Top Chef Power Rankings, Week 12: Let Them Eat Ants!
Ay, check out Nigel Forage over here! Finding freakin' ingredients in the freakin' forest and whatnot!
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First, a moment of appreciation for Top Chef, probably the only show on Earth that could have a famous chef tell a group of other chefs “ants are probably my all-time favorite ingredient” with a straight face and have them all nod sagely in agreement. Oh, ants, definitely. Whenever I want to kick things up a notch I always add a biting insect.
That’s right, ants. Not as in a euphemism for the raisins you put on peanut butter inside of some celery (which might be almost as weird as eating ants), but the literal insect, gathered from the forest floor. Mmm, floor to table! And it’s a testament to the show that I didn’t immediately turn it off. In fact the wizardry of this show is such that I actually thought to myself “Jeez, I gotta figure out where I can go try some ants.”
Alexa! Search up “restaurants that serve ants” on Yelp!
So, this week’s episode. It was arguably the most pivotal of the season. The one that decided which chefs would get to go to the finale in Milan and live out their House of Gucci dreams, and which would slink sadly back to their James Beard award-winning corndog pop-ups and biodynamic banh mi huts and whatnot. Eh, who are we kidding, all of these people are inevitably going to show up as sous chefs in the finale anyway, but it’s fun to play along.
We opened this week’s show with all the remaining contestants lighting a candle and having a little cry for the dearly departed Lana. “She’s so funny,” the contestants lamented. “So funny.”
Clearly everyone loved having a Jessa from Girls around as much as I did. As commenter David pointed out last week, “Lana leaving guarantees a 100% reduction in ‘it's giving’ comments from here on out.”
It’s true, but we must forge forward. Or should I say forage forward? That’s right, this week was a foraging challenge. Countless times during Kristen Kish’s introduction she described going trees to roots, top to bottom, mountains to valleys — lots of metaphors for verticality, which was a little weird because it seemed like they never did any climbing or digging. Felt very much like a ground-level foraging challenge to me, but I digress.
First the show had to make up for all of the sponsor tie-in money they missed out on not by having a quickfire by stumping extra hard for BMW. “Wow, these BMWs sure are great,” said one contestant, whose family definitely wasn’t being held hostage by dour Germans. “They really do it all,” added another. “This car is magic!”
Oh my God, we get it. My favorite parts of these BMW segments are when they make it a point to ask the car, “BMW, take me to Quarry Lake,” as if 99.999999% of the Earth’s population isn’t doesn’t exclusively use their phones for navigation. We are never asking our cars to do that, let it go!
Anyway, turns out they had all piled into their Ultimate Navigation Machines™ to head out to Quarry Lake for a little foraging, assisted by “Cree knowledge keeper” Brenda Holder. Holder guest judged alongside chef Tracy Little from Sauvage, in Canmore, Alberta. Little is the chef I was quoting in the first paragraph about her favorite ingredient being ants, so go check out Sauvage for all your ant-sampling needs.
Also, am I the only one that can’t hear “Sauvage” without immediately picturing that Dior ad where Johnny Depp goes to the desert to bury his Native American charm necklace?
That was an ad for the perfume Sauvage, which apparently just means “savage.” I guess that seems less offensive in French*. By the way, imagine choosing, as the face for your perfume, a guy who always looks like he smells like 800 fermented buttholes. Europeans are wild.
[*Late update, from Tracy Little herself: “Sauvage is actually French for ‘wild,’ ie: wild animals is ‘animaux sauvages.’ It’s not a guarded secret.” Fair point, but I did say “it sounds better in French.”]
Anyway, it was a foraging challenge. And as a further stipulation, the chefs were to cook their foraged ingredients outdoors, over open flames. That had to be an additional blow to Lana, who got kicked off the show just one week before the challenge she spent an entire apprenticeship practicing for with Francis Mallman on an island in Patagonia. The char queen’s reign was over before it even began! Sad!
On the plus side, it looked pretty cold over at Quarry Lake in October, which allowed the show to introduce yet another character. Someone I like to call “Toque Season Tommy.”
Yes, toques are what Canadians call beanies, and everyone seemed to have one this week. I want to roast Tom, but I can’t deny the essential ballerness of the Patagonia Lenny Kravitz ‘fit he’s rocking here. Even if he looks like he’s only a few beaded bracelets and silver rings short of a Johnny Depp perfume ad.
I actually liked this shot of him even more:
Doesn’t this look like a still from a Michael Bay movie? The camera swooping around Tom, just at the moment he finds out the mission to Mars really needs a guy who can nitpick a subpar risotto? “No chance! I toldja I’m out of the game!”
In any case, this week’s forest-to-table flaming forage challenge (FTTFFC) ended up being pretty representative of this season. Which is to say: everyone’s food looked pretty damned delicious.
The Food
Tristen:
“‘OG Jerk pork,’ plantain miso glaze, Quarry Lake callaloo and coal-roasted roots.”
