I think They learned their lesson with Ilan. They left the challenges too open, and he just cooked a dish he had learned from a Spanish Restaurant each time. They have to through them some curve balls or it becomes who was line chef in the best place.
Man, they were making me crazy during the Quickfire. I think a few of them should have been sent home for trying to peel the garlic one at a time.
I’m sorry to see Dale go 
A heads up to all of Richard’s fans … he has a new show “Blais Off” premiering on the Science Channel tonight.
This is funny. I know someone who worked at Casa Mono with Ilan before he was on Season 2 and they said almost exactly the same thing about his food. He just took the food he had been making as a line cook and used it to win.
Someone goofed and posted Gail’s blog a few hours early. I don’t feel right posting any details or links. That’s too big of a spoiler. Her EW blog is easily found if you really, really want to be spoiled.
Someone at EW is in for a major butt chewing. 
That didn’t take long. The blog is already down. Word travels fast on the net. It was up maybe 45 minutes.
Don’t suppose you want to post the spoiler for those who want to know? Behind a spoiler box of course.
TwoP’s Top Chef spoiler thread has a couple posts. I regret reading the blog. Speculative spoilers are fun because they aren’t always right.A blog is a bit too much. I’ll still watch tonight. Next time, I won’t let my curiosity get me.
As it hasn’t aired outside of EST
[spoiler] Do these chefs even WATCH other seasons? Their own seasons? Here are some notes for them:
-Chefs with immunity, for whatever reason, usually have crappy dishes. Trey should have been scheduled for last. Sure, he took up a spot at elimination, keeping someone out of there, but I’d rather have had a 1 in 4 chance than a 1 in 3.
-No matter what your teammates do, YOU are responsible for your meal. SAY NO. Don’t let them touch it, add stuff.
-Angelo sabotages everyone.
-Jamie was super manipulative in her season. Once her beans sucked the first time, it’s no coincidence she just “happened” to not be ready. She has twice now taken herself out of contention for incompletes. I suspect the first time she does end up on the bottom, she will pay the price for that… if she manages to not sneak out of getting on the bottom.
For competent chefs, they’re kind of moronic competitors.
[/spoiler]
I thought Tre played a interesting game. First, I’m not sure he tried that hard to create a great dish. Also, it occurred to me that he agreed rather easily that Angelo cook his fish. Letting someone cook a major component isn’t what you’d expect. Maybe Tre was testing Angelo? Find out if Angelo was being helpful or working his own game? Turns out Angelo “somehow” overcooked the fish just a bit. Good thing Tre had immunity.
I didn’t quite understand Spike’s brilliant strategy. Who wants to risk serving a weak dish as some kind of strategy? That puts Jamie right in the fire if the team loses. I don’t blame her for not serving.
Carla rocked it tonight. Congrats girl!! I liked Spike and hated seeing him go. He’s certainly better than some of the others that are still in the game.
Once again Jamie doesn’t participate and avoids elimination. That was pretty crappy. Especially since she just refused to compete. I wouldn’t care if she just ended up that way randomly. I also realized that without Stefan there to bug her, she’s really boring to watch too.
On a better note, I loved the Quickfire. I have no problem with absolutely ridiculous Quickfires. I also like Carla’s “Undonete” dish. I like when the Chefs don’t take the Quickfires too seriously. They did that a lot on Season 3. I remember Hung made a Smurf village out of cereal once and Casey made Siracha ice cream.
I really, really, really want to try Carla’s soup. It sounded great.
First of all, I agree that the quickfire was fantastic.
Secondly, the competitive game player in me wishes that they’d been more clear about one crucial point in the elimination challenge… does one team (maybe the team that won the previous round?) have to announce first who they’re sending up?
And I also think Jamie is being a total pussy so far this season. Boo to her!
However, I just don’t see how Angelo is sabotaging dishes. In this context, he had already won his round. He was 100% safe period. And one of his competitors is going home, period. And Tre can’t go home no matter what. And if Angel’s team wins, there’s a good chance Angelo will win a fabulous trip somewhere (Italy, it turns out). So someone explain to me a possible motivation Angelo could have for sabotaging Tre’s dish?
