Mike G wrote:The team that did the tacos, I really have to give them credit for pulling off something that in outline, looked to have as many kid-strikes against it as sherry chicken (red-wine-vinegar-marinated onions?)

Totally agree with this. When they mentioned onions (actually in 2 of their dishes, iirc), I was thought they were navigating directly toward an iceberg but they pulled off their plan without a hitch. In this respect, the kids impressed me.

Thinking back to Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, this single episode of Top Chef provided more hope than that entire series.

=R=

Okay, to start this off, I'm quoting myself from what I wrote on the Next Food Network post.

I watched the second and third season, but somewhere after that I lost interest of most food cooking shows, even Top Chef DC, I'm over it and have zero interest. As in all reality contest shows, there is the villain, there is the dummy, there is the lazy, there is the smart ass, there is the one really good person, etc etc etc. Personally it's played out and I'm over it all. Sorry to rant, just thought I'd add my two cents.

Someone here be honest, do you think Top Chef DC is really worth watching? Is it any different from any other season?

Shaggywillis wrote:Okay, to start this off, I'm quoting myself from what I wrote on the Next Food Network post.

I watched the second and third season, but somewhere after that I lost interest of most food cooking shows, even Top Chef DC, I'm over it and have zero interest. As in all reality contest shows, there is the villain, there is the dummy, there is the lazy, there is the smart ass, there is the one really good person, etc etc etc. Personally it's played out and I'm over it all. Sorry to rant, just thought I'd add my two cents.

Someone here be honest, do you think Top Chef DC is really worth watching? Is it any different from any other season?

Yes and no.

Worth watching but only if you're interested in consuming what is essentially another serving of 'more of the same.'

=R=

Shaggywillis wrote:Someone here be honest, do you think Top Chef DC is really worth watching? Is it any different from any other season?

If you haven't been enjoying previous seasons of Top Chef, I can't imagine why you'd suddenly enjoy this one. Unless what's been missing for you is an unusual amount of nastiness and backstabbing. Because that's the one way this season seems to be distinguishing itself early on.

Worth watching but only if you're interested in consuming what is essentially another serving of 'more of the same.

Figures

If you haven't been enjoying previous seasons of Top Chef, I can't imagine why you'd suddenly enjoy this one. Unless what's been missing for you is an unusual amount of nastiness and backstabbing. Because that's the one way this season seems to be distinguishing itself early on.

I was a big fan up until last season, then I had enough.

Thanks for being honest.

Oh, these poor chefs! how can ANYONE fairly expect them to make PIE?!? they're not pastry chefs? who would ever, ever guess that they would be expected to make pastry on Top Chef?



I couldn't have said it better than the guest judge- it's not like he was asking them to make the perfect souffle, they just had to make a pie.

This week's was the first time I ever felt, "Hell, I can cook better than these people." Not one or two people (that probably happens most seasons during the first half, at least) but I was really floored that two things that seem like basic minimal skills for anyone interested in cooking were shockingly unfamiliar to most of them— making a pie and grilling adequately and interestingly. Do they all just have crappy hotel kitchen skills, but no real feel for food, no desire to play around with it in their home lives and see what makes it tick? Don't answer that.

You'd think "inedible" would be enough to get you sent home, as in the bacon wrapped sea bass, but it feels like this year they're really out to rid themselves first of the people who can't even make something out of a women's magazine recipe competently. So far we've gotten rid of the people who made bad custard on a frozen pastry shell, grainy, sickeningly sweet pudding, and undercooked sausage patties. That's a hell of a bar the rest of 'em have cleared so far. Michael Voltaggio must be in awe.

I was amused when Chef Waxman pointed out that the sausage patties seemed like something his 10-year old would make. That's exactly what I thought when I saw them.

On a completely unrelated note, the Hilton Hotel they're cooking in is the same one where John Hinckley, Jr. shot at and wounded President Reagan and a number of other people in 1981. I will be THOROUGHLY disappointed if Jodie Foster is not a guest judge this season.

"For today's quickfire, you have to do a little better than Mr. Hinckley and knock Ms. Foster's socks off with a BLAST of a dish of your own!"

Jodie Foster or no, the food they've been cooking is about on par with the food I've been served when staying at that Hilton ...

Very disappointing so far.

The thing that got me was the terror in their eyes upon learning they had to make a pie. I mean....come on, folks. You don't even have to make a pastry crust -- plenty of pies have cookie crumb crusts or graham crackers or something other than pastry crust. How can you have gotten along by being a "cook" without having to make a pie...at least once?

This group of contestants does not impress me -- or interest me. In every other season of this show I've been impressed and interested but so far....it's a big yawn. Maybe the shark has been jumped.

None of the food at the picnic impressed me at all.

And what kind of chef can't make a pastry crust, anyway? It's not just dessert: quiche, empanada, wellington... it's not really that hard.