Cesar:
“Mushroom trompo, mushroom pibil broth and toasted ants.”
Bailey:
“Lamb Spiedino with grilled dandelion salad, ‘Cowtown’ cowpeas, and thistle root purée.”
Shuai:
“Roasted cabbage with rose hip-glazed pork belly, sour cabbage broth, lovage and thatching ant togarashi.”
Massimo:
“Grilled trout with mustard sauce, smoked potato purée, and bannock with wildflowers. “
CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER!
Based on looks alone (and admittedly I might be biased by the final result of the show, though I’m pretty sure I would’ve chosen this way anyway), I think I have to go with Shuai, followed by César.
That charred cabbage looks incredible, and I’ll never not be intrigued by some lovingly-cooked pork belly. César, meanwhile, is playing to some flavors I know with his al pastor-inspired celebration of mushrooms. Making a trompo* out of a pine tree was truly a galaxy-brain move. That those dishes were also the only two to prominently feature ants is probably just a coincidence, but who knows. Watching this show does fascinating things to the brain.
*That’s the vertical spit Mexicans use for al pastor, which was inspired by the same ones Middle Easterners use for schwarma.
Results:
Top: Shuai*, Tristen.
Bottom: Massimo**, Bailey.
(*Winner. **Eliminated)
Power Rankings (change from last week)
5. (-2) Massimo Piedimonte
AKA: Sylvio Celine-Dionnte. Gouido. Pietro Le Pew. Le Situación. French Horn.
Ranking History (most recent to oldest): 5 3 5 5 6 6 6 9 11 12 11.
Dish: “Grilled trout with mustard sauce, smoked potato purée, and bannock with wildflowers. “
Judges’ Critiques: "The fish was perfectly cooked." "The bannock, that really intense herb condiment had such a bitter note."
Eliminating Massimo just before this season’s Milan trip follows the general pattern of the last few years of Top Chef: eschewing obvious entertainment value to die on the hill of arcane cooking technicalities. Come on! Massimo is such great television! And what happened to that Tristen/Massimo conflict you spent three episodes trying to gin up?
It’s funny to me when people say Top Chef is rigged when the judges seem to do the exact opposite of whatever studio notes would probably dictate at every turn.
But let us pour one out for Massimo. Five minutes into the first episode, I truly expected to hate this man and be sick of his shit before the first commercial break, and yet here I am 12 episodes later wishing he could stick around just a little bit longer. Usually there’s nothing worse than a “real character” who starts to understand what a great character they are. But maybe that’s an American thing, because Massimo seems to know full well how entertaining he is and the self-awareness only enhances the effect. He’s funny by accident and on purpose, a rare combination.
This week was no different, with Massimo dropping one-liners like “I love hiking, with a pack of cigarettes. —Just kidding on the hiking, I’ve never been hiking.”
He of course said this while wearing jeans so tight he probably does yoga in them, which added to the effect.
On-brand as always. Massimo reminds me of an Italian man I had dinner with a while back, who, upon being offered a glass of water, responded “No thanks, I try to avoid it.”
I had Massimo ranked close to last more than a few times this season and I must now acknowledge that I was wrong. He rose to the occasion these past few weeks, and pulled out all the stops. Which this week included cooking a “bannock” cracker on a rock (!!) and choosing the notoriously tricky trout for his protein (you know who else loves getting protein from a tricky trout? That’s right, your mom).
Per Wikipedia: “A bannock is a variety of flatbread or quick bread cooked from flour, typically round, which is common in Scotland and other areas in Britain and Ireland. They are usually cut into sections before serving.”
Hey, sure, whatever. It looked like naan bread which sounded great to me. Sadly the margins were paper-thin again this week, and in the end the judges decided that Massimo’s dish was perhaps slightly inelegantly plated, and that, in choosing to celebrate something as familiar as mustard as his main flavor, Massimo arguably didn’t embrace the “foraging” aspect of the challenge.
Mehhh. I suppose I can buy that logic, though it studiously ignores the fact that he baked a bannock cracker on a damned rock. This was supposed to be an outdoorsy challenge, and Instagram videos have led me to believe that cooking shit on river rocks is the height of outdoor cooking! Massimo’s dish also still seemed a little more interesting than Bailey’s. At the same time, I didn’t get to taste them, and if you asked me to choose between a lamb dish and a trout dish it’s gonna be lamb in a walk. The best trout I’ve had in my life was a B+ at best, so perhaps this was a lesson in working smarter not harder?
Tough week for Massimo either way, and for us by extension. Kristen Kish did shed actual tears while asking Massimo to pack his knives. Did that soften the blow of him leaving for us? Probably a little, and at least he went out with a classic Massimo one-liner: “I'm going to hug my children until they're blue in the face.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard “until they’re blue in the face” used in this manner before. Massimo is going asphyxiate his children with love! Perfect Massimo sentence. RIP, you beautiful maple-drenched guido frog.