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Ah, here we go. It is only week two of the competition, and yet, as the contestants get ready for their day, with the shaving and the pushups and the butter, already they are starting in with the “I’m here to win” interviews. Oh who are we kidding, they were doing that last week, too. Relax, contestants! For one thing, I am pretty sure you are all there to win? Because of how it is a competition and that is the point? I’m not even sure why you keep saying that. We know. Hush. “I’m here to try my best, hopefully come in tenth or eleventh, but learn a lot about myself and my craft and hopefully make some new friends,” said no one on a reality show ever. But also relax, contestants, because almost all of you stink. “I’m here to win” makes sense in the final four, or maybe even the final six, when you have proven yourself and/or managed to survive to the point where the group has been whittled down to a reasonable number of people. Until then, most of you are cannon fodder, as we will see during this week’s exciting Judges’ Table. But I am getting ahead of myself. First, the Quickfire!
This week’s guest judge is Sam Kass, assistant White House chef and “food initiative coordinator”. The contestants pretend to be excited and to know who he is. “He is important, he feeds the president,” says some guy. (Still way too many dudes on this show. Give me a few weeks to learn their names. What is this, school? Trust fall!) Anyway, the Quickfire this week is to pair up and make a sandwich. Because of bi-partisanship? So it’s going to be a PORK SANDWICH with a FILIBUSTER JUS. Get it? Politics. Everyone is like, “What? A sandwich? So easy! There’s definitely not going to be a twist that makes this harder than it sounds.” Whoops. Pay attention, guys. You are here to win!
The catch is that each pair will have to wear a conjoined apron, just like they do in the House of Representatives!
Apparently, this is hilarious.
Really, guys? It’s just an apron sewn late at night by a team of production assistants for a throw-away challenge on a basic cable reality show. You’d think these guys had seen SAM KINISON’S GHOST!
The one thing I have always thought about relay races is, yes, OK, sure, these relay races are hilarious and exciting to watch, and I can only imagine how much fun the people running these relay races are having, probably the most fun possible, but what all of these races are lacking is KNIVES. Problem solved.
So hilarious and fun! One guy keeps complaining that his partner is not helping enough because his partner is worried that he’s going to cut his hand. Uh, that is a completely reasonable complaint? He just keeps saying “I’m not going to cut your hand, bro,” which is the type of sentence that you can so easily hear right before hearing “I’m so sorry I cut your hand, bro.” Angelo says that he would be embarrassed to lose this challenge because he owns a sandwich shop in New York. It is interesting to hear Angelo talk about the things that would embarrass him, because frankly I find most of his behavior, and the things that he says, and the way that he looks embarrassing.
Anyway, welcome to Sandwich Town, population Some Sandwiches. They all look fine. I mean, seriously, incredibly hilarious aprons aside, these are highly trained chefs preparing sandwiches. Big whoop. At the end of the day, the worst-rated sandwiches are downgraded for being too boring (but still entirely delicious). Although that one lady from the Culinary Institute of America got busted when Sam Kass said that her sandwich was a mess to pick up and she was like “It’s more of a knife and fork sandwich.” Really? Because it definitely just looks like a regular sandwich, and you definitely let the judges pick it up in their hands where it then fell apart. I’m sure at the Culinary Institute of Technology they have an entire class called Letting the Customer Learn for Themselves. The winning teams are Kenny and Ed, and Angelo and Tracy. So basically Kenny and Angelo. Both made very delicious looking fish sandwiches. The coolest part of this show is how you never get to taste any of the food. You get to use your imagination! So neat. It’s like the Phantom Tollbooth of food, or whatever. Angelo wins. Kenny is pissed. Everyone is pissed, actually.
Elimination Challenge! So, because of MIchelle Obama’s genuinely important and compelling initiative to end child obesity within the next generation through rigorous institutional reforms, the chefs will make a mockery of all that by preparing a school lunch. I mean, seriously, child obesity is a serious problem, and the deep and consistent budget cuts made to public school funding perpetuates many of the lazy dietary shortcuts that result in children’s overconsumption of sugar and fat. Those endemic problems don’t have fuck-all to do with some James Beard nominee’s YOGURT FOAM. And do not even get me started on the “sherry braised chicken cutlet”. Not yet. Get me started on that in a second.
