The chefs enter the kitchen and Kelly reminds them that this is their last Quickfire Challenge. It is? I forgot that the final has 3 chefs in it. I’m going to miss this series of Top Chef when it’s over and, in particular, my Michael.
The Quickfire is again one from a previous Top Chef. They have to taste and identify 20 things blindfolded (that IS kind of gross and goes against everything that my mother always warned me about).
Hubert is worried, because he says zat a chef eets first with his eyes. Kelly says someone or other won when she identified an umeboshi plum. Michael laughs and says to his fellow chefs, “I’ve never even HEARD of it.” Rick is relieved he doesn’t have to come up with a dish in 30 minutes. Anita admits that last week it could have been her as easily as Art chosen to go.
MC goes first. He does abysmally. How could he not know what hoisin sauce tastes like? And he does equally badly with any other Asian ingredient. He admits he works with “a narrow scope of ingredients”. This may be bad news for Mikie. Oy!
Hubert a little kinky? Yup, when he says “Kelly putting the blindfold on me… that was probably the best part of the challenge.” He seems to be doing pretty well.
Even Anita misses the hoisin sauce, by the way.
The results: Hubert guessed 5 correctly which gave him 3½ stars; Rick and Anita both guessed 6 right. They get 4 stars. And Michael? He wins by guessing 7 correctly. He receives FIVE stars! Yay!!!
Kelly says being a chef means hiring the right staff and they’ll be provided with some sous-chefs to help them. They get to choose among 12 former contestants and they have to cater a lunch the next day for 200 people. The chefs are allowed to interview each sous-chef for 2 minutes before they make their selections.
Michael has the brilliant idea of asking each chef to chop for him. SO smart. Wait a sec. He IS coming off a bit hard-bitten. Jamie is scared by him.
Rick and Hubert are all palsy-walsy with the chefs. Rick wants to know what their experience is with Mexican food. Hubert wants to know about French food and pastry experience. Anita likes Jamie, because she used to work for him.
Michael keeps asking the chefs to demonstrate their chopping. Fabio is there. THAT’S nice. He says, ”I can tell this dude is Italian, ‘cause he’s making everybody running around him like chicken with no head.” Michael's busy ordering the chefs to do a brunoise out of batons.
Spike is giving MC a hard time about dicing. Spike assures him that he knows how to do it. Mike tells us that there he is no way he’d pick Spike.
Wow, this is a different side to Michael. We’ve only seen him as a host and fantastic chef so far. We’ve never seen him as a boss. MC then asks every chef what his (Michael’s) name is. Is he testing them to say Chiarello correctly or does he want them to say chef? A little of both it looks like. Richard Blaise, molecular gastronomy guy, says Michael is really annoying.
The chefs get to pick their sous-chefs in rounds. Betty says everyone loves Chef Hubert Keller and wants to be with him and no one wants to be with Michael Chiarello. She mispronounces his name. See? He was right to test them.
Michael gets to pick first. He picks Fabio. Rick picks Richard. Anita picks Jamie. Hubert picks Antonia first. Betty is picked second to last. And Spike is completely last. Spike says he’s not bothered. He says obviously the chefs didn’t want him to outshine them. Yeah, sure, Spike, keep thinking that.
Rick and Hubert ask the opinions of the sous-chefs in what to make. They’re so nice. What a pair of Goodie-Two-Shoes…Just kidding. Michael TELLS his sous-chefs what to do. He says he doesn’t have time to get to know them, culinarily speaking.
2 members of each team go to Whole Foods and the others go to Restaurant Depot. They get back to the kitchen and they have 3½ hours to prep. Everyone but Michael rushes to cram their stuff in the fridge. Michael calls Dale “Young Man” as he’s telling him to make room in the fridge. Dale takes issue with that. “For the first 20 years of my career, I ate 3 Dales for breakfast. He is way out of his league.” Dale gets in his face and we don’t actually see what happens. It's kind of anticlimactic, but I guess Michael walked away.
Hubert says he likes to mentor his employees and that Michael has a different approach. Michael says (to us), “I want to get in the finals, damn it.”
I feel ambivalent here. I suppose it’s true that if any other chef were acting the same way, I’d call him or her out. But I really do think that that was clever of Michael to want to see the chefs dice. Knife skills do tell a lot.
I want to digress just a sec, in defense of my Mikie.
When I got out of cooking school and came back to
I went over to see him, and Chef Fitoussi asked where I went to cooking school. THEN the only other thing he asked of me was to chop an onion.
