It is getting ridiculous almost to be unwatchable.
The ground rules are: here’s a basket of mystery ingredients and you must use all of them. The only thing is, you’re not eliminated if you leave one out. What makes it really bad is that there is usually one ingredient that is a real bitch to work with. Someone leaves it out and makes a great entree whereas a chef that has to shoehorn strawberry jelly with the chicken thighs and coconut gets eliminated since their food isn’t as good. Last season, the flagrant disregard of the rules reached new heights when a chef who hadn’t plated by the time limit was allowed to plate, serve his food, and was actually considered for moving to the next round.
Now in season 2, they don’t even try to pretend there’s rules. A chef plated only one of the three required plates with his ham fritter (ham being a required ingredient) and he was moved on to the next round with the rationale that since the fritter was on one plate, all the judges were allowed to taste the fritter. The guy does the same thing in the final round (one almond brittle made it on a plate) and he almost won :eek:
Interestingly, on FoodTV’s website, there is no way to give feedback on this show.
I haven’t seen it, but I almost dropped Top Chef for similar reasons. Are you seriously going to tell me that with 700 cameras in the kitchen you don’t know who keeps changing the temperature on peoples food?
Eh… That’s only happened a couple times, but I would guess that it was probably either the chef turned it down him/herself and didn’t realize or someone turned it off by accident.
The judges are boring, prissy, and annoyingly nitpicky without being colorful or particularly constructive, and the same-ingredient rule sometimes leads to an interesting variety of entrees, but more often (like last night) it leads to a tedious redundancy in what they make.
In all fairness to the OP, I don’t remember a single time that someone who broke the rules ended up winning the entire thing. The last judgment assesses the entire competition, not just the dessert, and I think that’s where the non-compliance really hurts.
But that doesn’t make the show any less irritating. I tried it again last night after giving up on it for a while, hoping something about it had improved (even Ted is a bit of a prick on this show, while never on Top or Iron Chef), but alas–No.
I remember in the first season when someone dropped a piece of chicken on the floor, picked it up and served it, and STILL got put through to the next round. How’d you like to lose to the guy that served the judges Floor-Chicken?
By making something crappier tasting then Floor-Chicken? The issue that complicated last nights judging was that the guy who kept screwing up and not finishing the plating still seemed to be giving the jugdes really good food and his competitors were mediocre. The one judge even admitted that if he had done his plating on time he would have won the whole thing hands down. They were torn between punishing him not finishing and rewarding him having the best food.
But he still got through to the round even after not using the required element on two plates? So rules are only in effect unless inconvienent? Either you’re eliminated if you don’t satisfy the rules or the rules don’t matter.