Top Chef World All-Stars Power Index, Week 9: Restaurant Wars

Top Chef's most famous challenge was back -- with a few tweaks. Plus, forgotten shopping basket drama and a stunning lack of jus! GIMME BACK MY JUS!

May 05, 2023

Top Chef World All-Stars was back with another new episode this week, and as teased last week, this one featured the most famous of all Top Chef challenges: Restaurant Wars!

That’s the challenge in which the chefs vying for the title of “Top Chef” do the unthinkable and actually try to run a restaurant for a night. It’s traditionally the most intense episode with the most drama of the season; the one that chefs start brainstorming for before the season even begins and dread before every challenge is announced. How wild is it that the thing they’re all competing to do, the act that virtually all of us ask workers to perform virtually every day and mostly without a second thought, can be this hard, even for the very best in a crowded profession?

Cooking for people: it’s the most basic and arguably the second oldest profession and even at the highest level it’s still nerve shredding and energy sapping for even the most organized. It’s the most straightforward service and the hardest one simultaneously. There’s a natural drama to that, which is probabably why I’m still watching and writing about these shows 20 years on.

Phew, that was weirdly earnest, wasn’t it? Anyway, Padma arrived for the episode after murdering Fonzi and turning him into a tube top.

Or is that a bustier? It’s a lot of zippers, in any case. “I like this one. One zipper goes one way, the other zipper goes the other way. And this lady’s sayin’ ‘Ay, whaddya want from me?’”

Everyone knows leather jackets make you look like a tough guy, so I suppose this was their way of telling us that this was going to be a “tough challenge.” Ayyyy.

As this is an all-star season featuring previous winners and finalists, most of the cheftestants were survivors of at least one previous Restaurant War. All of them, it turned out, except for Chef Victoire (Top Chef Italy season two finalist) and Chef Tom (Top Chef Germany season one finalist). No Restaurant Wars in Germany or Italy, eh? I’m guessing this was some sort of agreement with the former Axis Powers outlawing Restaurant Wars as part of the Marshall Plan.

(I am actually a Restaurant Wars veteran myself, having served at the Battle of Guy That Likes Dessert. Do not steal my valor, or my dessert.)

This year’s Restaurant Wars, it turned out, would have some BIG TWISTS.

Namely, this year, they’d be using a pre-existing restaurant with normal restaurant infrastructure and a professional restaurant director running service with that restaurant’s usual staff. At a stroke, the producers had done away with two of the biggest traditional sources of drama in Restaurant Wars: Party Down-style temp waiters that have no idea what they’re doing and are probably stoned, and one of the chefs having to work as Front of the House Manager during service. Which, at worst, they probably don’t want to be doing, and at best distracts them from cooking their own food.

Normally the chef who gets sent home is either the captain or the FOH manager from the losing team, which would seem to rob this year’s Wars of the usual drama. But I actually appreciated these changes. This is Top Chef, after all, not Top Hostess, or Top Stoned Waiter Whisperer (I would watch that one, by the way).

NITTY GRITTY DETAILS AND GRATUITOUS NUMBERS: The chefs would be working at Core, a restaurant owned by three Michelin star chef Clare Smyth, who it turned out, used to be Chef Buddha’s (last year’s Top Chef US winner) boss at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. In two teams of four, they would prepare a tasting menu of four courses for 50 tables. They’d have 30 minutes to conceptualize, £1,000 to spend at specialty stores, £2,000 at Whole Foods, and a full five hours to cook. And, if that wasn’t all, there would be a SECRET RESTAURANT CRITIC attending service to compare notes afterwards with the judges.

As for all the changes… they worked out great, actually! As a Restaurant Wars veteran, one of the outstanding questions I had was whether my experience had been anything like the judges, as that can vary wildly. There was still plenty of drama (a lost vegetable basket!), all the usual bickering and backbiting that occurs during a hectic dinner service, and, because this season takes place in London, an absolute cornucopia of ridiculously British food names, from “coddled eggs” to “cullen skink.”

You will never convince me that “Cullen Skink” is not the squinty heartthrob from the new teen vampire movie.

Also, there were plenty of the old Restaurant Wars standby tropes, like Padma, Gail, Tom, and the guest judge slow-motion cool-guy walking up to the hostess stand and Padma saying demurely, “Table for four, please,” as if she’s not a fully coiffed, eight-foot tall supermodel with a full production crew following her. “Oh, are those cameras following me? Haha, I never noticed.”

RESULTS

Winning Team: Team “United Kitchen” — Buddha*, Ali, Amar, Sara.
Losing Team: Team “Root” — Tom, Victoire, Nicole**, Gabri.