I’m with you 100%. I liked her in the season she competed but this fussy, “I’m not ready” / “Ow! My finger!” baloney is quickly getting tiresome.
Ok, sabotaging is probably too strong a word. But just keep watching. As the season continues there will be an ongoing pattern of behavior from him. Notice how in tonights show he insinuated himself into prepping dishes for two different chefs. Both were in the bottom 4 and Spike got eliminated. Yeah, Spike allowed it and so did Tre. But the fact remains, Angelo horned in on their dishes, didn’t make those dishes better through his contributions and one of them gets the elimination. And at the same time his dish shines on through. I don’t remember one time last season (and I haven’t seen one time this season) where his advice or suggestions to another chef have ever served the other chef well.
Oh yeah - if he is so innocent then he is getting the worst “bad guy” edit I have ever seen someone get on a reality series.
And that would be “bad guy” edit two (2) seasons in a row on the same series, BTW.
After rewatching, I realized that Mike I. didn’t have his food judged either. They didn’t even show what he was going to serve. I guess whatever it was, it would be better than Jamies’ undercooked peas.
I guess the difference to me is whether it’s intentional or not. Does he think he’s making their dish better but lack self awareness? Or is he an incredibly cynical and competitive person deliberately trying to improve his own odds of winning by specifically trying to make other dishes worse?
My guess is in fact some of the time his advice is helpful, and the editors are doing selective editing to make him appear a bad guy in situations when it’s not.
I am really getting sick of Jaimie. This is the second time she got a free pass for the elimination even though she had what was probably the worst dish. (The first time when she cut her finger and her partner for the task went home, and now not even serving because she knew it was so bad.)
I’m really not a fan of these team challenges. It’s way to easy for what may be the best dish of the night to not win, and the worst dish to be safe.
I really hated the format of this elimination challenge. The last two dishes should have been judged, also. Perhaps they did the “first to four points” thing to avoid a tie, but it would have been far more fair to have just stated that in the event of a tie, the first team to achieve 4 points would win.
I don’t like Jamie. And, while I was willing to give her a bye for not getting a dish judged the first time with her finger injury, this time around was unforgivable. And while I always thought Spike was a real douche his first season, he hasn’t been that smug an obnoxious this time around. (Or perhaps when he’s around masters of smugness like Angelo and Marcel, it’s just not as noticeable.)
I was so delighted to see Carla get the win. I think the big win came when she proposed her dish, the others snubbed it, and she just told them “I’m going to cook my food.” It shows that she really did learn from her experience in her first season.
Jamie is starting to annoy me with the avoidance too. The others were right that going to the hospital for a cut finger was a gutless thing to do. It’s completely counter to the culture of cooks where cuts and burns are commonplace and the expectations is that you will tape it up and power through it unless it is truly severe. Karla’s reaction to getting cut is by far the more normal one, where she took it as an annoyance more than anything else, wrapped it up and kept going. Basically, you just do what you have to do to make sure you don’t get blood in the food.
Jamie’s avoidance last night was even more irritating. When she was said, “hopefully I won’t have to serve my dish,” I thought “you don’t deserve to be on this show, then.” You should want to compete and look forward to it. Say what you will about Marcel, but you don’t hear him saying he hopes he doesn’t have to compete. Or any of the rest of them, for that matter.
the “strategizing” was kind of lame too. The strategy should have been to make every dish capable of winning every match-up. The way to win is too cook the best. That’s it.
Oh, and people do need to be responsible for their own dishes. By now, I hope people will learn to ignore Angelo (who I think is trying to sabotage them indirectly by manipulating them into sabotaging themselves).
Karla’s ground nut soup looked and sounded like it was really good. It’s unfortunate that the audience can never actually taste the dishes.
I don’t think that Angelo is sabotaging. I’ve never thought that.
What I believe is that he thinks he’s being super super helpful and he’s completely clueless that anyone wouldn’t want his help. And why wouldn’t he believe that? Whenever he wants to help no one says no! So clearly he must be helping. And they probably like when he helps so he should help more.