Andrew is beginning to
warm my heart a little. He will always be mr. twitchy to me, but he does seem to have culinary skills.
Stephanie has one flaw. She does not work well under pressure. She has won two elimination challenges and been on top for others. She sucks at the quickfire part. I think she is a great chef but needs to calm down.
Richard and Dale are kicking ass with Stephanie close behind. Spike is looking better but I can’t get past the stupid hats.
Overall a fun episode, now that we are down to nine we should be getting rid of the gimmicks.
I’d have been fine with Jen, Antonia or Lisa going home, but it would have been stupid as all get out to send Stephanie home for one bad dish that was not entirely her fault, when she has been consistently a top performer. She looked so scared when she realized they were in the bottom two teams, I just wanted to give her a hug. But I thought they deserved more credit for presentation and attempting to use all the words they were given, than the other team that pretty much ignored all the words they were given and therefore ignored the premise of the challenge.
Seems like, with the exception of Lisa, all of the deadwood has been cut. Time to cut back on the team challenges and let them stand on their own feet.
You should also be able to find links to the menu and photos of some of the food. A couple of unusual touches that he brings is fried green tomatoes with ranch ice cream and raw oysters with hot sauce dippin’ dots.
Ditto, but I’m satisfied with the fact that the soup got the raves that it did. What the competitors said is on the money: a truly well made soup is a thing of beauty, and should not be taken for granted. They made it exactly right, tasting and re-tasting for the last half hour, and carefully refining the seasonings. Kudos.
And I don’t know if ignoring (and dissing) the Polish Sausage ingredient was an ejection-worthy offense, but they definitely needed to be slapped a lot harder than they were. 'Tain’t just “bar food,” you stuck-up twits.
[QUOTE=Lamar Mundane]
It seems that Richard is a ringer. Wikipedia says that he’s been a contestant on Iron Chef America already. /QUOTE]The trend in these Bravo shows seems to be to go for people who are already experienced and successful in their industry. Read the bios of this year’s Project Runway contestants; they nearly all had extremely successful businesses before coming on the show.
Personally, i’d like to see these shows take a chance on younger people who are trying to get started, rather than experienced pros who simply want to get their heads on television. But i’m betting that the producers have focus group data showing that people prefer the more experienced people, so i’m not holding my breath for a change in policy.
I completely agree with everything you say here. I thought they were the one team with a slam-dunk easy-to-figure-out theme for their dish…what goes with polish sausage better than beer and some red cabbage? Chefs dress up more casual food to be haute cuisine all the time…in fact, that sounds like kind of a fun challenge to me. I remember I went to a restaurant once in DC that was an upscale version of down-home southern cooking (so the meatloaf was made with ground filet, for instance.) It was REALLY good, and a cool concept. The snobby attitude doesn’t fly with me.
I think he did a great job, and he has a great attitude about food…it’s fun, and he’s a little irreverent about it. I think that’s cool.
But you’re right about the fauxhawk…that has got to go. No one out of high school should be wearing their hair like that.
I agree that I hated their attitude about the whole thing, I also was annoyed by Antonia’s interpretation of improv. In this case I just don’t think they should be disqualified unless they were specifically told they had to use a particular ingredient. Look, we have seen time and again when somebody breaks the spirit of the rules are given a bit of a verbal beatdown but allowed to continue. The judges are foodies and chefs, while they pay attention to the challenge, inside all they care about is the food…taste and presentation. And in this case, the lusty orange asparagus phallus just was not very good.
Which is a real shame, because as soon as they said “orange turned-on asparagus,” I said to myself, holy cow, there’s your winning combo right there. How can you mess that up? Genius combination of inspirational terms. They should have knocked it out of the park.