'Top Chef' episode 11 recap

February 5, 3:14 AMTop Chef ExaminerMatt Wolf

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Top Chef Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Adios muchacha... you were good

So now your friendly Top Chef Examiner is back on neutral ground. I threw out all notions of objectivity and "no cheering in the press box" weeks ago when I admitted that I was rooting for Jamie, and I really believed that she would win. It was a strange loss for her last night... she at least cooked her fish well, which is more than can be said of Hosea and Leah. Still, she seemed severely disinterested for the entirety of the episode, and her lack of attention to detail seemed to ruin her dish from the outset. Every judge (with the notable exception of Colicchio) was disgusted with their first bite of Jamie's dish, which had everything to do with her overbraised celery and the effect that it had on her sauce. When Toby Young took note of the "metallic, burnt taste," in Jamie's dish, I knew right then and there that she was done. Who among us hasn't screwed up something in the kitchen with that taste? It's irredeemable. By that time, Jamie seemed resigned to her fate, like Jesse James when he stood up to hang a picture on his wall, knowing full well that Robert Ford was going to shoot him in the back. Chalk this one up to mental fatigue and the emotional rigors of competition. We've already seen it this year with Eugene and Melissa, and we're still seeing it with Leah. It's the most underrated aspect of Top Chef.

Put yourself in the contestants' shoes for a moment: You're locked in an apartment with more than a dozen strangers for weeks on end. You can only call your loved ones every great once in awhile, and when you do so, you'll likely be trapped in T-Mobile Product Placement Hell. You have no internet access (gasp!).  You're cooking day and night for snobs like Padma Lakshmi and the people at Food and Wine magazine, and oh yeah, you're on television. It takes a special kind of personality to make it through this madness, and for the most part, the chefs still left standing embody that.

All of them, save the aforementioned Leah, are wily competitors in their own unique way. Stefan is the stone-cold killer, unflappable in the face of adversity and on target when it comes to flavor. Hosea, whose lack of culinary training finally caught up to him in Eric Ripert's kitchen (albeit in a minor way), is scrappy, great with a knife and just solid enough in the creative aspects of cooking that he'll have to be beaten on his own terms... in other words, he's not going to give it away. Fabio, whose star has dimmed lately, is still an extremely skilled chef whose competitiveness is offset just enough by a charming demeanor and the occasional burst of brilliance, like his Beef Carpaccio in the Craft episode. And then there's Carla, Top Chef's version of the 2008 Arizona Cardinals. Carla's peaking at exactly the right time, and I really thought that she deserved her second consecutive win last night, if degree of difficulty is to be taken into account. Carla may very well be the most skilled chef in the competition when it comes to flavor control. The way that she nailed Ripert's red wine bearnaise sauce by letting it cool and breaking it down with her taste buds belies some serious talent and a thoughtfulness that may have flown under the radar up to this point. And her hair is almost as long as Larry Fitzgerald's.

Leah? I don't know... she's been very whiny and defeated lately, but I thought that I saw her mojo and ability to stand up for herself come back when she faced the chopping block. It's obvious that Colicchio has it out for her, and her dalliance with Hosea has affected her a lot more than it affected him. Still, I'm sensing a resurgence here. I'm not going to drive out to Vegas and bet on her (though I'll bet her odds are through the roof), but I think she may have turned a corner, and I have a feeling that it'll be Hosea or Fabio that comes up short next week.

Last night's quickfire was a tournament of fish-cutting, which inevitably led to another Hosea-Stefan showdown and ended with Stefan skillfully cutting up a still-moving freshwater eel like it was a rattlesnake over a campfire. Very impressive. The chefs were then treated to a six-course meal at Ripert's renowned restaurant, Le Bernardin. Here's a great clip of Anthony Bourdain on Letterman, where the conversation is completely derailed by both men's appreciation of Ripert's artistry:

After eating Ripert's food, the chefs drew knives to determine which of his dishes they would be charged with replicating. Jamie, whose detachment was already evident during the meal, drew the short straw with the difficult black bass dish. As the chefs toiled in the Le Bernardin kitchen, struggling to replicate the master, Ripert demonstrated his generosity by walking through and advising them: Leah had the miso in the mahi mahi dish all wrong, Hosea couldn't deal with the exotic za'atar spice in the monkfish recipe, and Stefan had mistakenly cooked the asparagus with his lobster. Jamie, in a sign of things to come, couldn't even come up with a tasting for Ripert to advise her on.

In the end, Carla's brilliant interpretation of the difficult escolar and Stefan's dead-on cooking of the lobster carried the day. Leah never did get the miso right, but her dish was at least edible, which was apparently more than could be said of Jamie's creation.

I'm not quite done with this Carla phenomenon: We're seeing this sort of late-bloomer trend prevail across many different spectrums of our culture lately. While it's not yet fully formed, there is an undeniable twister of momentum gathering above Carla's saute pan. Just think about the Super Bowl for a moment - while more deserving teams (chefs) sat at home and watched the big game (finale) from their couches, underdogs like Carla and the Arizona Cardinals go on to compete brilliantly at the moment of truth, whether they actually capture the brass ring or not. Just don't be surprised when she gives Stefan a serious run for his money.