Top Chef - 9/12

Just watched this last night and came to catch up on the comments only to discover no thread had been started…I thought the elimination challenge was interesting. Not often you see actual food on an airplane anymore (at least on the flights I’m usually on).

Goodbye CJ - your broccoli was truly deserving of being booted off the plane without a parachute.

Congrats to Casey - winner of the elimination challenge 2 weeks in a row.

mmmm…Padma wake up service :stuck_out_tongue:

Really sad to see CJ go, but at this point, it’d be hard to see any of them go (except Hung, who still irritates though he’ll probably be in the Final 2). Casey seems to have the chops as long as she can keep it together, I think either Brian or Sara will be the next one to be eliminated.

Whil I liked CJ, he never really stood out as a chef in my mind. Casey is coming on strong at the end. I fully expect Brian to be the next one gone.

I thought it was going to be Sara because of the pained look on Padma’s face before she announced the loser. I thought she may have a bit more sympathy for her. I think Sara was saved because she knew what was wrong with her dish and took responsibility for it, instead of still trying to say it was good when told otherwise.

This challenge was a lot about planning and a little luck, there’s no room for trial and error. If you didn’t consider all the problems with having to cook everything at once you could easily mess it all up - like Brian’s hash with the overcooked lobster. Luck figured in with things like Sara’s different sized fish fillets, which caused some to be overcooked.

I fear that product placement is taking over this show. When you’re down to six people who can really cook, putting them in a situation that none have ever experienced before and probably never will again is like rolling dice. Even the judges got it wrong - they thought that choosing fish was a bad idea, but it turned out to be the smart choice.

What’s the finale going to be, inventing a new sub for Subway?

As much as I dislike product placement within shows, I probably have myself to blame. As A Tivo devotee I don’t really watch commercials and the TV execs see this more and more.

On the whole I wasn’t too pleased with this EC, either. Seemed too random, but like I said I was never too impressed with CJ as a chef, so I am not too bothered by the result.

They did make a point of naming the blender in the quickfire challenge, but other than that the only brand I remember was Continental Airlines. If you’re going to have an episode dealing with the challenges of producing an edible meal on an airplane, it’s pretty hard to do that without the aircraft. I don’t even recall the usual Glad storage containers being featured.

Mentally, it was probably a match for the episode where they were creating the frozen dinner. I’m sure they were briefed during the tour of Continental’s kitchen on the hows & whys of the way they prepare meals and it was up to each chef to create something that would hold up in that environment. I have no problem with that kind of challenge being included in the contest.

I thought it was instructive how important moisture is when planning meals for preparation on airplanes – making sure the cooked product won’t be too dry. Hence, Hung’s wise choice of catfish (I think that’s what it was, no?).

Chilean Sea Bass. A fatty fish, therefore moister.

Hasn’t product placement always been a part of the show? Sponsored by the Glad Family of Products, a feature in Food & Wine magazine, a trip from Evian, the incessant Bombay Sapphire drinks paired with the QF dishes, the GE kitchens … so on and so forth.

I agree that Brian or Sara will be the next eliminated, and Hung or Casey will win it.

I don’t have a problem with product placement in general, just when it encroaches on the competition itself. Eliminating one of the final six competitors based upon, esentially, how well your food reheats doesn’t seem like it belongs in a contest to see who is a “Top Chef.” Fine in an early round or in a quickfire challenge, but not in the final strech.

The judges keep going on about expecting brilliance in this stage of the competition, but they tie the chef’s hands behind their backs. Let them cook.

After Airplane!, I ain’t never gonna eat no fish on a plane.

Yeah, this challenge was pretty bad.

CJ was by far the weakest chef left. I can’t believe the judges let him slide by after he passed up the executive chef spot in the restaurant wars. Really he should have been booted off the minute he passed on being the head chef. To me he basically conceded that Tre was the better chef. Not only that, it sent the message that he couldn’t win the restaurant wars with a hand picked team.

I think the judges have been pretty poor in deciding who to kick off. The 5 remaining chefs only have 4 of the elimination wins. Tre alone had 3.

I was just tooling around on the Bravo site and reading Anthony Bourdain’s blog. He pointed out that the challenge had a lot in common with what a chef would encounter when catering, which I wouldn’t have picked up on and thought interesting:

"What the contestants were looking at was a situation not unlike off-site catering. When not cooking or staging on familiar ground, you don’t know what the ovens and refrigeration and food holding facilities or the space is going to be like – and you have to assume the worst. Faced with the very real possibility that standing at the edge of a wedding reception on a windy lawn, your portable propane stove might not get you the dark, caramelized sear you’d ordinarily like to see on a saute item, you plan around that likelihood. You know there might well be problems with the sterno-heated warming cabinets should the bride turn up late – or a fistfight breaks out at the altar. If there are ovens, you anticipate completely untrustworthy calibration. So you don’t plan on serving Dover sole.

