Top Chef Review: Lacking Drama

This week’s Top Chef: All Stars, called “An Offer They Can’t Refuse,” turned out to be pretty boring. Probably due to the lack of drama.

The Quickfire Challenge guest starred Isaac Mizrahi, a fashion designer, and the judges basically evaluated the presentation of the food. Some chefs were thrown off by not being able to work with taste; some chefs embraced it as art. Now, art can tend toward the weird, but Angelo’s food honestly looked like crap and deserved to be at the bottom. Richard made a frozen pile of black and white mush with green stuff popping out, but won the challenge. Possibly because he realized Isaac seemed to like black.

The Rao family, of the prestigious Italian restaurant Rao’s in New York, issued a challenge to cook Italian food, which would be judged by the family. The contestants were assigned to one member of the judging family; each member represents one part of a three-course Italian meal. Each individual contestant had to prepare a single dish, depending on the member of the family they drew. Obviously, the Italian contestants were taking the challenge to the heart and harshly judging their non-Italian peers.

What’s crazy is part of Tiffany’s dish caught fire in the oven and they still liked her food. Carla, as usual, was praised for her cooking. Antonia seemed to blow the judges away.

For the next course, Dale screwed up royally. Tre really messed up all the garnishes, and the judges were mad as hell at Mike. So basically, all three contestants failed the pasta course. They criticized Angelo’s food for being too flavorful. Richard’s crispy cutlet seemed to please, and the judges thoroughly enjoyed Fabio’s meat dish.

Antonia won the challenge, which was extremely annoying for me to watch. The woman was so dead set on an Italian winning, it made me hope a non-Italian would win just to see the look on her face. It’s understandable to want to win a challenge with a theme so close to the heart, but to just want any Italian to win seems wrong. She’s an annoying character in general, though, so maybe it’s just that.

The three pasta dishes were the worst, so all three guys were at the bottom. That they sent Tre home surprised me. You’d think either Dale or Mike would be sent home for not boiling pasta properly because really, my 12-year-old brother could do that.

Overall, the episode was a little bit disappointing due to the lack of issues between the contestants. Drama in the kitchen is much more exciting than actually watching them cook.  It’s not like anyone watching from the comfort of their couch is actually going to taste anything they make, so the drama between the characters is a part of the excitement the audience can engage in. This episode definitely lacked tension between contestants, although Antonia, with her snippy comments on just about anything, tried her best. Who knows? Maybe she’ll get into a fight with Tiffany or Mike sometime in the future.

That would be great to watch.

For a different take on this week’s episode, check out “Chefs and Goodfellas, Together at Last” by Gabe Callahan.

Season 8, Episode 8: An Offer They Can’t Refuse (original air date Feb. 2, 2011)

Top Chef airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on Bravo.

Photos courtesy of David Giesbrecht and Bravo.