Top Chef World All-Stars Power Index, Week 8: Fast 10 Your Eat Belts
Top Chef was back this week, with the most obvious tie-in: A 'Fast X' themed challenge introduced by Vin Diesel. When you dine with Dom Toretto, you're family.
Introductory note: I’ve been recapping Top Chef for years, and while this isn’t a perfect representation of what will be on The #Content Report, it’s one that my readers will probably recognize, and this seems like a convenient place to put this feature while it finds a permanent home. Don’t ask me how recapping a cooking competition became one of my favorite things to write, it just is. I’ve tried to provide brief explanations for any running jokes that might need explaining to any newbie readers out there, if there are any. Oh, and fair warning, I do reveal who got eliminated this week, so if you’re worried about SPOILERS maybe watch the episode and come back. Okay, onto the piece!
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After this week’s Top Chef World All-Stars, I worry the producers’ brains must be hurting from thinking so hard. This is admittedly a strange thing to say about a cooking competition whose latest episode featured a Fast X tie-in (as in, the tenth Fast/Furious movie) complete with a cameo by Vin Diesel, who would have three Oscars by now if Not Thinking Too Hard was a category. But it’s true! These producers thought so hard!
Top Chef is undoubtedly the champagne of cooking shows (please don’t cancel us, France). I’ve written before about being mystified by other cooking shows, in which contestants just gathered some ingredients and straightforwardly cooked with those ingredients, with no stealing from each other, having to use other people’s ingredients, or other twists. After 20 years of Top Chef viewing I’ve come to expect some chicanery in my cooking competitions. Nay, require it! Give me the good chicanery, sir! And don’t skimp on the skullduggery!
For this week’s quickfire (that’s the first of each Top Chef episode’s two challenges), host Padma Lakshmi introduced guest judge Judy Joo, the owner of Seoul Bird — is that even a play on words? with so many potential “soul” puns, how did we land on “Seoul Bird?” — a Korean street food restaurant, who was there to judge a street-food themed challenge.
Said Joo: “Some of the best meals I've had I’ve eaten on the pavement,” which sounds like the perfect set up for a “your mom” joke that I can’t think of right now. (Maybe I have long Covid. Or thick Covid. One of the kinds of Covids your mother would love).
Judge Judy presented a big map of the world with “passports” on various countries, including street food meccas like India, Vietnam, Colombia, Turkey, Jamaica… Canada?
Yes, Canada was one of the street food countries, presumably thanks to its world famous delicacies such as… uh… flapjacks, and… poutine. Listen, the Parts Unknown episode where Bourdain goes to Quebec and nearly ODs on truffles and foie gras is some of the best food porn ever filmed, so no disrespect to Canadian food culture. It’s just hard to think of a single Canadian dish that doesn’t involve a plate, a fork, and lots of sauce (maybe a moose part or two).
The word “Canada” doesn’t really conjure images of vibrant street life. Cabin food, maybe. Canada is to street food what “Informer” was to street culture.
The contestants were to choose a country, open the associated passport, and make their version of whatever street food delicacy from that country was featured inside. The “twist” was that they wouldn’t see what actual dish they were meant to recreate until after they chose a country. So you could choose Nepal thinking “Mmm, momo dumplings!” and end up opening your passport to find “Aw, pickled yak lips?! Horsefeathers!”
This is a great example of classic Top Chef chicanery! A nice lil’ twist. Meanwhile, and this is neither here nor there, but Padma wore her most high fashion JNCO pants for the occasion:
Ayyy, check out Parachute Padma over here! I hear her harem raves about her.
Jk, I’m just mad I can’t pull those off. I don’t have enough glowy sticks. And anyway, I’d probably just get yak lip juice on the sequins.
After that, well, that’s when the overthinking really began. The producers dramatically staged a television on wheels screeching out of the pantry in a cloud of smoke (I can’t imagine how dull this must’ve been to see live, with PAs pushing a big TV on wheels out and someone yelling “now imagine the vroom vroom sounds!”). The robot TV screeched to a stop in front of the competitors to play an intro message from Vin Diesel and the rest of the Fast family — Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, and of course, Tyrese Gibson, who is clinging onto this meal ticket with every ounce of his being.