The same kind of Worst Case Scenario thinking HAD to go into this challenge. The contestants should have known one thing for sure about what was going to happen to their food the second it left the production kitchen: It would get no better once it boarded the plane. In fact, it would begin to die. Like properly stocking a buffet, one can only hope, under such circumstances, to control how fast or how slowly the food expires."

In that light, the challenge was less about Continental Airlines and airplane food than about thinking on your feet, adapting to new environments, and still creating something tasty within certain limitations – all things I’d think a chef should be able to do and definitely belongs in the competition.

Lamar Mundane I do like your point about “let them cook,” which is why I really disliked the cruise challenge. I’d rather see the chefs making entrees instead of canapes and ice cream.

I wish Bourdain would be a judge more just so we can get more blow-by-blows on his hilarious blog:

Sometimes I think Hung is the only chef on this show that TRULY knows about food. I mean, I’ve been cooking since pre-teen and I am a hobby chef. Never professionally trained (maybe someday . . .) and I see people on this show making mistakes that even I know are wrong. Add cream THEN whip? (The Mousse That Wasn’t (season 3)) Baking with splenda is the same as baking with sugar? (Why Follow The Rules (Season 2)) Apples can be unpeeled in a bread pudding? (At Least I Got The Bread Part Right (Season 3))

Has anyone else noticed that they’ve begun (or maybe i’ve just begun to notice) to telegraph who’s going home in the first ten minutes of the show? The second CJ started talking about how he’d never been to new york i knew he was going home. They did the same thing with Sara N. when they showed her and Dale talking about how theyd become fast friends.

Duke Of Rat
I couldnt believe that Bourdain didnt make any Airplane! Jokes.

I thought Bourdain’s best line was that Brian’s lobster had the consistency of a doll’s head. I couldn’t stop laughing.

I didn’t mind seeing C.J. go. I didn’t like how he tried to skate by and would kind of jump on the judge’s bandwagon when they started criticizing the other chefs.

The technical term for that is the “loser’s edit” and they’ve done it since season 1.

Right, but in watching these shows (Project Runway is the same), you have to accept that the elimination challenge is exactly that—an elimination based on your performance in one particular challenge.

The fact is that the very format of these shows does not allow for building up credit with good performances early in the competition. There’s no reward for consistency, or even for consistently excellent performances. You might have won every challenge so far, but if you fuck up badly today, then you’re out.

By all means, criticize the way that the show is set up (i’ve been critical of the format in the past), but when it has been made very clear that this is the format, it’s rather pointless to criticize the judges for sticking to the format.

Yeah, that’s been annoying me too. I want to see these chefs do what they’re supposed to do—cook high quality food in good surroundings with a decent budget. I know that cooking on a small budget, cooking under bad conditions, cooking under insane time pressures, etc., are all a part of being a chef, but if the judges are going to keep asking for amazing food, then they need to give the chefs a chance to shine.

I thought last week’s boat cruise sucked. Six bucks a person for high quality food? Also, the criticisms often seem contradictory. One of the judges last week (Padma?) was getting antsy when it looked like they might run out of food, but then the judges also told them that they should have gone for quality rather than quantity. Well, which is it?

Similarly, the restaurant challenge. While the challenge of preparing restaurant menu is fine, i think it’s silly making them run around like mad in order to actually decorate the place in one day. Again, that tells me nothing about how good they are as chefs, and it also makes the judging even more difficult and arbitrary by ensuring that one member of each team barely does any cooking, and gets judged instead on his or her front-of-house skills. I’m watching Top Chef, not Top Maitre D’.

Also, the nightclub challenge a few weeks back. I thought that getting them all dressed up for a night on the town, then making them cook in a cramped trailer, was not only a bad culinary challenge, but was pointlessly mean. All it told us about them was that they, like everyone else, don’t like it when they’re promised the night off and then told at the last minute that they’ll be working until 3am. That doesn’t tell me how good they are as chefs.

Yes, yes, yes. I realize that this is all part of the show, and that i should take the advice i gave treis above and just learn to deal with it. I also realize that the producers think that this type of “gotcha” challenge is good TV. But while some of the rinky-dink challenges like frozen food or using canned goods can be fun, they get a bit old, and i just want to see the chefs given an opportunity to show what they can do under good conditions.