I agree that Lisa should have been bagged over Dale, but it was perfect poetic justice since he was talking trash non-stop about Nikki’s lack of leadership being unacceptable during wedding wars.
Good point; i had forgotten about that.
I’ll bet he can cook reasonably well in other genres, but Asian is his comfort zone. Notice he did well on the Quickfire, which was simply raw cooking skills coupled with the ability to handle pressure.
I, personally, don’t think it should matter much. Would we be asking the same question about a classically trained French chef who couldn’t cook Asian food?
Except IIRC, Nikki was going on and on about how she knows Italian food and she’s Italian and it’s her specialty, etc, but “oh I’m not going to be in charge because I don’t want the responsibility.”
Whereas Dale’s attitude was more like, “I’m Asian, this is an Asian restaurant, I should be in charge, it’s a no brainer.”
I don’t really think it’s fair to blame Dale for a lack of “leadership” when the show doesn’t really doesn’t provide them any real leadership. If he had told Lisa her dishes were crap and not to serve them, would she really have listened? Is that even an option? He told her the soup was seasoned wrong and she ignored him. How could he have gotten Lisa to do what he said when he has nothing to back it up? It’s not a real restaurant so he can’t fire her or demote her or anything like that.
Right and in reality, none of those three would have been working together by choice. Dale would not have hired them and visa versa. Whereas the other 3 could very well have hired each other for work in a real restaurant. Dale knew once he saw the teams that he’d probably be going home.
As for always cooking Asian food. He cooked a lot of stuff that was not Asian, but with Asian influence. Nikki cooked lots of stuff with Italian influence (and not very well), Richard was using a lot of his molecular gastronomy stuff early on. What’s the point? They cook in their comfort zones.
God, I hate Lisa so much. What was her point about Dale doing only Asian food? Uh, Lisa? you do realize that Asia is a huge continent with many different styles and flavors, right? Anyone who has been to Japan, China, Thailand, or elsewhere knows that the food is very different.
If Spike or Lisa doesn’t get booted next week, I may stop watching this show. The hate I have for both of them is amazing.
Making laksa is like making chicken soup. WTF!!!
Spike probably could of saved it, but Lisa was too much of an ass to ask for help.
Weight of effective leadership and teamwork aside…
butterscotch scallops???
Anyone who’s met me can guess pretty qickly that I’m not a fussy eater. I really enjoy scallops and I really enjoy butterscotch, but together?
I’m generally willing to be surprised by unusual flavor combinations, like Casey’s hot sauce dessert last year, but butterscotch scallops sounds nasty to me. At first I was hoping there was some alternate meaning to butterscotch, or it was like chocolate in savory cooking and would be good, but it seemed like ice cream topping type butterscotch. Ulgh.
I believe along with Agnostic Pagan that if Chef Tom had not been absent Lisa would have been more likely to pack her knives. Anthony Bourdain has only had her sneering in his face once.
I wouldn’t try it with seafood, but I do make a butterscotch glazed chicken (my own invention). I don’t know what Dale did, but my glaze is basically modified from the standard kind of dessert sauce (brown sugar, butter, milk/cream, vanilla) into more of a spicy/sweet glaze (sub in coconut milk for cream, add some salt and cayenne. Skip the vanilla). It’s not as jarring as you’d think.
That is a good point. Anthony Bourdain hasn’t had to deal with Lisa and maybe didn’t know her record on Top Chef.
I think Chef Tom would have told her to pack her knives and go home.
I missed most of the actual show so I only heard about butterscotch scallops here but I thought maybe it was supposed to be like the Vietnamese savory caramel sauce that Steph and Lisa used in the movie challenge which was actually a big hit. Still I don’t get why they’d be experimenting with really risky stuff in restaurant wars, even the winning team fell back on Richard’s winning dessert from a previous challenge.
Did I hear Lisa griping about someone turning off her rice? Is is possible that Lisa just plain can’t cook rice and so blames everyone else when it goes wrong?
There were two problems with the rice. First, someone bought the wrong rice, as in something other than sticky rice for her dessert. She says it was Dale and Dale says it was her. Either way, that mistake surprised me. When I hear “sticky rice”, I assume it’s something like mochi rice used for Japanese cooking and surely she should have caught it before they left the restaurant. Then again, I’m very much an amateur at cooking and at watching Top Chef.
In the other incident involving rice and Lisa, they showed her yelling at Dale that the rice wasn’t done. He’d apparently added a rotten avocado to something he was making, which threw him off his game as he tried to correct it or cover up the taste. This meant he was grouchy and distracted, which is what led to Lisa yelling at him about the rice. I gather he moved her rice off a burner before it was cooked. Can someone else correct me or add anything to this?
But it was pretty unacceptable, wasn’t it? From what I remember.
I’m sad now. Dale’s been the only one whose food I’ve really consistently wanted to eat every time (even the pretzel pork, if a little more fully realized), and I’ve never really bought him as an asshole, with the young urban Asian guys around here for reference, though I don’t want to paint anything concretely with such a wide brush. Similar stuff was kind of par for the course around the circles I hung out with round college, it was usually at least somewhat justified (he certainly hasn’t built up his “act like you like people even if you think they suck” people skills, but that’s arguably an honesty issue) and it wasn’t sneaky and wormlike, like Spike’s behavior seems to be. I still always assume the editors are fucking with the audience each episode, but unless they made up sentences out of random words Spike’s spoken, he really is an asshole. A conniving one I’d never want to work with because he employs snake-tactics instead of relying on work and talent. I like him less than Lisa, who may be belligerent and complainy, but at least she doesn’t seem to be focusing on how many people better than her she can screw over. When Dale was teamed with people he was cool with, he did fine. And even when he wasn’t, he held out for civility for a good while. He encouraged everyone during the relay race, even Nikki.
