« No No No | Home | Friday Shuffle »
Top Chef Miami Week 3
By oceanguy | June 28, 2007
One big downfall of Top Chef is that they only did a one hour opening show. There are just too many contestants to keep straight in week 3! An hour is barely enough time to give each of the contestants a few seconds of air time while getting through the quickfire and elimination rules and evaluations, and I wish they had taken more time to let us see who they were. A two hour opening episode could have been used to introduce the chefs to us an allow us to get to know the names and faces. They didn’t do that. So here we are in week 3 and there are still a handful that have not been among the best, nor the worst, so we have barely seen them and don’t know their names, let alone have any opinions on them or their work.
The other downfall is the deceitful editing. I mean how can the chef who 1. doesn’t know a scotch bonnet pepper is the same as a habanero and 2. doesn’t know they’re hot… AND to top it off, she doesn’t know how to light a BBQ grill… how does she almost win the challenge? The obvious answer is that she CAN cook, her food is good and the producers were just trying to throw is a curve by making her look like an idiot. But that was last week… let’s get on to this week’s challenge, a challenge that mirrored The Next Food Network Star elimination challenge… Remaking comfort food.
After the quickfire, Each chef picked a typical American comfort food dish and was tasked with updating it to a more healthy, modern, jazzed up meal. Among the selections: Macaroni and Cheese, Tuna Casserole, Fried Chicken, Meat Loaf and Mashed Potatoes, Chicken ala King… Franks and Beans… you get the idea. I thought it was a great challenge and I was looking forward to seeing some innovative plates that might give me an idea or two. Well I may have been able to pull a couple of ideas from the food each presented, but the overall result was extremely disappointing.
Micah, Hung, and the two Saras were at a disadvantage right off the bat. None of the typical American comfort foods were really familiar to them. Hell, I don’t think I’ve had Chicken ala King more than once or twice in my life, so it wouldn’t be really familiar to me either. So they had a terrible starting point.
Micah took the meatloaf and mashed potatoes and turned it into a Shepard’s pie. It actually didn’t look too bad, but it got a big “Yuk!” from our guest judge, Alfred Portale, at the tasting table. Looks certainly are deceiving in a cooking competition, and the appearance didn’t keep her safe. The dish must have really been bad, though, as she was told to pack her knives.
The worst looking dish, by far, was CJ’s remake of tuna casserole. It was a base of a runny green unappetizing mess topped with what looked like chunk light tuna straight from the can. The green color was tres, tres YUK. He was in the bottom four but it must have tasted OK, because he stayed and Micah didn’t.
Also in the bottom four was Lia. Her remake of Beans and Franks landed Lia in the bottom 4. As Chef Tom said, “It was a winning dish,” but she didn’t really do anything with it. She cooked some store-bought chicken sausage, cooked undercooked some lentils and served it with a chunk of watermelon. Any 10 year old could have done that… well, except for cutting the watermelon in such a pretty shape… but, lucky for her it wasn’t the worst dish. It certainly wasn’t up to the standard the judges expected, but she didn’t get a Yuk either… even with the undercooked beans.
Sara M didn’t have to pack her knives either. She remade Chicken ala King… or maybe she didn’t remake it… and served a chicken dish… chicken kabobs is the best way to describe it… it wasn’t even remotely reminiscent of anything I knew as ala King. She was lucky not to go home, since she didn’t really follow the rules.
Playing within the rules but not to the judges liking was last week’s winner, and the winner of last night’s Quickfire challenge, Brian. Because of it he was also brought in to the judges table with the bottom four. Chef Colichio just wanted to chastise him for not playing by the rules even though he was immune from elimination. He used high cholesterol shrimp and lobster in what was supposed to be a low cholesterol challenge. It didn’t matter, they scolded him and sent him back to the stew room. However he was warned that he needed to do some meat at some point. He’s been clinging to the seafood he knows up to now, we’ll see what else he can do.
So Micah got sent home, back to her daughter, which seemed to make her happy. As she said, she got out of there before things get ugly.