It’s always a little sad when the show doesn’t have the juice to get the movie people they’re doing an ad for to actually show up (you couldn’t even get Tyrese?!). But it did allow us the opportunity to learn that “Fast X” is pronounced “Fast 10,” and not “Fast X.” Honestly, that one could’ve gone either way. Maybe just spell it “Fast 10?” Since when are we doing fucking Roman numerals?
After a brief message and clip from the film, and the cheftestants briefly pretending to all be massive fans of fastness and/or furiosity, Padma introduced the challenge. And this one was so complicated they had to stretch the rules explanation over a commercial break.
The show was bringing back an old favorite challenge: the mise-en-place relay. That’s French for “chefs try to chop food really fast.”
Only now, for the first time ever, the mise-en-place relay would be an elimination challenge, not a quickfire. The chefs had differing reactions to this news:
Part of me wishes they could’ve incorporated hibachis or teppanyaki into this challenge, to reflect my favorite Incredibly Obscure Pop-Culture Fact: that Tyrese Gibson enjoys Benihana so much that he had a teppanyaki station built into his house. The station is semi-officially known as “Gibsihana.” I’ve seen pictures.
I digress, but…
THAT’S NOT ALL!
The contestants would be split into three teams of three. Each round would consist of three items to prep. Those items would reflect filming locations from each of the nine Fast/Furious movies. At the end of each round, the winning team would get the first choice of prepped ingredient, the second team second choice, etc. Only the team who chose said ingredient would be able to use that ingredient (plus whatever was in the “minimal pantry”). (*panting for air, takes big sip of water*)
Are you still with me here?
Okay, so the first round would involve ingredients from Los Angeles (The Fast And The Furious), Miami (2 Fast 2 Furious), and Tokyo (Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift). Those ingredients would be: Avocado (peeled, pitted, and fanned). Oranges (suprémed). Whole hamachi (butchered and filleted).
(*gasping for breath*)
Round two would be ingredients from Mexico, Rio De Janeiro, and London: Peeling prickly pears, deveining head-on shrimp, and shelling peas. Round three would be ingredients from Abu Dhabi, Cuba, and Scotland: Pitting dates, dicing red bell peppers, and Frenching racks of lamb (as in, taking the meat off half the rib bones, not kissing lamb bosoms with tongue).
Are you… still with me? (*sitting down on stool, wiping brow with towel*)
With their three ingredients chosen, each team would be tasked with making three dishes, each highlighting at least one of the ingredients (wording is important here). And they’d do it all in a half hour! Because FAST!
Most complicated challenge ever? I’m one of those people whose mind goes completely blank the second someone tries to explain a card game to me, so most of this explanation just washed over me like a llama speaking Chinese. Or maybe it just seemed complicated because the end of the episode hinged entirely on the particular interpretation of the final part of the rules. And this in a competition with, at most, three remanining contestants whose first language was English.
To judge, they brought out guest David Zilber, who managed to look more like Ludacris-in-a-Fast/Furious-movie than the actual Ludacris in the Fast/Furious movie.
Maybe Fast X could borrow Top Chef’s costume person? Anyway, it’s Fast Ten your JNCO jeans, becuase it’s time for this week’s rankings.
RESULTS:
Quickfire Top: Buddha*, Gabri, Tom.
Quickfire Bottom: Charbel. Nicole. Sara.
Elimination Top: Yellow Team - Ali, Tom*, Gabri.
Elimination Bottom: Green Team - Sara, Charbel**, Amar.
(*Winner. **Eliminated).)
RANKINGS:
(Change from last week)
9. (-4) Charbel Hayek
AKA: Davos (the Onion Knight, because he loves onions). Soup Nazi (look at him).
Ah, Charbel. This elimination hurt, as it felt like it was based solely on a slight misinterpretation of the rules (which were not only fractally complex, but delivered in a non-native language for him). Also, his dish looked good!
Charbel also got screwed in the Quickfire. He chose Japan, whose street food turned out to be takoyaki, a fried octopus ball which Charbel had neither seen before nor heard of, let alone eaten or cooked. He did his best to make a little fritter that looked like a perfectly cromulent octopus fritter to my eyes, if not exactly a traditional takoyaki. Judge Judy immediately stuck in him the bottom three, reasoning that “It didn’t look like takoyaki, it didn’t taste like takoyaki, it had no resemblance to a takoyaki.”