(*Winner. **Eliminated.)

Yes, one of the teams/restaurant was called “Root.” You can tell the Australian wasn’t on that team. I really wish he would’ve explained it to them after the name had already been chosen and the menus printed, right before service. “Oi, ye know ya restaurant name means ‘to have sex with,’ roight?”

“That’s not a root. That’s a root.”

RANKINGS

(Change From Last Week)

8. (-1) ((Eliminated)) Nicole Gomes - Winner, Top Chef Canada Season 5

AKA: Kindergarten Cop. Clawhoser. The Contessa.

The contestant I nicknamed “Kindergarten Cop,” for her slightly pedantic yet theoretically benign manner weeks ago turned in an absolute masterpiece of passive-aggressiveness this week. She practically bit Gabri’s head off when he tried to use her ice cream maker (?) and then when he reacted, asked woundedly, “Gabri, are you yelling at me?”

Can’t imagine why he’d do that! Then, as a kind of olive branch, she suggested, sing songily, “Gabri! Maybe you can do liquid nitrogen ice cream over here.”

You could practically see the musical note emojis next to that one. When Gabri actually took her up on it, she saw all his steam — FROM THE NITROGEN SHE SUGGESTED — and said, “Oh my God, Gabri—” to which he immediately apologized.

“No, no, it’s awesome!” she walked it back. “It’s like a show now!” Then muttering as he walked away, “I can hardly see my fuckin’ raviolis.”

An absolute masterpiece. I always thought Germans and WASPS were the masters of passive-aggression but Nicole is single-handedly elevating Canada to the big leagues. She’s like working with the dowager from Downton Abbey. Ah yes, who doesn’t love spending 80% of your interactions wondering if you’re being complimented or insulted? (Spoiler alert, it’s the second disguised as the first!)

All that aside, I have mixed feelings about Nicole’s actual elimination. She made shellfish tortellini (which she constantly referred to as “ravioli,” which was slightly confusing), and, as a big time stuffed pasta nerd myself who basically learned to cook by making ravioli every holiday season, I can appreciate how hard it is. No matter how many times you make stuffed pasta, it’s always the same dance between getting the dough thin enough to taste good but thick enough that they don’t fall apart or look bad, the same dance between to freeze or not to freeze (fresh is better, but the dough will turn green in 12-24 hours if you don’t), trying to keep them from sticking together, and blah blah blah. They’re hard! She tried a hard thing, which is respectable!

Reviews from the peanut gallery: "Not the most refined tortellinis I've ever seen, but the flavor was good." "Pretty good." "No."

But then, she also made a big show of sourcing these perfect, live Scottish lobsters, only to grind them up and stick them in a tortellini. The judges didn’t even ding her for that, but come on! Stuffed pasta doesn’t seem like a great showcase for expensive proteins. You wouldn’t stick a filet mignon in there either. Ground beef filling would probably blow them both out of the water.

Anyway, I’m not 100% convinced Nicole had the worst dish of the day, but probably she deserved to go home on account of constantly pronouncing “pasta” so that it rhymes with “Shasta.” Which for some reason is only mildly annoying when British and Australian people do it, but when a Canadian does it is like someone whacking my ear with a sock full of bees.

7. (+1) Victoire Gouloubi - Top Chef Italy Finalist, Season 2

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).

I thought for sure Victoire was going home, but I think the secret critic, Jimi Famurewa from the Evening Standard (coolest name/job combination ever?) saved her ass. He claimed Victoire’s Tiramisu with Congolese ingredients was his favorite of the night.

Reviews from the peanut gallery: "I lacked a punch.” “I'm missing a hit." "Very liqueur forward." "It's just beautiful."

Hard to know what to make of the comments on this one. They seem “mixed,” at best. Victoire keeps trying to make Italian dishes with Congolese ingredients, and it’s never quite been a smash hit for her. Maybe the reverse would be better? How good of Conogolese ingredients can one really find in London, anyway?

After Jimi Famurewa (amazing mouthfeel on that name, honestly) said Victoire’s dish was his favorite, Gail Simmons exclaimed (and there’s really no other way to describe it, it was the platonic ideal of exclaiming) “It had no delivery!”

Is that a tennis metaphor? I don’t know quite how to apply that one to a dessert, but I do know that Victoire seems like the longest shot of the remaining contestants right now.

6. (-1) Gabri Rodriguez - Top Chef Mexico Winner, Season Two

AKA: The Black Pearl. The Mongoose. Wile Y. Coyote.

