Top Chef Power Rankings, Week 13 - Blew Curacao
The chefs arrived in Curacao for a fish and cheese challenge, followed by a cruise with Morimoto and his eight deadly fishes.
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Almost this entire season of Top Chef had been basically shaping up as a two-way battle between the top two chefs. Last week made me wonder if maybe I’d be wrong all along, and whether the two perceived favorites were actually more vulnerable than I’d anticipated. Turns out it was all a trick! I should’ve spotted that late second act twist a mile away.
After a season of somewhat speculative handicapping, the positions of the three remaining chefs could not be more clear: we have a Favorite, a Sentimental Favorite, and a Dark Horse. But we’ll get to that.
This week’s episode began six weeks after the last one, the chefs given some time to breathe and recharge before jetting off to the site of the big finale. That site would be Curaçao, a Dutch island in the southern Caribbean just 40 miles north of Venezuela. To cap off a season set in the culinarily dubious destination of Wisconsin, it seems fitting that Top Chef chose for the finale an island colonized by the Dutch, who are frequently accused of having the worst food in Europe.
If an interesting local cuisine was the goal, you’d much prefer being conquered by the French or the Spanish, whereas overlords who were English or Dutch ensured generations of meals based on mashed potatoes or tinned corned beef. In the Dutch case, it also meant having to learn the world’s most unserious-sounding language. Ja, mijne seester hoft a beeg dooki! The Netherlands and Wisconsin: two great places for beige cuisine.
Anyway, Curaçao. It’s in the picturesque Caribbean, and colonial legacy aside, certainly near to vibrant tropical ingredients and seafood. We got a few quick updates on how the chefs spent their six-week break: Danny ran a marathon, Savannah got engaged, and whatever Laura and Dan got up to was clearly too boring to even make the show. Probably for the best.
Soon, the judges were welcoming the final four chefs to the island.
Something about Tom’s outfit was giving me “Pauly Walnuts in Italy” vibes.
I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that behind Tom’s smile, he was silently vowing that this season’s costume designer will never work again.
The first (only?) island quickfire: make a dish combining lionfish (an invasive species local chefs are trying to help eradicate) and gouda. “Oh, like a keshi yena!” Savannah piped up, this season’s Tracy Flick.
A keshi yena, we soon learned, is a traditional Curaçao-an (?) dumpling made of meat and spices cooked inside a gouda cheese shell. Sounds great! (If suitably beige). I’ve said on here many times that the best way to introduce yourself to a new region’s food culture is through their dumplings — which are inevitably spice-filled morsels of flavor, lovingly created one-at-a-time by some grandma in the back room. Most places try to pack all their best stuff into a dumpling. Just order the dumplings, you won’t be disappointed.
And then… no one made a goddamned keshi yena! Just a bunch more fucking crudos! Why bring it up if no one was going to cook it? I got dumpling blue balls over here!
This challenge was to be judged by local chef Helim Smeulders, which, like all good Dutch names, sounds like an arbitrary collection of sounds created by a malevolent AI. Todd Bonzales-ass name. Excuse me, mijne son is also named “Horb.”
Of all the ways to combine cheese and fish, I still can’t believe three out of the four chefs chose to make crudos. Monday Morning Quarterbacking here, but my first thought was maybe some kind of fishcake eggs benedict situation, with a cheesy mornay sauce taking the place of hollandaise. My podcast partner Joey suggested fish and cheesy grits, which is also a great idea (though I’m not sure about being able to cook grits in 30 minutes). Still more interesting than yet another riff on ceviche (not that either of us could actually execute these dishes, but it’s fun to play fantasy foodball captain).
That being said, the winner did finally break this season’s aguachile curse. What was this, the sixth aguachile served this season? This season has had more aguachiles than the previous 20 seasons of Top Chef combined. This is Top Chef not Top Aguachile!
After that, it was time for the big elimination challenge, the one that would decide the final three chefs. It turns out, they would be cooking an eight-fish tasting menu, with the stipulation that they’d have to cook them eight different ways. (Hey, “eight fish tasting menu,” great name for your mom’s— nevermind). The fish they would be able to choose from would be: snapper, grouper, monkfish, dorade, black bass, Atlantic salmon, rainbow trout, sea bream, and striped bass. Wow, you know who else just loves a big black bass in her eight-fish tasting menu? That’s right, your mom. (Sorry? Honestly, I don’t even know anymore).
Those fish in turn would have to be each cooked in one of eight ways: raw, steamed, mousse, poached, fried, roasted, smoked, blackened. Minus the fact that there were nine fish for eight courses, and that no one chose monkfish even after they all spent five minutes each rhapsodizing roasted monkfish, it was a thoroughly straightforward challenge. As Kristen said a few episodes ago, “I always cook the best when given the smallest box possible.”
What could be a smaller box than being told the fish to cook and the way to cook it? And yet, this challenge produced arguably the worst food of the entire season. Maybe the worst food ever for the first part of a finale.
Even the winner completed botched a mousse. Tom must’ve died a little on the inside, having to praise someone who had just miscooked a protein. I only hope that part of Tom was already dead on account of the baby blue guayabera.
One of the highlights of the evening was that the night before the challenge, the chefs were treated to a personalized menu prepared by none other than Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto. Morimoto is apparently the Holland America cruise line’s “Fresh Fish Ambassador.” (As the old comedian joke goes: who books that?)
The chefs all fangirl’d over seeing Morimoto, and for once I actually believed it was genuine. It’s Morimoto! As an old school food competition TV enthusiast, I’ll never forget when Bobby Flay stood on his cutting board at the end of an Iron Chef cookoff and Morimoto was so disgusted that he said “Bobby Flay is not a real chef.”
Some of the best chef shit talk ever aired. Really makes one pine for the good old days.
And yet… did it seem like this version of Morimoto was… I don’t know, animatronic? He sort of came out, cooked some food, and gave some advice to the chefs with certain words CAPITALIZED at RANDOM, like that old can’t-modulate-the-volume-of-my-voice joke from Austin Powers. Could the show not afford a real Morimoto and so had to settle for the Country Bear Jambaroo version? It actually felt like Morimoto was doing an extended bit that he was an animatronic of himself. It was… pretty fun, actually. My suggestion for next Top Chef season: more Morimoto.
After that, Morimoto did what any sane person with better options would do and got the hell off of the cruise ship. Then the chefs went to pet some stingrays at the Little St. Jeff’s Stingray Sanctuary or whatever it was called and Chef Danny cried because he couldn’t wear his Jordans in the tide pool. Maybe it was all the vacationing that got their brains somewhere else, because, as I’ve already noted, this week’s food really ended up sucking. By my count, the judges complained that four out of the eight fish courses were “raw” or undercooked, not including the course that was supposed to be raw.
Tom’s face kind of said it all:
Meanwhile, Kristen was left to explain “They usually make much better food than this, I swear!”
Can you believe one of these chefs is actually going to win this thing? Wild.
RESULTS
QUICKFIRE WINNER: Dan.
ELIMINATION CHALLENGE BOTTOM: Laura**, Savannah.
ELIMINATION CHALLENGE TOP: Dan, Danny*.
(*Winner. **Eliminated.)