I passed his test, because he could see that I been taught properly, i.e. the FRENCH way: Trim the onion, cut in half and peel, make the first cuts horizontal to the work surface, second ones perpendicular, then chop.
BTW, I had a job with a friend of his 2 hours later and ever since then, I've always looked at chopping style as a clue to a chef’s training. (Don’t tell anyone, but I mostly do NOT chop onions that way anymore…unless a chef is watching.)
One other thing. This is kind of what I was hoping for. I wanted to see the REAL Michael. I wanted to see how he was. How he operated. What he was like.
Yeah, he was a bit of a brute. But he wasn’t in his own kitchen and he had been presented with a bunch of underlings and his first response was to LEAD them. To be a chef. That’s WHAT a chef is. You can’t be a chef ALONE in your kitchen. It literally means CHIEF, leader or boss. (Oh! Am I yelling? Sorry.)
You could argue that he could have led more effectively, but you’re not going to get any Michael-hating here. I prefer to think of it like this: It’s not that HE was super-bad, it was that the others were super-nice. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Blais is such a ninny. He describes Rick’s cooking and his own as being “rustic Mexican meets molecular gastronomy”. Was it on Top Chef that some judge once referred to molecular gastronomy as being soul-less? I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I do think a one trick pony gets a bit old.
Anita realizes she’s made a mistake picking Jamie, because she’s taking too long cleaning the seafood for the raw bar. Jamie tells us Anita isn’t organizing well and that the chef still hasn’t told them what’s on the menu.
Why is there a commercial for the new season of Top Chef next Wednesday? Are they showing that and the finale of the TCM on the same night? Yup, that’s exactly what they’re doing. And they’re supersizing the first episode of Top Chef Las Vegas and giving only 45 minutes to Top Chef Masters.
Kelly comes in the next day with 2½ hours to go and tells them there’s a twist. OH no, please don’t make it that the sous chefs are switching teams and Michael is getting Dale! PLEASE NO!
Anita looks REALLY po’ed. Think Jamika having her pineapple taken away from her.
Kelly says the location of their lunch has been changed to the SLS Hotel and they have 30 minutes to pack up all their food and then 2 ½ hours to finish cooking. Whew, I’m actually relieved. They stay on their same teams. Unfortunately, though, the lunch is being served outside, which they didn’t know. Richard says Michael is going crazy and Rick is being calm and cool. Richard, stop being such a little tattle-tale and just do what you have to do!
Kelly shows them the space and it’s completely in the sun. Anita says she would never have chosen a raw bar. THEN Kelly says they have to get rid of one sous chef. Fabio remarks, “I’m sweating like a mountain goat at the beach and she’s telling us we have to get rid of one chef.”
Michael is nice when he gets rid of Brian, because he had finished his mis en place. Hubert gets rid of Spike. Rick deep sixes Betty and Anita is almost gleeful to ditch Jamie.
They all get it done. These
Rick is calm as a cucumber as he serves folks. Hubert is completely charming. Michael is not happy with the way his table looks.
The critics go to Anita’s table first and Kelly goes through the rigamarole of introducing the critics.
Anita - Asian Buffet With An Array Of Sauces & Condiments
Jay LOVES the braised pork rib, but isn’t sure there are enough good dishes on her buffet.
Michael - Rustic Italian Buffet
Gael doesn’t love the TASTE of the risotto, but she’s impressed with the cooking. They all agree the swordfish is odd and perhaps a bit old.
Hubert - 18 dish buffet
Hubert pulls out all the stops and prepared a huge buffet, including a Vietnamese Gazpacho. We never learn exactly what’s in it, but I love the idea of a gazpacho with Southeast Asian flavors. He says to us he would be disappointed to go home, because he thinks things went well. The judges are super impressed with his dishes. Hubert thanks his sous chefs. (He would.)
Rick - Mexican Food Buffet
His dishes sound really good. Among them are an avocado bar, a tortilla soup and a pork dish. Rick gives Richard full credit for the avocado ice cream. Beautiful and wonderful say the critics. Rick says he couldn’t have asked for a better team. They’re really emphasizing that Rick and Hubert are nice guys and Michael? His approach was “different”, as Hubert said.
At Critics Table, Rick tells the critics that the best part of the challenge was getting to know his sous chefs. Is he really that nice? Closeup on Michael. Gael loved the shrimp with nuts and figs. Jay comments favorably on the avocado ice cream. He’s impressed that Rick let Richard run with it. Close up (again) on surly Michael.