You had to feel for Chef Gabri this week, not only did he get whiplash from bearing the brunt of Chef Nicole’s massive swings between sweet and snippy, his teammate, Tom left half Gabri’s ingredients at the store.

Gabri also got one of the best lines. As they were trying to figure out where Gabri’s cauliflower went, with both Tom and Victoire swearing “we definitely bought it,” Gabri responded, “You can buy it, but there is not.”

Not-native English can be so beautifully sleek sometimes. “You can buy it, but there is not,” sounds like some kind of profound Yoda wisdom.

It’s also crazy to me that Chef Begoña and Chef Gabri can speak the same native language but have wildly different accents, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, as the editors depicted it, Chef Gabri seemed to be the only one affected by Basket-Gate. He swapped his cauliflower out for an onion puree and never once brought up the fact that his teammates sandbagged him by forgetting his produce in front of the judges. Stand-up guy!

Reviews from the peanut gallery: "So good. So, so good." "It's kind of like, psychedelic." "I just felt like there was a lot of sauces that kind of got blanketed." "Going from the pasta dish to this, it's too similar, it doesn't work."

Chef Gabri is the inverse Chef Ali. Ali never has enough sauce, Gabri’s dishes are usually about 85% sauce. Gabri feels like the wild card of the season. He was down this week, but next week is an Indian food challenge, and the guy who loves mole might have a leg up in a curry competition. Mole is basically Mexican curry.

5. (+1) Tom Goetter - Top Chef Germany Finalist, Season 1

AKA: Meekus. Sprockets. F-Boy Tom. Spotted Ox Hostel. Funnybot.

I’ve been keeping meticulous track of which words sound absolutely bone chilling in Tom’s clipped, mischievous German accent, and this week’s was “stagger.” Find a German and ask them to say “stagger.” It sounds like an angry Teuton God summoning a lightning bolt, you’ll hide under the covers.

Anyway, Tom was at the center of Basket-Gate this week, and it’s a fun thought experiement to ask whether Tom sandbagged Gabri the most by forgetting his cauliflower at the store, or if Chef Sara sandbagged Tom the most by not telling Tom he’d forgotten a grocery basket at the store. Not that I blame her. That’s gamesmanship, baby!

Meanwhile, the editors did an absolutely brutal job on Tom, juxtaposing Tom, ever the fastidious German, telling the camera “It’s super important that you organize,” with a shot of the forgotten basket, and a follow up shot of Tom gloating, “We did really good because we bought almost every single vegetable.” Cut to lonely forgotten vegetable basket. Chef’s kiss for that edit.

Reviews from the peanut gallery: "The chestnut's really delicious." "The leeks are beautifully cooked."

In a previous season, Tom may have gone home for taking over de facto team leadership and saddling his team with the dogshit “Roots” concept (with an assist from Victoire). He explained it two or three separate times and with the double talk aside, it mostly seemed to boil down to “we all have roots.”

Ancestors. We all have them, don’t we, folks? Love to descend from previous humans.

No one really asked how all his team’s roots on “four different continents” (and it’s only four if you count Chef Nicole as Asia, even though she’s Canadian) were going to add up to a cohesive concept. And they didn’t. Luckily for Tom, everyone loved his dish. No one can cook a vegetable 15 different ways in the same dish like Tom.

4. (-2) Ali Ghzawi - Top Chef Middle East And North Africa (MENA) Winner, Season Three

AKA: RRR. Maui Wowie. The Strain. The Ghizza. Muhammara Ali.

Ali finally found a name for his and Amar’s season-long bromance — Papi and Habibi! Nicely done, though I wish it hadn’t take nine episodes.

Please Sir, May I Have Some Sauce?

Ali made a riff on a Cornish pasty this week, but couldn’t help himself and paired it with a lamb loin and freekeh. Come on, man! Duos and trios are the only Top Chef dishes more cursed than risottos. You must avoid giving these bitchy nitpickers more components to bitchily nitpick at all costs!

Reviews from the peanut gallery: "A little bit dry." "It needs a sauce, it needs a jus." "The dish felt glaringly naked."

Ali’s dishes looked great, but painfully dry. No one likes a dry guy, Ali. His dishes had Tom literally leaving his table to search for more jus.

Should’ve borrowed some sauce from Gabri. That guy is always freakin’ lousy with sauce.

Ali looked like a lock to go home this week, save for the fact that he was on the winning team, and thus immune.

3. (even) Sara Bradley - Top Chef Season 16 Finalist

AKA: Party Mom. Reebok (she’s been pumping breast milk for her infant this entire season). Sassparilla (she’s very sassy).