YEAH, LADY, WE KNOW. She failed to answer the actually pressing questions, such as: Did it taste good? What did it taste like? And if your answer is “not takoyaki” I’m going to whip you with octopus tentacles.
ANYWAY, Charbel (did you notice he and Salma Hayek have the same last name? people forget that her father is a Lebanese oil executive in Mexico) ended up on the Green Team with Sara and Amar, who ended up with prickly pear, orange, and lamb as their ingredients. They each chose to highlight one ingredient in their dish, but all of them used lamb.
Did you understand that? I had to watch it twice to parse what was happening, but basically that meant that Amar had a prickly pear dish (with lamb), Sara had an orange dish (with lamb), and Charbel had a lamb dish (with lamb). That meant Charbel basically had to highlight lamb, while essentially competing against two other people also cooking lamb. Oopsy!
In retrospect this team desperately needed a Buddha. Someone to look at the data and play the angles. No way they all would’ve cooked lamb if they’d thought this through. The NFL NextGen Stats Powered By AWS would’ve told you the guy cooking Lamb-Lamb was going to lose sight unseen.
It was kind of a bummer, because of all the dishes, the Green Team’s various lambs looked easily the best. And in the end they managed to lose to some other chef who made a red bell pepper garnished with 16 other forms of bell pepper cooked different ways. Top Chef judges love that crap, for some reason.
8. (+1) Victoire Gouloubi
AKA: Al Dente (she tried to cook risotto in six minutes in episode 1, calling it “Al Dente”). Minute Rice (see previous). Steven Seagal (because Seagal famously “doesn’t keep track of space and time too well.”). Three’s Company (for all the humorous misunderstandings she gets into on account of her limited English). Pulp Fiction (she had to get an injection after inhaling walnuts, which she is allergic to). Backstory (she went from refugee to dumpster-diving culinary student).
In the Quickfire, Victoire chose Jamaica and was tasked with cooking jerk chicken. I admit, I don’t know that much about jerk chicken, but the one thing I do know about it is that it should take a while. An overnight marinade, some smoke.
How the hell do you give someone 30 minutes to cook and then ask them for jerk chicken? Is this Top Chef or Top Wizard? Were you hoping one of the chefs would be Dr. Strange?
That being said, Victoire chose Jamaica, of course it was going to be jerk chicken, so some of this is on her. What else would it be?
Padma and Judy Joo seemed to like Victoire’s jerk, but not enough to put her in the top three. In the Elimination round she ended up on the Red Team with Buddha and Nicole, who had to cook with hamachi, shrimp, and dates. Victoire took the hamachi and made a tartare.
The judges didn’t have too much to say about the Red Team’s offerings, though Gail Simmons did ask “Why tartare, Victoire?”
Which I’m fairly certain shouldn’t rhyme, but did. Why the tartare, Victoire? What’s the deal, Neil? Where’s the gelée, Renée?
It seems like they wanted to find fault with Victoire’s tartare, but raw fish preparations — crudo, ceviche, carpaccio, tartare — are to Top Chef judges what playing a flute is to cobras. They get a far away look in their eyes and suddenly find themselves unable to attack you.
I’d like to believe Victoire planned that, but she hasn’t seem especially strategic. That, along with her language handicap gives her the steepest odds, in my mind.
7. (-1) Nicole Gomes
AKA: Clawhoser (she looks like Clawhauser, the desk clerk in Zootopia, and is also Canadian). The Contessa. Kindergarten Cop (her schoolteacherish personality).
Every season has at least one contestant you find vaguely annoying for mostly arbitrary reasons, and Clawhoser keeps riding that line. This episode I think the editors sandbagged her a little bit. They had a whole editing package of people reacting with shock and awe over Gabri’s hamachi-butchering skills, and later his prickly pear peeling.
Meanwhile, Nicole got one dedicated to her trying use a peeler on a prickly pear (which is apparently not the way you do that! like duh I totally knew that too!). And yet… Nicole beat him both times.