Jay says Hubert presented a staggering array of dishes. Hubert says he wanted to make a feast with lots of things for people to taste. (Even I can tell that my MC is not coming off well in comparison to these two – they’re a cross between Mother Theresa and your favorite 3rd grade teacher.)
James: ”It didn’t taste like a thousand bucks. It tasted like a million bucks.” (More Michael close-ups, but more importantly, why are James’s lapels so shiny?)
Gael tells Anita her ribs were fabulous. The critics tell her that the raw bar might not have been a good idea under the circumstances and Anita says she didn’t have time to change her menu.
The critics’ questioning of Michael is weird and he’s a little weird. (See? I can be objective.) Kelly asks him if he was happy. He says - way too fast and without a trace of a smile - “I thought it worked out just fine”.
A little glimmer of his charming personality comes back when James asks him what he thinks was his most successful dish. He says the risotto. James says he did not like the taste of the shrimp. Michael takes that okay. Jay says there was a general question mark over the swordfish. He says he kept it hot and maybe that contributed to its texture. Gael says it tasted like old swordfish.
Rick made a point of telling us earlier that his sous chef suggested he go to the fish counter immediately to get the best fish. I guess Michael’s sous chefs could chop, but he didn’t quiz them on their common sense.
Kelly says the olive oil cake was too oily. MC says it needed more time in the oven and he had instructed his sous-chef to cut it only from the edge. Kelly asks how it was working with the Top Chef contestants. He says “My colleagues have more guts than I do. Cause I wouldn’t know how to say, here why don’t you go and take a dish?” Remember these are sous chefs that he doesn’t know.
The chefs go to wait in the kitchen. Jay says Rick was in his comfort zone today. They were all impressed with his cooking and his managing of his staff.
About Hubert, Jay says, “There was an immense precision in what he did. Inspired gazpacho.”
Okay, I have prediction. It’s not what I thought or hoped would happen. I predict that Hubert will take the big prize next week. He simply has it all. He’s unflappable. His cooking is flawless and his big advantage – he’s French.
Jay says there was a misstep in Anita’s menu. James: “Every dish had some kind of fundamental inadequacy to it.” Uh-oh what are they going to say about Michael?
Jay: ”There were ups and downs.” The critics didn’t like the prawn or swordfish. The olive oil cake was oily too. They don’t sound quite as down on Michael as on Anita, but who knows? I would say Anita is going home.
During the commercial is the answer to their quick poll question - Who would win a fist fight, Michael or Dale?
(Do they mean against each other or if they were fighting some random other person?)
1. Michael 74%
2. Dale 11%
3. It’s be more like a catfight 15%
(I don’t even know what that last thing that means.)
The chefs are called back in.
The critics tell Hubert and Rick they are the top finishers.
Rick
Quickfire 4
Diners 4½
James 4½
Gael 4
Jay 4½
Total 21 1/2
Hubert
Quickfire 3½
Diners 3½
James 5
Gael 5
Jay 5
Total 22
Hubert is the winner and he says the sous-chefs came up with some good stuff.
Anita
Quickfire 4
Diners 3
James 3
Gael 3½
Jay 3½
Total 17
Michael
Quickfire 5
Diners 3½
James 3
Gael 4
Jay 4
Total 19½
Whew!!! Thank goodness. Anita is told to pack her knives. Anita says the others were charming, and she’ll miss them.
In the previews in the final scene, Hubert looks 10 years younger.
I really think the three chefs that remain are the ones that should be there. And, alas, I do feel quite sure that Hubert will win, but I would love to be wrong.
4 comments:
My man happens to be Rick, but I think you're right that Hubert is going to win. He seems unstoppable.
I got really nervous when Michael and Dale were in the kitchen getting ready to fight. I wanted to run in there and break it up.
I didn't like how Michael came across, but it could have been the editing. Still, I'm rooting for Rick now.
But yes, Hubert is like a robot. I bet he'll win.
I'm bummed out by the way Michael behaved. I've always been a fan of his, but editing or no editing, he really did come off as a jerk. Although so did Richard Blais. Also have been a fan of his but "I came in second and should have won?" Um, he choked.
I dunno every time I think about Michael; I think about how much he uses expensive ingredients needlessly. I just remember one of his cooking shows where he called for grey salt to salt his pasta water with.
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