Top Chef Power Rankings, Week 5: One Leche Too Far
This week the Top Chef took on the greatest villain of all: Inflation. Plus, a mystery illness and a night of too many leches.
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If last week gave us a classic Top Chef high concept — cook a dish meant to evoke a dead mid-century architect! — this week went back to basics. A farmer’s market challenge based on a pioneering chef; a team supper club challenge on a tight budget. It lacked some of the ridiculousness of the previous episode but the food porn was on point.
I watched this episode between meals, which turned out to be a huge mistake. What it lacked in ridiculous drama (“you call this foie gras ‘prairie style,’ you idiot?!”) it did make up for in making me hungry. Shout out to the boom mic guy, he did incredible work capturing the sound of fish batter crunching. These chef seem to prefer a straightforward prompt. There was a clear differece between the food that comes out of “cook us a chicken course” vs. “create for us a three-course tasting menu that evokes one the feeling of one young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk.”
But hey, I’m viewing, not eating. Give me that Rochelle-Rochelle menu.
Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This week’s Quickfire Challenge asked the chefs to shop for food at the Farmer’s Market (the famous Madison blah blah Farmer’s Market, the biggest something something in the whole modifier geographic whatever). The twist was that they had to shop without knowing what the challenge would be, which was sort of fun. Do you assume the challenge will be to use only the ingredients you bought and try to get everything, or do you assume there will be some kind of basket swap at the end, or a thing where you absolutely have to incorporate everything you bought?
In the end it was nothing so obvious. The challenge was to pair the farmer’s market ingredients they’d bought with one of the sauces created by pioneering UW-Madison chef and cookbook author Carson Gulley. Mmm, “gully sauce.” I call your mom “gully” because she likes to rut. What? It’s okay, I can do that joke, I have depression.
But hey, enough with the gulch jokes. It says on Wikipedia that Carson Gulley invented a fudge-bottom pie that’s still served on campus today. Hey, wasn’t “fudge-bottom pie” your mom’s nickname in college? Butt seriously, folks— (*frantically trying to type while being yanked away from keyboard with giant hooked stick*)
After that it was time for all of the chefs to experience a classic Wisconsin Supper Club. I know I’ve had a lot of fun ripping on Wisconsin these past few weeks, but could one of you take me to a supper club, please? Pickles and spread, fried chicken, fried fish, a slab of prime rib, and dessert? Plus cocktails? It sounds like heaven. Plus it combines my two favorite things, gluttony and not having to make menu choices.
The chefs, naturally, were split into two teams and tasked with serving up their own takes on a supper club meal. Given such a straightforward challenge, they seemed to excel. Frankly, even the losing dishes looked pretty good. Most of the drama the show did managed to wring out of it came from the team’s limited budget. The eleventh competitor was inflation!
Meanwhile, the new quickfire rules (no immunity for quickfire wins!) had their biggest impact yet, with the winner of this week’s quickfire getting eliminated at the end. It just goes to show, you’re only as good as your last steamed monkfish collar or tousled avocado mousse.
RESULTS
QUICKFIRE TOP: Manny, Charly*, Laura
QUICKFIRE BOTTOM: Kevin, Michelle, Amanda.
ELIMINATION TOP: Dan*, Michelle, Savannah, Kevin, Rasika
ELIMINATION BOTTOM: Manny, Charly**, Danny, Laura, Amanda.
(*Winner; **Eliminated)
POWER RANKINGS
Ranking, (change from last week).
10: (even) ((Eliminated)) Charly Pierre
AKA: 9-Ball. Carmen. The Creamy Bandit.
Dammit, I feel like I finally figured out a good nickname for Charly (9-ball, because his head+scarf looks like a striped billiards ball) and now he’s gone. Alas. I guess if I can handle losing “Pho Butter,” I’ll make it through this.
It was a particularly cruel twist after Charly won his first quickfire earlier in the episode — for his fingerling potatoes in Creole sauce. And yet, I can’t say Charly’s elimination didn’t seem warranted. Charly, on a team with Manny, Danny, Laura, and Amanda, drew the fish course, which all the chefs seemed to be fighting over.
He made another well-received Caribbean-style sauce, but much was made of his decision to cook his fish 25-30 minutes before service. Tom called it “not just a little overcooked, it was way overcooked. It wasn’t even close.”