Turns out, the person who looks the fastest is often actually slower than the organized one. Ah, that’s probably the root of Nicole’s vague annoyingness. Aren’t organized people the worst? You just want to muss up their hair and give them a wedgy. Come get in the slop with the rest of us piggies, nerd!
Anyway, Nicole made some shrimp tempura, which looked maybe slightly boring but also well executed and definitely delicious looking, which is sort of her whole deal:
She skated on through to the next round, if not particularly excitingly so. Again, kind of Nicole’s MO.
6. (+2) Tom Goetter
AKA: Meekus. Sprockets. F-Boy Tom. Spotted Ox Hostel. Funnybot.
I’m suddenly filled with gratitude for Tom, for having nicknames that require the least explanation. He’s a mischievous German, you see.
Tom was back on his bullshit this week, by which I mean making obnoxiously conceptual space food using his junior high science fair molecular gastronomy kit. And pronouncing at least one familiar word in a new, bone-chillingly Germanic way. This week, that meant a riff on red bell pepper for the former and “chorizo” for the latter, which in Tom’s mouth sounded like “shore-EAT-so.” Ayy, guiseppe, whya youa no putta da shore eat so onna mya burrito? Whatsa matta fa you!
He also made Indian food in the quickfire, and Tom’s genuine love for Indian cuisine (he works on a cruise ship with a lot of Indians) seems to be the only thing that gets him out of molecular mode. It’s been a theme this season. He also seems to be pretty good at it. Tom took home a top three in the quickfire and the win in the elimination round. Huge week for the Funnybot.
5. (+2) Gabri Rodriguez
AKA: The Black Pearl. The Mongoose. Wile Y. Coyote.
The Mongoose! As described above, Chef Gabri was his usual whirling dervish of chaos and occasional competence this week. In one of the strangest moments of the competition, Gabri came out in the Quickfire prepared to fight for the right to the Canada passport. “If someone grab the Canada passport, I’m going to fight!”
Try to guess whether anyone fought him for the right to make Canadian street food. Now try to guess what food was inside.
Correct on both counts, the answers were indeed “no” and “poutine,” respectively. Poutine, huh? A plate of fries covered in gravy? We’re just calling anything “street food” now, I guess.
Fries are hard to make in a half hour (you most likely have to peel, wash, dry, fry, rest, and fry again if you want them to be any good) so Gabri went instead with… parsnips, which are basically albino carrots. Poutine usually has a beef gravy, but Gabri used chicken.
The idea of poutine with chicken and parsnips sounds weird as hell and I would’ve guessed Gabri was headed for defeat, but Judge Judy instead declared “I was so impressed with your modern deconstruction of a poutine,” and stuck him in the top three. (Again, she didn’t really explain anything about how it tasted or why it was good).
After that, Gabri zoomed around the kitchen (at one point actually falling down and sliding into his teammates before immediately getting back up) like a NOs-powered wood sprite, chopping so fastly and furiously that the competitors and judges alike oohed and ahhed. I’m honestly shocked no one has ever chopped their finger off or fallen on a knife during this challenge.
As noted above, Nicole technically beat him, but Speedy Rodriguez won the popularity contest. Later, when Gabri couldn’t work out how to French a lamb rack, it left his team (Tom, Ali, and Gabri) sans protein. Which actually ended up working out for them, because as stated above, these judges go absolutely wild for “A Meditation On Bell Pepper” and “Potato Stablized 101 Ways.”
Gabri himself got avocados (even despite choosing third that round — “You leave to the Mexican avocados? Are you crazy"?”) and made… uh… a sliced avocado with some dressing on it.
You never know when the “bold in its simplicity!” slot machine is going to hit triple 7s or come up snake eyes on this show, but luckily for Gabri this week it was the former. As an obnoxious Californian I eat avocados at least once a day and the idea of cooking them (why ruin an already perfect taste and texture??) is anathema to me. Even so I must defer to the Mexican here. “Charring” might be a loophole.
4. (-1) Amar Santana
AKA: Big Sleazy (because he’s a big boy who’s always takin’ it sleazy, so to speak). Laughtrack (always laughing). Hibbert (see previous). Flava Flav (has spent most of this season acting as Ali’s hype man).
