end the judges sent Lia home. They commented that her dish was not Latin, but even if it wasn’t a Latin challenge her dish was really bland. And the blandness had nothing to do with the time constraints placed on her.
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