Though if you ask me, his cardinal sin was taking on a fried fish dish and choosing rainbow trout. C’mon, man! All the fish in Whole Foods to choose from and you went with the mushy one? Day old chicken breast of the sea-ass fish.
I’ll miss 9-Ball, but that seemed like the right call.
9: (even) Laura Ozyilmaz
AKA: Yogurt Soup. Zed. Z-Squared. Ozyilmandias. Oz-matazz. The Wizard of Ozyilmaz. Wild Pistachio.
The budget buster! After getting arguably the least screen time of any contestant through the first few episodes, Laura seemed to provide all the drama this episode. First, she rifled through the recipe cards everyone was just supposed to take, cherry picking one she wanted (a rifler, Jerry? Oh, she was rifling! She was rifling like you wouldn’t believe!), much to the chagrin of Dan. Then, later in the elimination challenge, she blew up her team’s budget (or so the editors would have us believe!) by insisting on serving her tres leches cake with an accompanying cocktail.
Four leches? In this economy?
To make matters worse, the judges called her cake “soggy” and questioned whether the cocktail was even a good pairing. But hey, at least it wasn’t fuckin’ rainbow trout. And she managed to ingratiate herself to America’s deadbeat dads by blowing her team’s whole food budget on booze. It’s fun to imagine Low-ra sprinkling rum on everything while Danny couldn’t afford carrots.
An early editing package also revealed that Oz-matazz, who specializes in Middle Eastern cuisine, is actually Mexican. Apparently she fell in love with Middle Eastern food partly from spending time in Turkey and partly through her Middle Eastern husband. I feel pretty dumb now, not picking up on her now-very-obvious accent. Turkish and Mexican food? Weirdly similar, in a lot of ways! The accents? Very different.
8: (even) Kevin D’Andrea
AKA: Le Kevin. VousTube. Un Trevail. Monsieur Brie-st.
Poor VousTube. He seems to be locked into the bottom tranche of contestants, finishing low in the quickfire and only seeming to skate through during the elimination because he happened to be on the winning team. Even his pants seem to be getting looser. That’s how you can tell Le Kevin is sad, it’s like when an Orca’s dorsal fin goes floppy in captivity.
For the record, his beef tenderloin that every judge whined was “undercooked” and “still has a name” looked perfectly medium rare to my eyes. And hey, if I wanted to eat a bloody hunk of cow that’s still mooing (*gets tackled by security before he can make another “your mom” joke*).
7: (even) Savannah Miller
AKA: Funko. Peepers. Sporty Spice. Fryer Tuck. Big Pun. Bell Curve.
At the beginning of the episode, Sporty Spice revealed “my boyfriend has been giving me quickfires to practice.” Which is… I dunno, something? For the love of God, give this woman a storyline.
Savannah promptly slid right through the meaty center of the competition once again. I’m changing her name to “Bell Curve.” (Belle Curve?)
The most interesting Savannah moment this episode was when she seemed to be pounding the absolute hell out of her chicken, and I was wondering why the chicken wasn’t just disintegrating and flying all over the room. At which point I had to pause it to figure out what was going on and realized that she wasn’t using a meat tenderizer or a mallet at all, but an empty measuring cup:
What in the world? How are you just going to give us a shot like that and never explain it? Is this some new chef technique I don’t know about, whacking the absolute piss out of your meat with a really light thing? I’m gonna go whip my pork loin 100 times with a red vine. (God why does that sound so much like a euphemism?")
6: (-1) Amanda Turner
AKA: Daria. LAN Party. Milton. Grimace.
You don’t get a lot of firsts in the 21st season of a television show, but is it possible Amanda gave us our first mystery illness??
For most of the episode, Chef Daria continued her enigmatic run on this show, landing in the bottom of the quickfire (gloppy sauce??? NOT GLOPPY SAUCE!) only to turn around and serve an absolutely delicious looking hot chicken with cabbage slaw and apple-miso-mustard sauce.
Damn. She said this was a signature dish at her pop-up, normally served in a “Japanese sando” (I don’t know why this perfectly legitmate term always annoys me), but I think it looks better like this. Bread? Who needs bread when you have breading?