After Ali’s tumble this week, Chef Sara and Chef Amar feel like they’re in a dead heat for the number two spot. I’m giving the slight edge on this one to Amar, because it seemed liked Buddha basically told Sara what to cook. Cullen skink! Would Sara have even know what “cullen skink” was if not for Buddha? I say no, but I could be projecting.

Either way, she deserves credit for, as the editors seemed to depict it, creating a whole service guide for the servers, explaining each dish and the ingredients, plus the concepts behind them. That feels shockingly organized for someone so sassy, but I guess that’s why she’s Party Mom.

Reviews from the peanut gallery: "I loved the dish." "I love how delicate the smoke is." "It's absolutely beautiful."

It was another easy skate-through for Sara, who hasn’t been on the bottom yet. Impressive performance for a chef who is literally leaking milk.

2. (+2) Amar Santana - Top Chef Season 13 Finalist

AKA: Big Sleazy. Laughtrack. Hibbert. Flava Flav. Benjamin Button.

Against all odds, Big Sleazy seems to get more chill every week. I’m calling him Benjamin Button because he feels like a genie gave him the chance to live his entire life over again and he’s doing it for a second time from an amused remove. It’s really hard not to love the guy.

Chef Amar was also notable this week for being the only chef on his team who wasn’t just basically cooking what Buddha told him to. He also took a huge risk, cooking, er, preparing a cold scallop tartare with a warm sauce poured over it. I think it was in Amar’s original season that Amar himself clowned Jeremy Ford for always making raw fish dishes, not to mention an echo of Fabio Viviani’s infamous quote:

He also served it inside its own shell, which is like catnip to these judges:

Reviews from the peanut gallery: "Delicious." "It is odd to put a warm sauce on a cold scallop. But we all enjoyed it!"

Not only that, he was the first to make fun of Chef Nicole for making a stuffed pasta — “Making a tortellini on Top Chef? You’re crazy! — which turned out to be prophetic.

We knew Big Sleazy was permanently chill and incapable of being rattled, but now he seems to be learning. Can’t count him out!

1. (even) Buddha Lo - Top Chef Season 19 Winner

AKA: Moneyball. Double Down. Big Data. Buddha.

Buddha has been the number one in almost all of these rankings and there were times I doubted myself; times I was putting him here mostly for lack of anyone else looking like a favorite.

But if ever there was a coronation, it was this episode. After two consecutive episodes in which Buddha won immunity in the quickfire and skated through the elimination challenge, he won the captainship of his team through a random draw (was it actually ordained by God? was that knife he drew actually the sword in the stone??). From there, he came up with the concept (“United Kitchens,” featuring the chefs’ takes on British food), and conceived most of the dishes, from his own “coddled egg,” to Sara’s “cullen skink” to Ali’s Cornish pasty.

He threw in a tomato tea served in a wine glass and whipped up a dessert for shits and gigs and managed to crush them all seemingly without breaking a sweat. Where chefs on this show normally treat cooking a dessert like an almost unfair imposition, Buddha throws some fruit in a fancy bowl with some frozen stuff on it with his eyes half closed for the fifth time that season and the judges treat him like Prometheus inventing fire. “Ice cream shaped like a skull?? Let’s tattoo his name on my child’s eyelids!”

Buddha is winning this show so easily it almost feels like he’s clowning on it. “Yo, watch this, I’m gonna make them crap their pants over an English breakfast.”

Reviews from the peanut gallery: “This egg was really beautifully done." "The black pudding, to me that was a little too crispy." "That tea is amazing." “There was some fun to it." "The strawberries were so intoxicating.”

If I had to take issue with one thing, it’s that his riff on “the full English breakfast” (great nickname for your mom’s V) did not have a bean component, when we all know that beans on toast is easily the most revolting part of the English breakfast and the hardest to elevate into something edible (we get it, guys, you ate canned food during the Blitz, let it go). Then again, he turned the tomato into tea and it was a huge hit, so maybe leaving out the beans was his inner voice telling him he doesn’t have to go so hard.

Easily the most British moment of the show came when Buddha, in the midst of his huge win in front of his former boss, told her, in front of all the chefs, judges, and television cameras, that he wouldn’t be where he is without her, and that he carries the lessons from her mentorship with him in everything he does. It was an emotional moment, my wife (*Borat voice*) who was watching with me even cried, but Clare Smyth? Not a drop! That was more British than David Beckham snogging a lorrie. She really earned that Y in her last name.

NEXT WEEK: It’s British-Indian food week! Could this be Buddha’s kryptonite? Maybe! But probably not.