The pie challenge was more difficult than it seemed. I think they were given 2 hours. To make a pie dough, chill it, bake it and have enough time to cool for a fruit filling to set is pretty near impossible. That's why the winner was the one with the chocolate pie, not a fruit one.

I wondered about the timing issues too, but they were whining at the very thought of making a pie, not at the results. And many of them outright said they'd never made pie, weren't pastry chefs.

I was annoyed with Johnny Iuzzini, a veteran pastry chef, as guest chef on the last episode. When the one contestant mentioned that there were eggs in his pie, Johnny then said "then it's a quiche" in a seemingly negative manner. Hmmmm . . . chess pie, banana cream pie, coconut custard, chocolate cream . . . I could go on and on but all incorporate eggs. And isn't quiche just a type of pie anyway?

I think it's because it also had goat cheese in it and seemed generally quiche-y. He also may have been trying to push the chef to defend his choices, which didn't really happen.

I guess enthusiasm here for Top Chef has waned a lot around here. This years' crew seems to have fewer interesting characters and fewer serious contenders. Maybe we were spoiled last season with at least four people who could have won. Or, maybe I'm underselling some of the contestants this year.

I found last Wednesday's episode somewhat confusing because I didn't realize that the winner would be the team with the best dish over all, even if they only make a breakfast dish and are then safe. Apparently it was just a coincidence that the best dish happened to come from a team that was in the dinner competition.

In any case, the episode differed from the norm because the team who made the worst overall dish wouldn't necessarily go home. This alone made the episode higher stakes than normal. On top of this, the whole team goes home, not just the person responsible for a particularly bad aspect of the dish. I guess it is good that they mixed it up a little bit. But I am pulling for Kenny and was shocked at how close he came to being eliminated so early in the show.

I truly didn't like this week's contest. While the cheftestants never seemed to be told this, it appeared to me that the ones who advanced to Lunch and Dinner were both the best and the worst of the bunch: the key bit of data was calling the ones dropped "safe."

If the final judging was based on all of the meals, those dropped in the first two stages were at distinct disadvantages: I'd want to continue to compete to get better dishes out.

I have to say, the original goal of providing new and exciting dishes for a hotel resto really was not achieved by most of the teams. Two of the final three made short ribs? How novel. For a flagship global hotel's dishes, I would have been thinking about east/west fusion, latin-inspired, or other ethnic recipes.

Definitely not getting off to a sharp start. Even though Angelo and Kenny started the season looking like master technicians, they aren't following through, and they don't have the Voltaggio bros' intensity or Richard Blais' wacky enthusiasm. There seems to be a distinct dearth of tattoos, beards, fauxhawks, piercings and general edginess to the chefs too, let alone actual personality.

JoelF wrote:I truly didn't like this week's contest. While the cheftestants never seemed to be told this, it appeared to me that the ones who advanced to Lunch and Dinner were both the best and the worst of the bunch: the key bit of data was calling the ones dropped "safe."

If the final judging was based on all of the meals, those dropped in the first two stages were at distinct disadvantages: I'd want to continue to compete to get better dishes out.

I agree with this last bit and this is why the whole thing was confusing. If the winner is the team that makes the best dish of the day, then everyone should have the option to cook three dishes. This isn't what happened, of course.

If the best and worst dishes advance, while those in the middle are safe, a team could make the best breakfast dish, the best lunch dish, and then happen to make the worst of three excellent dinner dishes and be eliminated. Or, one team could make the best breakfast and second best lunch; another team makes the second best breakfast and the best lunch; both teams advance to dinner and are then on the brink of elimination.

Perhaps the best thing to do would be to give the best dish in each meal the chance to "opt out" of the competition or continue and risk elimination.

While the cheftestants never seemed to be told this, it appeared to me that the ones who advanced to Lunch and Dinner were both the best and the worst of the bunch: the key bit of data was calling the ones dropped "safe."

Not sure I understand. Why would they advance the best chefs if in each round if the odds of getting booted increased as they moved on?

I have to say, the original goal of providing new and exciting dishes for a hotel resto really was not achieved by most of the teams. Two of the final three made short ribs? How novel. For a flagship global hotel's dishes, I would have been thinking about east/west fusion, latin-inspired, or other ethnic recipes.

I don't disagree, but the losing mussel and squid ink pasta dish was criticized by the Hilton judge as not being the sort of thing their guests would order, while she seemed pretty happy with the short ribs.

One thing that also got lost along the way was that the dishes were supposed to be appropriate for take out as well.

I agree that it was a very poorly constructed challenge.

I think they were being too clever by half with the design of this challenge: very confusing and a little hard to follow. Although they did manage to pack a lot in and still make it watchable.