I think the only cooking Asian thing was kind of BS, too. He’s made things in both quickfire and elimination challenges that weren’t Asian; he even specifically addressed it at some point, but I don’t actually think he even had to. As long as it’s appropriate for the challenge and good, who cares? He’d be stupid to avoid his areas of strength consistently, and especially with Ilan’s (undeserved in my view) win that shows that the judges don’t even seem to take it into account. Asia is a pretty giant continent with many different cultures, and it’s somewhat insulting to lump them all together as “one-trick”. So some of the major countries have some common or region-specific base seasonings, like mirin, etc. - so does European cuisine. It’s just more ‘distinct’ from a western point of view and easier to point out than ‘vinegar’ or ‘smoke flavor’.
I actually even wanted to try the butterscotch scallops. Sure, there’s a probability that it came out gross, but I don’t think it was wrong to make the endeavor - it was a push - and I like sweet stuff. I guess Dale implied that it came out too sweet, though.
Also, I took his “Asian guy, asian food” comment as tongue-in-cheek, considering his chuckle afterwards. But that’s me.
Ah well. He ended up my favorite, but I sort of assumed he wouldn’t win because he’s too similar to Hung (not really, but from a TV-to-middle-America standpoint - I imagine it hasn’t escaped the producers). I’m just pissed because it really seems clear that Spike and Lisa are not of the same cooking caliber as the others (including Dale - Jen, too), and they’ve been in the bottom so many times - each at least once when I thought it should have been them, based on what was shown to us, and the judges made a bad call.
Now I don’t really care who wins…I’m assuming Richard. I wish he’d quit it with the naming things after things they’re not thing, it gets on my nerves. A chunk of watermelon isn’t any technically better just because you called it a steak. I guess it gets him out of the kiss-of-death of making a classic dish that doesn’t follow historical practice exactly.
I agree that if they’re going to keep doing teams (which I hate anyway) executive chefs need the requisite power that comes with it, otherwise holding them responsible for team performance is meaningless, and that leader picking who gets kicked off - unless the leader’s made an obvious deadly mistake or didn’t carry out duties as leader - seems more appropriate.
That’s what I was expecting of Dale until all of the judges said “Eewwwww. That’s way too sweet!”
I sure can’t, but oh yeah, thats’ right, I am not in a competiton for TOP CHEFs. To borrow a phrase from another Bravo reality show, Lisa seems like the Mayor of Excuses Village. (in Sneer County)
When they were in the store, Lisa was whining (in the voice over) that because they chose Asian food, they couldn’t find all the ingredients they needed at Whole Foods, and she was specifically talking about the sticky rice. I call bullshit on that, because I can find “sticky rice” at any random grocery store I’ve visited, including Utah (hardly known for its diversity). They probably weren’t looking in the right place or suffering from “hysterical blindness.” Dale grabbed a box of the stuff they ultimately bought and gave it to Lisa, assuring her that it was the same, and it would work. She accepted it. He shouldn’t have given it to her, she shouldn’t have taken it.
Doesn’t this make two weeks in a row now where Lisa has failed on cooking rice? I thought that was one of those basic cooking things that all chefs should know. She should have gone just for that!
Agreed. That threw me right from the start. No sticky rice? At Whole Foods? No way.
Yeah, I gave a little, “WTF?” to the TV during this. That Whole Foods is virtually brand-new, in a foodie city, and on the southern edge of a fairly diverse neighborhood. The Whole Foods across the street from me is in an arguably less diverse neighborhood, and I can get plenty of Asian foodstuffs. I can’t swear that they have the sticky rice that Lisa was looking for, but I know they carry plenty of sushi rice, which could give a similar texture if cooked properly.
I don’t remember him saying it was the same stuff - more along the lines of “this oughta work.” Still, with a team of three people who claim to know Asian and Asian-inspired cuisine, don’t you think they should know a little more about the varieties of rice on hand? They should have either been able to make a decent substitution, or recognize that nothing at hand would work and abandon that dish.
Reading more of what happened. I think Dale gave up when he found out who he’d been teamed up with and probably figured that there was no point really trying because he’d be sabotaged at every effort he made and if he did get sent home at least he’d never have to work with them again. And if by some miracle he didn’t get thrown under the bus at least he’d be rid of one of them. It’s really rather unfortunate that the luck of the draw pretty much screwed him and Spike and Lisa get to stay and probably screw up another good chef. I hope there are no more team eliminations after this so they can’t.
I thought Lisa should have been ejected too, but posts like this seem to imply that Dale deserves no blame for his own demise, and that he was nothing more than a victim of circumstance. That’s crap.
He’s been an asshole just about every time he’s had to work with someone, and last night he fucked up the scallops and also barely saved his avocado dessert (which most of the non-judge diners still seemed to hate). In the wedding challenge he ran around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to do everything, and ending up doing nothing very well.
I think he’s clearly an extremely talented chef, but he took aim at his own foot more than once in this competition, and last night he finally hit the target.