Liane Bonin of HitFix.com writes: Restaurant Wars! This episode is always good for some yelling, some swearing, a little crying and, of course, at least one complete meltdown. And, oh yes, there’s food involved. Restaurant Wars is the point at which “Top Chef” starts to feel, for better or for worse, like a traditional reality TV show. All you need is Gordon Ramsay to drop by and shriek at a few chefs and you’d think you were watching the Fox network. Let’s just hope the food is exceptional this season or we might as well be watching the chefs burn beef Wellington and picking spaghetti out of the trash.
Today’s Quickfire Challenge takes place at Le Bernardin, a very expensive but damn good seafood restaurant. Anthony Bourdain is there to introduce the chefs to Justo Thomas, the best fish butcher around. Just butchers up to 1,000 pounds of fish every morning. I smell Quickfire Challenge!
For immunity, the chefs must filet and portion one cod and one fluke in ten minutes, which is two minutes longer than it takes Justo to do the same thing. I’m guessing two minutes won’t be enough of a cushion for some of our chefs, so Justo has great job security.
The chefs start hacking away at some big, ugly fish and, surprise surprise, we get yet another injurty when Fabio slices through his thumbnail. Of course, thanks to Jamie, no one is willing to get medical attention unless they get a knife through an important internal organ (I’m guessing some of the chefs would even try to tough it out with one punctured kidney) so Fabio sucks it up.
Once Justo and Anthony examine the fishy massacre, some clear losers emerge (Carla doesn’t even finish). On the bottom are Fabio, Carla, Tiffany and Antonia. Dale, Richard, Mike and Marcel are at the head of the class. But to determine which one of them gets immunity, they have to make a great dish out of heads, racks, wings, fins and collars of a fish in 45 minutes.
Here comes the thoroughly predictable segment in which a chef (this time it’s Dale) explains why they will rock this challenge. Dale says his family ate every bit of the animal before it was cool. Yawn. Much cooler? When Richard says his first job was as the fish guy at McDonald’s. And even then, he screwed it up.
On a side note, we learn that Mike hates Marcel. I’m sure this will be important later.
Read the full recap at HitFix.com.
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