If one of the big concerns of the challenge was a dish that could easily and quickly be prepared in the hotel kitchen and delivered to a room and enjoyed there, then why not just do it that way? Make each team create one dish and be ready to prep it and send it for delivery 20 floors higher on the opposite side of the hotel. They could have structured it so that they wouldn't know when or exactly how many orders they'd get.

And I'm not sure on what planet beef carpaccio with kimchi vinaigrette is a good option for a Hilton room service lunch, but apparently the judges thought so. Put it on the menu and I'll bet you sell one a month.

rickster wrote:One thing that also got lost along the way was that the dishes were supposed to be appropriate for take out as well.

Good point. At one point in the show, Tom commented that one of the dishes could easily be rolled up. (I don't recall the exact language.) It wasn't clear if he meant that the dish could easily be prepared ahead of time and, because it consisted of thinly shaved something-or-another, rolled in plastic wrap until it was needed. Or, did he mean that the dish could be rolled in a tortilla-type of wrap for a sandwich. Probably the former, but this would have been a good opportunity for the show to educate the audience about an interesting (to me) aspect of how restaurants operate.

Also, if part of the challenge was for the food to be good as room service or take out, it would have been a nice twist to surprise the contestants in one of the meals and make them actually go through the motions of plating and delivering the dish to a room. Then we'd see if the dish could really hold up. Incidentally, the program description on my cable system actually said that they'd be making room service.

I remember Tom questioned one of the teams in the breakfast round about how they would package the dish to go, and they explained how they would compartmentalize it in a styrofoam container. I never heard any reference to takeout after that.

although I agree that the challenge was confusing, I liked it a lot because, finally, the chefs got to actually cook off a hot line for a service-type situation, rather than again being reduced to scoop-n-serve out of chafing dishes, like 75% of the show.

I hope they keep this up and allow people who cook a la minute 95% of their work lives to continue cooking a la minute, otherwise, they should change the name of the show to Top Prep.

Shaggywillis wrote:

Worth watching but only if you're interested in consuming what is essentially another serving of 'more of the same.

Figures

If you haven't been enjoying previous seasons of Top Chef, I can't imagine why you'd suddenly enjoy this one. Unless what's been missing for you is an unusual amount of nastiness and backstabbing. Because that's the one way this season seems to be distinguishing itself early on.

I was a big fan up until last season, then I had enough.

Thanks for being honest.

That's surprising, because I thought last year was an outlier for the extremely high level of chefs, including the Volt bros and Kevin. This year, it's more of the younger sous-chefs and out-of-the box types like caterers and instructors. I find this year to be a lot less enjoyable.

I was only half-awake while watching this week's episode. I was most impressed by the fact that they were able to dig up Bing Crosby as a guest judge. Did he sing?

That's surprising, because I thought last year was an outlier for the extremely high level of chefs, including the Volt bros and Kevin. This year, it's more of the younger sous-chefs and out-of-the box types like caterers and instructors. I find this year to be a lot less enjoyable.

I totally agree, but I thought it was interesting that one of the contestants the other night mentioned he had competed for Patrick O'Connell on the Bocuse d'Or team while last season Kevin seemed estatic that he was going to be given the chance to compete for a spot on the team as a prize in one of the challenges he won. So on paper, the differences between seasons may not have been that apparent when picking the contestants.

Darren72 wrote:At one point in the show, Tom commented that one of the dishes could easily be rolled up. (I don't recall the exact language.) It wasn't clear if he meant that the dish could easily be prepared ahead of time and, because it consisted of thinly shaved something-or-another, rolled in plastic wrap until it was needed. Or, did he mean that the dish could be rolled in a tortilla-type of wrap for a sandwich. Probably the former, but this would have been a good opportunity for the show to educate the audience about an interesting (to me) aspect of how restaurants operate.

I think he said "rolled up in a spring roll wrapper" or something like that, so he meant the latter -- an idea I would have gone for!

eatchicago wrote:I was only half-awake while watching this week's episode. I was most impressed by the fact that they were able to dig up Bing Crosby as a guest judge. Did he sing?

I thought it was Gael Greene crossdressing.

I'm coming to the conclusion that this season of Top Chef is a train wreck. It isn't that fun to watch. Why are the contestants picking the two people who could be eliminated? What if they decided to be strategic and send up the two strongest contestants? Then one would have to be eliminated, even if he or she had the best dish of the day.

Yeah, I think the producers decided to try to keep the show "fresh" by throwing in a bunch of weirdly constructed challenges this season and it's not working. There's sort of a sour tone to the season as well.

What if they decided to be strategic and send up the two strongest contestants?

Or use it to protect the weaker ones, which is what happened. (Has that guy Steve--I think that's his name-- produced anything worth eating so far?)

This was a terrible idea, and turns a cooking competition into a chess match, along with creating considerable possible tensions for the future. Maybe that's good for "drama," but if I want that I can watch the NJ housewives (speaking of train wrecks).