The biggest problem with this week’s “Top Chef: D.C.” episode wasn’t that Angelo and Kenny were fighting too much or that Alex may have stolen Ed’s pea puree.
It was that we wanted most of the contestants to be eliminated this episode, and the show could get rid of only one.
Normally by this point in the season, there are clear front-runners or at least chefs we’ve taken a liking to. While it’s clear that Angelo and Kenny lead the bunch (with Tiffany following close behind), even Kenny has found himself on the bottom. And Angelo, besides doing well in this week’s Quickfire Challenge, failed to impress when it counted.
This week’s bite-sized quickfire had the cheftestants trying to pack the flavor of an entire meal onto a toothpick. Kevin’s grilled pork kebab had guest judge Representative Aaron Schock, the youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives, thinking about the dish throughout all the tastings. Ed’s duo of tuna confit and grilled tuna had the rep remembering the mouthful for all the wrong reasons.
Angelo revealed he was “upset” because Tamesha was eliminated last week, but he didn’t let it get to his cooking. His — surprise surprise — Asian-influenced cucumber cup with spiced shrimp and cashews won him $20,000, immunity and the praise that it was like “fireworks in (Schock’s) mouth.”
“Yeah I’m pissed off,” Kevin complained. “(Angelo) keeps doing the same things over and over again. I know that my dish was good, but if they like eating Chinese food, so be it.”
The chef’s headed to D.C’s The Palm to serve the best power lunch with the restaurant’s traditional proteins of swordfish, lobster, porterhouse steak, salmon or lamb chops.
Ed scuttled around like a live crustacean in a pot of boiling water, freaking out over the fact that his monster four-pound lobsters were hard to break down. Tiffany tried to soothe him, which drew the inquisitive eye of Andrea, who said behind the scenes, “If Tiffany’s fiancé caught wind of anything that was going on, Ed would be in trouble.” Tiffany denied, denied, denied, while Ed pathetically revealed his teenage crush. “She makes me feel good,” he said.
But that wasn’t the worst part of the story for Ed. His pea puree mysteriously went missing, while Alex, who didn’t have anything planned the night before, suspiciously had a ready-made pea puree that he was plating on his dish. Alex’s well cooked applewood smoked salmon and what may have been Ed’s pea puree won the top dish this week.
Ed and Tiffany, with the delicious dishes of slow-butter poached lobster ballotine with eggplant caviar and Sicilian swordfish with olive tapenade respectively, glared at Alex as the judges revealed their decision. But neither one of them was at the top of their game either. Tiffany admitted she overcooked the fish, despite creating her own workstation away from the other chefs so she wouldn’t get distracted. If one of the best dishes was overdone, the other ones must have been really terrible.
Andrea’s pan-seared swordfish with a vanilla infused sauce just didn’t mesh well in the judges’ stomachs, so she was sent home. “First I thought it was interesting, and then it was not,” commented one judge.
But there were so many complaints about Kelly’s over salted porterhouse steak, Amanda’s deboned steak that bended the rules of the challenge and Stephen’s messy, overall failures in the kitchen that these three should have been sent home too.