Sara M. eliminated from Top Chef
To me the first few challenges on this season of Top Chef were difficult but did not always require a high level of culinary skills. Now in no way am I saying that they were easy or that the chefs who competed in them were not very talented and very skilled. What I’m saying is that it takes a different type of skill to recreate a family favorite dish, or to make a dish only from items in one aisle of a supermarket. Tonight’s challenges (both the quickfire and elimination challenges) seemed to force the remaining five chefs to use skills that might not have been called upon before this evening. I might not have realized it myself if we didn’t see the interviews with Hung and with Casey. Hung is confident, bordering on cocky, that he has a really good background and culinary education while Casey states that she is not classically trained and has worked her way up from the bottom. I think this is the reason why I stated that tonight’s challenges were at a completely different level than the challenges in the prior episodes.
The chefs finally make it out of New Jersey and get a chance to walk around Manhattan, experiencing the sights and sounds of the city. For their quickfire challenge they are brought to Le Cirque restaurant and meet up with its legendary owner Sirio Maccioni. I’m not too sure if the contestants realized that this was their quickfire at the time, or if they were just so awed by the restaurant and the company that it might have gone out of their minds for a bit. Maccioni serves them a dish that is not on the menu but available for VIP customers only – a dish made with bass and potatoes. The remaining chefs are excited as they enjoy the food, having the chance to listen to the stories of Maccioni. Padma then tells the chefs that she hoped they paid attention to details, because their quickfire challenge they are to recreate this famous dish right then and there in Le Cirque’s kitchen, having only 25 minutes to do so. Maccioni would select the winner, the dish that most closely resembles the original. Each chef would cook by themselves in the kitchen.
The chefs are brought into the kitchen and meet with Executive Sous Chef Jason Kallert who shows them their station and the ingredients they had prepared for them. The chefs pick his brain a bit before beginning cooking – asking questions as to how they prepare certain components of the dish. Hung cooks first, and his final dish is close to the original. When he joins the rest of the chefs Dale asks him how he cooked it, and Hung says he couldn’t say. Dale thinks Hung is being a jerk for not sharing (as the remaining four chefs were brainstorming as to how to prepare the dish) but I agreed with Hung on this one. It’s probably the only time during the show that I agreed with Hung, but it is a competition and why are you going to tell your fellow competitors how to cook the dish. Hung tells them that it is a simple dish to cook, and in his private interviews said that any good chef should be able to recreate that dish easily.
Dale cooks second, and Maccioni thought the dish was not seasoned at all. Brian is next, and while his dish tasted good the potatoes were not wrapped completely around the fish as in the original. Casey is up next, and Maccioni is pleased with the final product. Sara goes last and you can tell that she is really nervous. She seemed very uncomfortable in the kitchen and ended up serving her fish raw to Maccioni because she misjudged the time she needed to cook it. The top two dishes were made by Hung and Casey, with Hung being named the winner.
The elimination challenge was designed by the experts at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. The deans and master chefs of the school created the challenge for the final five contestants. The chefs had to create a dish using the ingredients under the cover in front of her, and the experts stated that working with these ingredients would be the ultimate test of the chefs’ skill and technique. Sitting under the dome is a chicken, a potato, and an onion. The reason – the simpler the ingredients, the greater the test of a chef’s skill and imagination. The chefs would have two hours to prepare a dish for a panel of experts. Hung gets an extra half hour to cook and the privilege of serving first because he won the quickfire challenge. The chefs had $200 and one hour to shop for ingredients at the Green Market in Union Square.
While the chefs are preparing the meal, the panel of experts comes over to be introduced. They are the deans and master chefs who are instructors at the French Culinary Institute. (I just thought of something – didn’t Lee Anne from season 1 teach there too?) Colicchio makes a comment that even he is overwhelmed to be in their presence, I guess an indirect way to try and unnerve the contestants.
When the dishes were presented to the judges it was interesting to watch the responses. Some of the judges got very nit picky but I guess at this level it’s going to be the little things that separate the winner from the rest of the pack. However, there were two errors that really weren’t nit picky – Sara serving chicken that was not fully cooked and Dale forgetting to put the honey sauce on the chicken.
Judge’s table really wasn’t all that brutal, at least in my opinion, and at least as compared to last week and Anthony Bourdain telling people that their food wasn’t fit to serve in prison. The top three are named and then the judges ask the standard questions in the family of why should we keep you, is this the dish to send you home, etc. Dale makes a comment that I find so interesting – he said that you can tell if a chef had sex the previous evening by the way he/she cooks a dish. I never really thought about it. I guess then a lot of the restaurants where I have eaten in the past have chefs who have been experiencing long dry spells, since I often have awful food when I go out to eat.
Colicchio asks the other judges what’s worse – conceptualizing a poor dish or executing a poor dish? That seems pretty much one in the same – poor dishes are poor dishes no matter the road taken to get there. I would imagine that a bigger culinary mistake would be to send out raw chicken than to forget a sauce on a dish. Maybe that’s why Sara M. ended up being eliminated from Top Chef this week.
I’m looking forward to the finale, and for another reason. While I’ve heard rumors about the premier date for Project Runway 4 it’s going to be formally announced next week!
[tags]top chef, television, bravo, tv, reality, food, topchef, reality tv, top-chef, cooking, chef[/tags]
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