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This season of Top Chef on Bravo has been marred by stupid controversy. The whole Otto/Marisa/stolen lychee thing. The "did someone cheat? Let's eliminate nobody" challenge results. Mia's going postal a few weeks ago. And now Cliff's attempted prank on Marcel gets him booted from the show. Shenanigans.
A lot of stupid crap for a show where the mantra has been "it's all about the food."
We still enjoy the show, but believe that the producers should (and will) be a little more careful in the selection of new cheftestants and challenges for season three. This season's a little unhinged.
In any case, we want to try and forget this episode and are just looking forward to the finals in Hawaii, which starts tonight. Forgive us for our brevity.
In the Quickfire Challenge, the contestants must shill for Nestle by making something with chocolate. Ilan tries turning a chicken liver into candy. Elia makes a chicken with mole sauce and a dessert (a "kiss"); guest judge (and stratospheric superstar chef) Eric Ripert says she'd have won if she'd skipped the bird. Cliff also makes chicken. Marcel does a potato cannoli duo, one with chocolate cream, the other with coffee cream. Sam makes an interesting dish out of shrimp, bananas, chocolate, and chipotle, and wins.
His prize? Well, the elimination challenge is a five-course Valentine's Day-style meal; he gets to choose which course and which protein. The meal will be cooked for restaurant patrons up in lovely Santa Barbara (our old home town! Go Dons!).
Sam choice: first course. He made a scallop/beet appetizer with a lobster plum sauce. Everyone thought it was lovely. In the kitchen, Marcel tells Sam he can't help, as he has no time. Sam is pissed and says on camera that he'll reciprocate.
Ilan's oyster and fideos (a Spanish pasta dish) were highly lauded, and won the day.
Cliff's steak with a lentil puree is somewhat frowned upon because the lentils are relatively unappetizing in this form.
Marcel's salmon with celeriac and beets (with cutesy little hearts in the side potato, awwww) seemed to be generally liked, though some judges wonder why foam/gelee boy went so "standard" on them. By doing a dish with beets, Astroboy also opened himself up to comparisons with Sam's dish, since that had a beet element. Sam, despite his earlier statement, shows he's classy by helping Marcel with plating anyway. Good on him.
Elia's heart-shaped dessert (a version of her Quickfire dish) turned out well, but she messed up the chocolate -- it was supposed to be heart-shaped, and ended up just being a chocolate lattice placed on top of the rest of it.
Overall, all judges were very pleased.
Then came the tomfoolery back at the residence. Ilan and Elia both decide to shave their heads. They both look great minus the pate, actually -- though we loved Elia's wild curls the way they were, actually. But, heck, hair grows back.
That doesn't mean you should be making that decision for others, though. Cliff, Ilan, and Sam joke around about shaving Marcel's Astroboyish locks. Cliff goes ahead with this drunken scheme, actually waking Marcel up, wrestling around with him a bit, and calling for someone else to come with the razor. Marcel breaks free (how?) and spends the night sleeping in the bathroom.
We claimed we were going to be brief, so here's the long and short of it: Cliff put his hands on Marcel; the producers decide to kick Cliff off the show; Chef Tom delivers the bad news; general consensus amongst the judges is that Cliff would've lost anyway. Accordingly, the other four are going to the finals in Hawaii. Padma tries a little fake-out by telling Marcel and Elia to "pack the knives" pause pause pause "for Hawaii!" Ha ha, aren't you tricky, Mrs. Rushdie.
Still better than Katie Lee. But duh.
Tune in tonight for what will hopefully be about food and cooking, and not about shenanigans. SHENANIGANS!
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This episode was moronic. And Cliff should have shaved Marcel head to toe for what it got him - if AstroBoy had any class, he would have asked the judges to not toss Cliff. But he didn't, cuz he's white boy rapping twerp.
And I still can't understand how a complete fox like Padma is married to Salman Rushdie - the guy looks like Jabba the Hutt. Yick.
Would you have ever thought that you would miss Tiffani? Or Stephen? They seem very classy compared to these morons.
These people almost all suck.
Elia is a fox, though and I think she looks better with the short hair, it emphasizes how pretty her face is more.
I'm glad Cliff got kicked off and based on my impression of his food, I thought he deserved to go anyway. I thought he should have gone last week. Plus it would have scared the crap out of me to have someone dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night, holding me down and calling for people to "bring the razor" when I had no idea what was going on. Yikes!
Season 1 had its moments. Who could forget "I'm not your bitch, bitch?"
They really need to pick some better people. Althoug, according to the lovely and talented Ms. Spotswood, Marcel got brained with a beer bottle in Vegas and had to get 20 stitches. I guess he really does suck!
should be fun tonight...maybe in Season 3 they'll get better judges (call off the search for the missing flagpole, there's Gail!) and some contestants that aren't so annoying. Didn'tcha just LOVE Betty and her big blonde annoyingness???
The worse thing about the whole shaving incident is that they went after Marcel *before* shaving their own heads.
I honestly don't care who wins at this point. Except I hate Ilan but don't hate Marcel, who is annoying. meh.
All about the food, my arse.
All about the product placement and "drama". Obnoxious and boring.
Do I have to watch the final episode?
Astro Boy is gonna win it - for some inexplicable reason, the girls find him cute. And Tom - based on his blog - was so pissed over the shaving incident that he wanted to send them all home and give Marcel the win by default. Plus, based on his blog, although its not his cup of tea, he respects Marcel's "vision" about "molecular gastronomy".
I can't stand Marcel not because his is a jerk (which he is) but because he's a poser hack. The guy is just slavishly imitating what Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Catalonia and Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck in Bershire and others have been doing since the late 90s. Ferran created those "foams" a while ago - at this point, he felt so many people were copying him as to make foams a fad, so he moved onto his "airs" and other more obscure stuff.
Even Marcel's little experimental test kitchen schtick he talked about is just a bald faced copy of Ferran's El Taller workshop in Barcelona.
It's so ironic, once again, that during last night's episode, chef Tom made a big point about how it IS all about the food, and he doesn't care how they act in the kitchen. Which is a load of crap. I understand that they took Cliff's manhandling of Marcel as a kind of assault, and frankly, it kind of was, but they shouldn't pretend they aren't loading the finale with the two most controversial--personality-wise--players!!
I don't want to watch the finale. I know I will but I don't want to. All signs point to Ilan winning (he just quit his job at Casa Mono this last week). Not only is he a poor excuse for a person but his cooking is BORING. He is not a top chef, he's a sous chef in a Spanish restaurant and all through this competition, he's simply been reproducing stuff he has learned there. Big whoop. Marcel, I think is talented, but way too immature and still has a lot to learn before he could be a top chef.
Sam was no prize but he clearly should have won this competition. He was the all around best with his creativity, execution and leadership skills. I call BS on making this some sort of nemesis v. nemesis story instead of really basing it on the food, as they claim to do.