Anyway, Amanda barely had time to present her dish before bowing out of the episode for some kind of tummy trouble. The judges asked why Amanda was gone during judges table and all of her teammates were like “oh yeah no she’s FINE, just a little under the weather she’ll be back in NO TIME.”
It felt suspiciously positive, the kind of thing you say about someone when they’re secretly dying. Are they trying to pull a Princess Kate? Is Amanda going to show up in an obviously Photoshopped picture next episode as proof of life??
Time will tell. I’m honestly shocked that the editors didn’t use Amanda’s Mystery Illness as a tease for next episode.
5: (+1) Manny Barella
AKA: Manny. El Cid Vicious. Brawny.
I’d just like to state for the record that I pegged Manny as “a guy who looks like he dabbles in grappling” in episode one, so when he revealed to Kamau Bell that he does “boxing and MMA” it felt like partial vindication. I knew there was a reason I felt compelled to ask “So what belt are you, bro?”
(I’m a black belt. Did I mention that? I know you didn’t ask, but you were probably wondering. People wonder about my grappling prowess all the time…)
Anyway, I also had Manny ranked number one early on, which is starting to feel more and more off base these past few episodes. Very little shakeup in the rankings this week, but one of my big dilemmas was Amanda vs. Manny. Amanda has seemed to pick up momentum as Manny slows down, but then he was in the top of the quickfire and she was in the bottom, but then she had the best dish of their team in the elimination and Manny had one of the worst… It’s a tough choice, that’s all I’m sayin’.
In the end, I went with Manny over Amanda, because his steak looked perfectly cooked to me. And you could argue Amanda was just doing a dish she’d done a hundred times.
I guess I also had to factor in the mystery illness. I have to think physical fitness will become more of a factor as the competition goes on. I hope there’s an upcoming challenge incorporating hand-to-hand combat so Manny can really shine. I feel like if Manny can keep it standing Michelle won’t be able to utilize her ground and pound.
4: (-1) Danny Garcia
AKA: Grok. Squeaky. Brooklyn. Stretch. Hype-bot.
Did anyone else notice that Danny’s accent got reeeeeal NEW YAWK the second he got pissed off? I actually didn’t even realize he was from New York before this episode (I nicknamed him Brooklyn because he looks like a Brooklyn dude, not because I knew he was actually from Brooklyn), but as soon as Laura blew all Danny’s crudite money on rum and fancy milks he went straight into Ah’m walkin’ heah! mode.
It’s starting to seem like all Danny’s fastidiousness and healthy living talk is just a thin veneer. You get this guy a little rattled and he immediately starts going on and on about his favorite bodega and the Yankees and bagels and how the pizza dough here is da best cuzza da watah.
Anyway, the editors would have us believe that Danny’s crudite platter suffered on account of his lack of vegetables and his salty black tahini-white bean hummus, but he seemed far more concerned about both of those than the judges. Whatever that fried bread stuff he served with it was looked delicious.
3: (-1) Michelle Wallace
AKA: Pitmaster. Soundbite. Levee. Maillard Angelou.
Shout out to reader Will Murray for suggesting “Maillard Angelou” as a nickname for Michelle last week. Are you trying to take my job? Jesus that’s good.
Anyway, one of my other ranking dilemmas this week was choosing between Michelle, Dan, and Rasika, who seem like they’re running close to a dead heat. I feel pretty strongly that they’re the top three, but how they rank within that top three is anyone’s guess.
I suppose I had to put Michelle on the bottom after her bottom-three finish in the quickfire. In her defense she did draw the dreaded “raisin sauce” card. I live in the raisin capital of the world so it pains me to say this, but raisins are a garbage food unfit for nearly everything outside of oatmeal (they’re nice when you plump them a little first). Every single raisin dessert can fuck right off. Especially when they trick you into thinking that they’re choclate chips. Rat turd-ass food.
Kamau Bell (sorry, W Kamau Bell, the W stands for “what does the W stand for?”) said Michelle’s raisin sauce egg dish was like someone tried to combine Taylor Swift and Slipknot. I didn’t get to taste it, but that sounds accurate.
Michelle disappointingly let Rasika talk Michelle out of cooking the fish course, even though Rasika had immunity. Though it may have been a blessing in disguise when Michelle decided to do some kind of bread pudding/pineapple upside down cake dessert instead. Combining my two favorite desserts of all time?? God, this woman can do no wrong.
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