“Top Chef” — Snacks on a Plane
“Your eggs in a hole were heavenly.”
Honestly, I can’t think of a better way to be awaken at 6:00am than by a perky (and preposterously attractive) Padma Lakshmi, even if it meant I was going to have to prepare her breakfast while running around in a robe — hell, especially if I was going to have to prepare her breakfast while running around in a robe. More after the jump…
Needless to say this week’s Quickfire challenge was for the remaining six chefs to cook up some morning food in the apartment. In now-typical Hung fashion he starts off the challenge by knocking over a bottle of truffle oil. No one slipped and was impaled by a sliding chef’s fillet knife so I guess it all works out. Hung won the Quickfire thanks in no small part to his spiking his smoothie (apparently Padma is a bit of a lush… yes!).
Then comes the fun stuff. First Hung is awarded Padma’s new cook book (which he accepted they way most people receive a bill from a plumber), then the gang was informed that for these last few weeks Top Chef was going to be hitting the road. The first stop? We’ll let you know after these commercial messages! It turned out to be New York City. Everyone seemed obviously excited. CJ, in fact, might have sealed his own fate when he said, “I’ve never been to New York. I can’t wait to go.”
Immediately everyone boards a plane and flies to the Big Apple… kinda. They flew to Newark International Airport, home of the “slightly cheaper flight and much longer train ride.” Here we were told of the elimination round: there would be no New York until one person was eliminated (to think, they could have saved the plane fare if they’d have taken care of this back in Miami). Each contestant would have to prepare 18 meals that could be prepped in an industrial kitchen and then finished inside of an actual airplane. In short, gourmet plane food.
The prep stage was kind of a disaster as no one knew where anything was and the equipment was far smaller than what they were used to. Some made it work. Some not so much. The big challenge was to pick a protein that would be really hard to dry out, as it’s anyone’s guess as to how the airplane ovens would cook. Hung was smart (as usual) and picked sea bass, an oily fish that is almost impossible to ruin. Sara and CJ weren’t as smart and ended up with food completely void of moisture.
Tom Colicchio shows up here to do his walkthrough (as he always does), only this time instead of sporting that spiffy, blue chef’s smock, he was wearing a bomber jacket and a flat-hat. He looked like he was about to get some drinks with Ice-Man.
As for actually serving the food, the chefs finished their work on a Continental 777 and fed an army of flight attendants (and of course our judges who now included some dude who didn’t matter and Anthony Bourdain, whose presence on the show always elevates the judges table by five “aweseome” points). Here is how everything was received:
Brian: He served a strip steak the size of a Kleenex box and then some sort of Lobster based side-dish that Mr. Bourdain described as “having the texture of doll-head.”
Dale: He went with a steak fois-gras that was well received but he miscounted and only prepared 17 dishes not 18. So no winner here.
Sara: She destroyed a piece of salmon and then served it over some flavorless couscous.
Hung: As previously mentioned, he went with the seabass, which was cooked perfectly and loved by all.
CJ: He served a so-so piece of halibut, but included a side of brocholini that was described by Colicchio as being the single worst dish served in the three years of the competition. Ouch.
Casey: She prepared veal medallions (which sound like something you either win at a Four-H competition or something you have to purchase from the city into order to ride your baby cow to work). Either way, everyone loved it and said her meal had the most creativity of the lot.
At the judges table it was quickly decided that Casey should win (she took home two tickets to anywhere on the planet… which is pretty cool). As for the loser, it seemed to be between Sara whose whole dish was a moderate disaster or CJ whose side dish might as well have been a crime against humanity.
Backstage the two had this exchange:
CJ: I wonder how Bourdain is gonna be.
Sara: Oh god… evil
Needless to say, CJ lost. I found this quite sad as he was probably the last person with any discernible personality left in the competition (well, aside from Hung). If anything the quip-ratio is going to be significantly cut back in these last few weeks of competition. Still, you can’t blame the judges. If someone produces the worst anything in the history of whatever they pretty much have to go. The ultimate irony is CJ had never been to New York, and here never even made it despite being more or less walking distance (a long walk, but still) from the Lincoln tunnel.
Hopefully he still had twenty bucks in his pocket to buy a train ticket in.
CJ, you will be missed. Now that he and Tre are both gone, I’m putting my support behind Casey. It’s Casey and Hung in the final. It has to be. Casey will win. Mark my words (just not on your computer screen as you’ll probably regret that in days and weeks to come).
