Are they adding new contestants to the show on “Top Chef”? Where are all these new people coming from?
The producers of the show finally took a step back from the Kenny vs. Angelo story line and focused on the other contestants. Some woman named Lynne spoke about being the oldest contestant in the competition. Lynne, have you been here all the time? Then a Tamesha said she thought Ed’s pie looked the best. Where did she come from?
This fresh focus also helped us realize there’s a difference between Ed and Stephen. They don’t look exactly alike, but something about their sad puppy eyes made it seem as if they were one and the same. The distinction was made even clearer when Ed headed with good graces to Judges’ Table and Stephen waited for impending judgment, but we’ll get to that later.
In a shameless plug for “Top Chef: Just Desserts,” Gail Simmons and Johnny Iuzzini judged this week’s Quickfire Challenge: pie baking. The hosts of the spinoff passed harsh judgment as the cheftestants tried their best to recreate the American classic.
To ask restaurant chefs to make desserts is just cruel: It’s like asking an extemporaneous speaker to start mixing chemicals in the laboratory. Something is going to explode, and this week, it was Tracey Bloom's “pie,” a jigsaw-puzzle-style dry mess that managed to leak blueberry fluid. She compared it to being as embarrassing as living in a trailer park. (Somewhere, a trailer park resident turned his TV with rabbit ears off.)
Pies also cracked Angelo’s bravado, and we saw the superchef’s weakness: anything that didn’t involve Asian food. Amanda resorted to her staple: adding alcohol to everything, and poor Alex made a quiche instead of a pie.
Kenny pulled himself together to win the challenge — under the evil glare of Angelo — and make a bananas Foster pie with Chinese five spice. (Did I say the producers ignored the Kenny vs. Angelo ego contest? Ah, I meant to say they devoted five minutes away from these two characters.)
Things improved when the contestants headed to the grill for the Elimination Challenge. Cooking for the White House interns — who Arnold so lovingly referred to as “being someone’s b----” — the chefs put their best picnic food up front.
Arnold complained about everything the whole time, from not having his sous-chef to working more in the front of the kitchen to the fact that grilling would clog your pores. Hey, Arnold! Quit whining! But he did come up with these amazing lamb meatballs that won him the challenge. If the more he complains the better he cooks, we’ll allow him this one transgression.
You have to give it to a chef who will put some sort of liquor into children’s meals, desserts and picnic food — it's bound to work eventually. Amanda won high praise this week by making ribs so delectable even Angelo admitted they were better than his offering — and kept eating her dish. Is this his new strategy? To eat the food of his competitors so they have nothing left to serve?
Sadly, it was Tracey we said goodbye to this week. The self-proclaimed psychic chef who talked to herself in the kitchen made an Italian dish that judge Tom Colicchio called “white bread with slimy onions and peppers.” Goodbye, Tracey. Hope you saw that coming and had your knifes already packed.