Top Chef Review: High Class, Low Taste

This week, our Top Chefs head to Dallas, their second stop on a three-city tour of Texas. While in their homely Toyota Siennas (Top Chef has become hallowed ground for product placement), we begin to learn more about the remaining chefs. Here are just a few nuggets:

• Pretty Chris used to be 70 pounds heavier…that is, until all his friends teased him for being a “fatty” and he was shamed into losing it all.
• The Beverly Equation: meek personality + quick to tears = tattoo sleeve (I never realized that Bev was all tatted up)
• Ty-Lor is gay (yeah, got that from the spelling of your name, big guy)

While on their merry way to Dallas, the chefs are held up at a road block and asked to pull over by a menacing looking sheriff. In the time it takes for Kim Kardashian to marry and divorce, we realize that the whole scene is a set up for the Quick Fire Challenge. Pan over to Padma and middle-aged masculine beauty, John Besch, owner of many esteemed restaurants in the South. Padma and John ask our chefs to turn a backpack full of processed and dehydrated packaged ingredients into a tasty delight – right smack in the middle of a windy cornfield. They give Lindsey top honors for her “Tuna and Sardines in French Onion Soup with Vienna Sausage.” Gross. Dakota, Pretty Chris and Whitney were the big losers with what I can only imagine were supremely nasty creations.

Now, onto the Elimination Challenge. The chefs must cook for three horrendous couples who are holding a progressive dinner in their crusty upper class neighborhood (Obama, your 1% lives here). Each couple hosts one course of the meal in their home. The chefs are split into teams of three and the teams are assigned to one course.

I think labeling each couple as one-dimensional would be a compliment. Here are my thoughts on the women:
• They had less personality than basket of hard-boiled eggs
• They appeared to be made entirely of plastic, dipped in orange sherbet and bedazzled with those make-up kits that have 101 different colors of blush and eye shadow
• There might’ve been a small packages of peas sitting where their brains normally would’ve been

Here are my thoughts on the men:
• One guy revealed that his wedding cake was a giant gummy bear – I don’t even know how to handle this
• They had less personality than a basket of hard-boiled eggs
• I am betting they don’t go anywhere without either a blazer or a shirt emblazoned with an oversized horse

Cut to all the chefs racing around Whole Foods, then cooking up a storm in each couples’ high-end kitchen. We see Bev hogging up all the counter space/being generally annoying and shots of chefs looking sweaty/bothered. Time’s up, utensils down! It’s time to feed the plastics!

The judges were particularly funny this episode. Tom C’s “WTF am I doing here?” looks coupled with Gail making fun of the housewives right to their faces keeps the dinner party entertaining.

Paul, Dakota, Grayson and Sarah made the best dishes of the evening. Paul wins for his prosciutto and Brussels sprout dish. Ty-Lor, Pretty Chris, Weird Chris and Chuy round out the bottom four. Weird Chris definitely deserved to be on the bottom for his odd cigar creation. But, Chuy ends up going home for overcooked salmon.

Chuy-lovers fear not! Little Chuy has one more chance to stay in the competition in Tom C’s Last Chance Kitchen and….he does! He beats out reigning champion Keith by butchering and cooking a better steak.  He awaits the loser of next week’s episode.

 

Season 9, Episode 5: Don’t Be Tardy For The Dinner Party (originally aired November 30, 2011)

Images courtesy of Bravo TV.