Amar was forcibly separated from his hetero life partner, Ali this week, and it seemed to hurt him as his streak of top three finishes came to an end. It actually ended before the team round, with this, Amar’s attempt to create the World’s Most Caloric Arepa:
If only the challenge had been to fit the most types of pork on a single arepa. As always, you gotta love Amar for that.
Similarly, he had prickly pear in the team challenge (along with Charbel and Sara, who collectively had lamb, prickly pear, and orange) but couldn’t resist putting some lamb on it.
Yeah, I know the dish was supposed highlight prickly pear, but to me that decision was more than outweighed by Amar being the only chef to leave his damn lamb on the bone. What’s the point of Frenching a lamb’s rack if you’re not even getting boner? (I’m so sorry for this).
To me this was easily the best looking dish of the week. Their team landing in the bottom three for not sufficiently highlighting the produce felt like the food equivalent of a football player making some one-handed circus catch and getting it overturned on review because a ref said “he didn’t have control of the ball when he went out of bounds.”
Amar came down with the lamb! Give him the damn catch!
3. (+1) Sara Bradley
AKA: Party Mom. Reebok (she’s been pumping breast milk for her infant this entire season). Sassparilla (she’s very sassy).
The judges all agreed Sara made the best dish on the losing team and she absolutely wiped the floor with everyone in the mise-in-place relay (I really wish they would’ve explained the technique behind how she Frenched that lamb’s rack so fast). Which I guess should be enough for me to forgive her for repeatedly adding an unnecessary tilde to “empanada.” “Empañada” offends my ears even more than shore-eat-so for some reason.
Sara, who is from Paducah, Kentucky, made this dukkah crusted lamb that not one person thought to call “The Dukkah From Pudacah.” Major disappointment (which was my nickname in the Army).
2. (even) Ali Ghzawi
AKA: RRR. Maui Wowie. The Strain. The Ghizza. Muhammara Ali.
Do I know for a fact that “Ali Ghzawi” rhymes? I do not. Is that going to stop me from riffing on it as if it does? Not on your life, pal. Ali Ghzawi and The Dukkah from Paducah, it sounds like it a psychedelic jam band’s worst album.
Ali chose Turkey in the quickfire and got döner kebab, which felt like it should be a slam dunk for a Jordanian guy. He didn’t land in the top three, maybe because he used a flat bread and not the slightly puffier stuff they use in Germany (I ate them every other meal when I was in Berlin, incredible). Purely speculation on my part here.
He returned to his usual dominance in the elimination round, on the winning team with Tom and Gabri, even with a dish that looked… sort of like a pile of potato scraps on a hillock of peas:
It must’ve been good, because that looks like a suicide someone made with three different days’ leftovers. Ali would be running away with this competition if not for…
1. (even) Buddha Lo
AKA: Moneyball. Double Down (because he won last season of Top Chef and immediately jumped into this one). Big Data. Buddha.
It seems like every time I wonder if I’m overrating Buddha in these rankings he justifies my gut-level instincts. This week, for the second week in a row, he won immunity in the quickfire and coasted for the rest of the episode.
He took this round after making a big show of how hard it was to get the crepe texture just right for his Banh Xeo. Which is surely true, but he also nailed the filling while barely trying and honestly, only Buddha would’ve managed to give himself enough time to actually test four or five different crepe batters in a 30-minute dish.
He’s constantly pretending he’s this chill Australian and not the most does-his-homework-and-plays-the-angles ass chef this competition has ever seen. All qualities that feel extremely un-Australian. He chose dates and made this:
I guess there’s a cake in there somewhere. That’s not a criticism, by the way, it’s my firm beliefe that cake works best as a vessel for moisture. Tres leches, tiramisu, pineapple upside down cake — cakes are best with minimal frosting and maximum wetness, this is my thesis.
Anyway, Buddha is running away with this thing to the point that I barely have any jokes.
NEXT WEEK: Restaurant Wars!
This continues to be the only TV recap worth reading.
I’d have made “coq au vin diesel.” Which is just regular coq au vin but it’s been left out on the counter since 2002 and everyone’s just kind of confused why it’s still around.