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TV Recap: Top Chef New York - Today Show
By Steve West: 2008-12-04 09:35:39
This week’s Top Chef saw the cheftestants not only having to cook great meals, but they also had to have the TV personality of a celeb chef to win. Not that I mind them bringing in a challenging element like this, but doing a live TV demo isn’t exactly an every day occurrence for a chef. Granted, neither is creating a breakfast amuse bouche. At least the latter is directly related to cooking though.
The show starts off with the Quickfire, and guest judge Rocco Dispirito. A brief glimpse at the sequester house shows Alex getting emotional about Richard’s departure last week. Excellent, now the audience is fully aware of this forgettable fellow for the rest of the episode. And I’m reminded of how much I forget about the early departing chefs as the season moves on. For the Quickfire Padma tells the cheftestants to create a breakfast amuse bouche that captures the essence of the AM meal in one bite. Rocco’s advice? He likes bacon. Sometimes I admire the brazen nature of Fabio, and sometimes I think he’s a fool. He went a sweet route with no bacon whatsoever. After Rocco declares it a bit too sweet Fabio says that next time he’ll just do whatever with bacon and some stupid egg on top. Good. The challenge isn’t to create a new dish of unexpected flavors; it’s to create the perfect breakfast bite. Bacon and some stupid eggs is exactly what were needed. Leah correctly points out that many of the other cheftestants are creating a 2 or more bite dish, which is not an amuse at all. Rocco does notice this, even as he praises Stefan’s egg opening technique, and awards Leah the prize for the second time in a row. Oh, and he gives her a copy of his new book. Plug plug! Onto the elimination challenge. The chef’s have to put together a dish that they can show off in a 2 ½ minute live TV cooking demo. Food and personality will win the day. This is the shopping part of the episode now. Gene, Hosea, and Fabio all go for the easy and fast to prepare tuna. Cute chef moment of the episode also occurs here as all three get permission to go behind the counter and cut their own fish. Alex decides on a crème brulee. I’m not sure why. I guess he thought it’d be easy to mix the ingredients in under 2 minutes, but have the dish already complete. The problem is they only have 1 hour to make the full dish, and crème brulee needs to be prepped, cooked, rested, and cooled as Fabio points out. Ariane does a beefsteak tomato salad that actually looks damn good, and she comes off looking well in the personality department. Jamie, who goes in confident, doesn’t have time to let her egg set completely. She makes the choice to just remove the egg and finish the segment. Personally I think that’s the better decision if you’re on TV, but I’d weigh getting the food perfect a little higher when competing on Top Chef. Jeff is starting to show me that he’s a talented chef, it’s just that he’s amazingly dissident in his ideas. There is a lot of stuff going on, and it’s only the clearly veteran status of his demo and live presentation skills that help him through this challenge. Melissa possibly had the worst experience of her time so far on the show when Tom had to spit out her shrimp. Unlike Padma, Tom normally finishes whatever bite he takes even if it’s horrible. The shrimp was just too damn spicy. Carla, Radhika, and Leah all run out of time. Not to mention Leah’s dish wasn’t looking so hot, causing Tom to mention that it’s a good thing she has immunity. Alex’s crème brulee does not work. He runs out time, and even worse his premade dessert isn’t set properly. Danny mentions that he wants to be like Bobby Flay, but his skirt steak smokes up the kitchen and his camera mugging annoys the hell out of Tom. Not too surprisingly Melissa, Jaimie and Alex head into the bottom three this week. At the top are Ariane, Fabio and Jeff. Padma says the judging will take place the next day, but then Tom shows up at the sequester house in the middle of the night to grab the top three. They are going to NBC’s Today Show to have their food judged by the female hosts. Meredith Viera doesn’t care for watermelon, but Ariane’s dish is still declared the winner. At the elimination judgment Melissa tries to make the case that she has always wanted to be there. She has the passion…to be on Top Chef. Yes, because the judges for this show should make sure to keep the less talented cooks around if they super duper want to win. In the end Alex is sent packing for his failed dish. Good, now he can call up Richard and they can have a laugh and cry about the trials and tribulations of being a Top Chef contestant.
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