What irritated me was Eric Ripert going on and on about minestrone soup having a past in it! I’m frickin’ living in Italy and have minestrone soup all the time. Sometimes it has pasta…but most of the time it doesn’t! It has beans and sometime different grains like barely or rice.
“Barely”?
barley
Ah.
I see.
I want to know what kind of “past” a soup should have. Trampy? Mysterious? It should come from a series of lost loves? 
I thought the “you’re all one team” idea was meaningless, unless there’d been some team-level judging… something like “we’ll grade the entire meal as a whole. If the whole thing gets a thumb up, you will all receive $5000 each from the maker of some random product and no one will be sent home (but double elimination next week), if not there will be a loser as usual”. Something to actually give the people an incentive to help each other. Otherwise “you are all a team” means exactly zero when there’s still a winner and a loser.
Max - The “You’re all one team” was following by “and you’ll be judged by your individual contributions”. I think that was to differentiate it from most of the challenges of this size where they’d be broken up into multiple teams.
StG
Bumping this up for this week’s discussion.
I thought they looked like jerks for voting for Kenny. Tamesha seemed to have a head cold so perhaps that affected her ability to taste her food.
I’ve never seen such an untalented bunch of twits on Top Chef. I’m beginning to think they are worse than than S5. S5 had a few likable chefs.
I dislike cold food. I can’t stand raw meat. I couldn’t relate to any of those cold dishes in the EC. Most of it I never heard of.
The open game play is ruining this season for me. This could be the season that I don’t finish watching. There is nobody to like or care about.
A lot of the problem is Kenny. His belligerent, alpha dog attitude is poisoning the entire cast. A damn shame he didn’t go home tonight.
The highlight of the show was watching Michele chew on those duck balls. Did anyone notice if Padma tried some testicles too?
Watching Padma wrap her tongue around that dish would raise ratings.
The thing is, alpha dogs don’t have to keep announcing that they’re alpha dogs.
They just are.
His entire “please, please, please notice me. I’m so cool. You know that because I’ve told you 16 times” wore thin in episode 1.
For my money, the most interesting part of the show was when we learned there was some girl who was cheating on Angelo with Ed. That was out of left field.
The cooking was pretty meh. I’m not at all invested in this season.
I’m starting to like Kelli and Tiffany- Amanda is interesting because she’s one of those that does knock some out of the park while her fellow chefs are putting her down all the time. I was amused by some of the faces that Tom was making during the “judging”, especially the first group that couldn’t say a single nice thing about the dishes (maybe they were that bad). But I have to say, I miss characters like Kevin and Stephanie.
In a season admittedly full of varying degrees of horrible people, the two that stand out to me for their toxic personalities are Angelo and Kelly Liken (head chef of Restaurant Kelly Liken, the menu of which can be found at - wait for it - kellyliken.com; it must be fun being married to her, let me tell you).
And if Kenny had been sent home last night, it would’ve been a first for me: I would’ve stopped watching Top Chef mid-season.
And as for the upcoming Top Chef: Just Desserts, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get past the Elvis-coiffed douche that’s co-hosting with Gail Simmons.
I thought it was interesting how the first group absolutely slammed the other team’s dishes. They didn’t have a single nice thing to say, and I think a more balanced approach would’ve gone over better with the judges.
Kenny telling the judges that he thought the reason he was there was because the other chefs were scared and jealous was amusing. He doesn’t seem to think he’s capable or turning out a bad turn, despite the fact he’s been criticized. Angelo is sneaky and I wouldn’t trust him to salt my food.
There really aren’t any personalities that I like this season.
StG
Despite the potential for some real backstabbing gamesmanship, it certainly appeared to me that the winning dishes were actually winning dishes and the loosing dishes were actually loosing dishes.
I dont think Kenny gets it. The judges often don’t really like his stuff, even when its made exactly the way he intended it to be. Somebody being worse is usually whats saving his butt.
Though I do suspect Tom C. was biting his tongue most of the time. I imagine those chefs probably got a lesson on how hard judging can be if you actually try to be serious about it.
And for a change, team “the 3 boring/strange white guys” made reasonable and perhaps even good stuff.
Also: Was I the only one who had a mighty hankering to motorboat both Padma and guest judge Michelle Bernstein last night?
As far as competition goes, I think it was absolutely the right play to nominate Kenny. He may not be the best, but he’s a strong competitor and trying to get him knocked out of the game is a strong move.
But criticizing EVERY dish mercilessly? What good does that do? The judges aren’t going to say “you’re right. Everyone on that team deserves to go home. Good job pointing that out to us.” A better tactic would have been to compliment and rave (or just give positive feedback) about everyone’s dishes except Kenny’s. Make his stand out as the worst and you give the judges something to consider. When you start bitching about everyone’s dish, you no longer show yourself to be an intelligent judge of food and who you’ve nominated is put into perspective.
Or maybe that was just the editing. I’m going to go read Tom’s blog now.
Since this has turned into the season 7 thread, I’ve changed the title. It was originally “No Top Chef Discussion? (7/7)”