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'Top Chef': Your Time Is Up

Posted by Harold Check, July 19, 2007 at 11:30 AM

First off, if you're a fan of Top Chef, casual or hard-core, it's time to visit the Bravo website and read up. There are a metric ton of blogs on that site, and, while they're not always stellar, the scales are tipping in a big way when you've got chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Season One's Harold Dieterle breaking it down. Bourdain's take on last week's episode is well worth your time, as is Dieterle's recap of this week's action. In fact, go read his and ignore the rest of mine...

Ah, well, if you insist, here's my take. [Warning: Spoilers follow after the jump.]

This week, the quickfire was a little longer than usual at 90 minutes. The task: Use a premade pie crust (not brand-name, strangely) to create a dish of your choice. What does using a premade pie crust have to do with anything? I have no clue. It seems like an arbitrary task that doesn't have a real-world analog. Good thing the quickfire challenges are basically just appetizers for the main event, because it's this kind of randomness that seems to sink a lot of reality television.

The guest judge was local chef Maria Frumkin, who hails from Argentina. As for the dishes, there were no big surprises. Some chefs went sweet. Some went savory. Some overreached. Some trotted out classics. The most interesting part of the entire exercise was the fact that Joey, the eventual winner of the quickfire, in his on-camera interview, chuckled about having a decent amount of pastry experience, but to judges Maria and Lakshmi he professed to being a complete novice. Fibber. Well played, Joseph. Still, Maria liked your tarts, so you are free to goof off on the elimination challenge.

That elimination challenge was to cater a lunch with Latin flavor for the cast and crew of Dame Chocolate, a telenovela filmed on location in Miami that airs on Telemundo. The chefs were given a half hour to shop and three hours to cook, before packing up and heading to the location to serve their food, buffet style.

But wait, there's a twist: After shopping and planning for three hours in the kitchen, the chefs are informed that the schedule has been changed and they only have 90 minutes. Cue the Benny Hill music and speed up the camera. Hilarity ensues as the contestants run around and fall all over themselves to complete their dishes on time. Oh wait, no, it's just Hung rushing around (cleaver in hand), and he does that anyway, no matter how much time is left.

In actuality, halving the prep time seemed to do very little to change the chefs' strategies. Howie, who had demonstrated time-management difficulties in the past, was sweating over his braised pork, but even he managed to deliver a finished dish in the shorter time.

The tasting, which took place at a mansion on Star Island where Dame Chocolate was filming, seemed to bode well for many of the contestants. The telenovela's cast seemed pleased with most of the dishes, most notably Sara M.'s Chile Rellenos, which included cheese she made fresh for the dish. A very nice touch. Hopefully, Sara will break through and win an elimination challenge soon. Despite the accolades from the actors, she didn't even make it to the judges' table this episode.

No, that honor went to Joey and Howie, former venom-spewing adversaries who are now as chummy as can be. The best sequence of the episode may have been their man-hugging and marching lock-step up to the judges' table, looking like Tweedlee and Tweedledum in chef's whites. The lovefest continued as Howie gave props to Joey's dish, a spicy stew that was universally lauded by tasters and judges alike. In the end, however, it was Howie's braised pork that took home the prize, giving the bulldog chef his second win. It's a big turnaround after landing in the doghouse for the first two challenges.

On the other end of the spectrum, four chefs were on the chopping block: Hung, Sara N., Casey, and last week's winner, Lia. Hung's Arroz con Pollo was trashed soundly while Hung challenged the judges' opinions. Sara was dinged for labeling her seafood guacamole as a ceviche and for essentially making an appetizer, not a main dish. Casey tried to create a twist on Mole Chicken but just ended up with a dried-out, coffee-coated mess. Lia's dish, Smoked Rainbow Trout on Polenta Cake, suffered from both bad planning and weak execution. Having little experience with Latin cuisine, she relied on a creative interpretation of the challenge to bring the dish back into her comfort zone. Unfortunately, when you go out on a limb like that, you need to deliver, and her plate didn't please anyone. In the end, Lia's dish was given the thumbs-down and last week's winner was this week's victim.

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Tags: television, top chef