Speaking of ugly, thankfully we didn’t see a whole lot of ugly drama last night. We didn’t get the hyped up product placement either. The Elks Lodge Elimination Challenge just didn’t have the same zip and in your face commercial sound of the Kingsford Charcoal Elimination Challenge. Still, I doubt we’ve seen the last of the Nascaresque product pitching. But enough of that, let’s try to make this all about the food.
Dale, [again with the manpris… cover your pasty ankles man] wasn’t much more ambitious than Lia in the work category. He bought instant mashed potatoes and a rotisserie chicken… I thought I was looking at Sandra Lee’s Canned Cuisine show from the Food Network. He got by though because his dish tasted great… Man I wish I could taste them all.
Hung had a good idea with giving folks a taste of crispy fried chicken skin, served alongside his skinless chicken legs. The dish looked like an Asian barbecued chicken appetizer and didn’t appear too original nor special. Except for his explanation of how he crisped up the chicken skin in a healthy way, his dish was unremarkable.
Joey’s lasagna was unremarkable too. So far, cooking-wise, he’s been the Michael from Season 2, giving us lackluster sports bar food. His problem is he doesn’t have Michael’s fun loving personality.. Joey is just a whiney asshole, and won’t last much longer. He’s only there for the drama.
One of the other favorites, Tre, did a Roast Chicken Cordon Bleu with Bluefoot Chanterelles that also looked pretty good. I don’t think the Elks Club members liked it too much though. Tre seems to be having difficulty seasoning his dishes the last two weeks. He’ll be packing his knives soon if he doesn’t get rid of that issue. I’m sure he will.
Howie has made a come-back. He won the elimination challenge with a healthful remake of pork chops and applesauce. And he almost won the Quickfire challenge. His problem the first two weeks were of time management. Week 1 he didn’t have the time to get his complete dish plated and week 2, while seemingly compensating for that mistake, started grilling then carving his pork tenderloin too soon. This week he found a happy middle and the quality of his food didn’t get overshadowed by other non-talent related factors. So now we’ve seen what he is capable of. I like the mango slaw from last week and this week’s apple slaw looked really good… I’ll be playing with that… but I trust he has more to show us than fruit slaw.
My top 4 at the moment are all men: Hung, Tre, Brian and Howie. As for the bottom group, there is only one: Joey. The rest are all in a pack in the middle. All of them have the talent to win challenges and to win immunity with the Quickfires but I don’t think, at the moment, that any of them have the talent to win in the end. Hung has been the steadiest, but I wonder if his best is as good or better than the best from Tre, Brian or Howie. They are all talented. We’ll have to wait and see.
I’m looking forward to the point that there are only 6 or 7 chefs’ left in the competition. It’s so hard to keep them all straight in the frenetic hour we’re given. And it’s so much more fun to have a bit of knowledge about their abilities and personalities and have had the opportunity to pick favorites. Right now there are just too many to keep track of. Praise the cooking-show gods that Bravo has a great web site to fill in some of the blanks from the limited time we see them in the edited broadcast show.
Topics: Foodie Love, Top Chef |
June 28th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
All the Bravo competition shows do an amazing amount of manipulative editing. It’s what I love (because they do a great job creating drama) and hate (because it’s all such bullshit sometimes) about them. I want to go to some of these celebrity judges’ restaurants and check them out (if I could afford it).
June 29th, 2007 at 8:32 am
What bothers me most about the editing is the impression it leaves that the winner is a foregone conclusion. I know it’s a bit of a chicken egg thing when they have the opportunity to edit after the fact, but I hate it.
I’m with you on the celebrity judges… I have eaten at Norman’s in Key West. As you’d expect, it was very good. We even brought our own catch in from the day’s fishing and had them prepare it. Grilled Dolphin (Mahi-mahi for the Hawaiian inclined).
This week’s judge, Alfred Portale, intrigues me… they made him out to be the king of presentations. I may have to add that to my list of places to visit… The Gotham Bar and Grill