So the teams split up. They have a very small budget. $134 to feed 50 kids. But Sam Kass is taking $4 away for some elaborately explained reason that still doesn’t make that much sense. Seems kind of arbitrary. God forbid something on this show seem arbitrary. The gay guy on the show (no offense to anyone, but I mean, COME ON) says that he doesn’t think feeding 50 people is a problem, for him the problem is the budget. Uh, yeah. That’s the challenge Gay Einstein. “When I go out, I spend $150 on myself hahahahha,” he gay interviews. Again, no offense to anyone, but I hope that guy falls into a k-hole and has to leave the show.
Anyway: each member of the team is responsible for one dish. There is supposed to be a main course, a side dish, a vegetable, and a desert. And as an added twist: the food is supposed to appeal to children. “Perhaps I should rethink my ox-tail ragout over saffron polenta with carmelized radishes and sea urchin reduction,” says everyone on this show.
Shopping. Cooking. Tensions are mounting! This week, we have a new semi-villain in Kelly, who comes up with pork carnitas tacos (“kids fucking love tacos,” crass but true) and then cannot shut up about how she came up with pork carnitas tacos. Relax, Kelly! They are tacos! No one is confused about what tacos are. And you didn’t actually INVENT tacos, you just thought of them as a thing for kids to eat, which makes sense, because even when I was in school back in the 1500s, they served tacos in the cafeteria. “Were they pork carnitas tacos? Because I love to say pork carnitas and I seem to think that I invented the term pork carnitas even though I am not hispanic and I live and work in Colorado. Pork carnitas! Were they pork carnitas? You never did tell me if the tacos you ate in school were or were not pork carnitas tacos, which is my idea.”
Oof.
The thing is, I respect taking pride in your work! And for as mad as the other people on Kelly’s team get about her steam-rollering them with her “idea,” it’s not like they really have her best interest at heart. But she is being pretty much a cunt about it. The thing that I don’t like about Kelly is that she reminds me of a lot of girls that I knew in high school and college (that’s right, I’ve been to college, and I knew girls, JEALOUS?!) who were just as self-interested and back-stabby as anyone else, but who liked to think of themselves as nice people who would never do anything selfish at the expense of someone else, and it’s just like, I’m sorry to demolish your self-image, but you’re a human being like the rest of us, and one of the defining characteristics of being a human being is being an asshole sometimes, so just be an asshole and acknowledge that you’re being an asshole and let’s move on. Kelly? Hand shake? Pixie haircut aside, enough with the “who me?” attitude because you’re kind of a dick. OK? OK.
Speaking of dicks, this guy would just hate himself if he didn’t confront Kelly about how he hates her.
Doctor Logic over here.
Anyway, they feed the kids. And the judges. The kids don’t care. I mean, I think the kids are just as excited to be on TV as anything else, which makes sense, because adults aren’t any better. “You’re telling me this is going to be on TV? Hell yes I will put that in my mouth! What? I might win $5,000? BONUS!” Can we please just go back to the Judges’ Table, situated in the World of Adults?
So, the losing teams are Team Kenny, Angelo, Tracey, and Ed, and Team Stephen, Amanda, Tamesha, and Jaqueline. Both of these teams seem pretty deserving of criticism. Team Kenny’s lunch had basically no vegetables in it except for a celery stalk with peanut butter on it. Good work, team! Meanwhile, Team Stephen had Jaqueline’s banana bread pudding with TWO POUNDS OF SUGAR IN IT (divided by 50 is 0.math cups per child!) and Amanda’s sherry chicken. Oh hell. Sherry chicken? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me with sherry chicken. If the challenge had been to prepare dinner for an AA meeting, sherry chicken would have been LESS INAPPROPRIATE than for a school cafeteria. What a clown. But also there is awesome fighting between the two teams over who is the stupider team. Team Sherry is all about giving Team Celery a stern lesson about the calorie count of peanut butter, forgetting entirely that Team Celery always carried the fact that Team Sherry used FUCKING SHERRY in their food as a secret weapon. When that weapon gets brought out, it is hilarious:
Kelly, Arnold, Tiffany, and Lynne (Team Alex, Tim, Kevin, and Arnold were somewhere in the gray middle) are the winning team. Kelly reminds the judges that she is the first person to have ever served pork in a taco, a dish that she has named Pork Carnitas Tacos after her beloved Grandpa Carnitas Jones. She wins. Everyone is happy to win, but they are tired of Kelly’s shit. That makes all of us.
The judges bring the losing teams back out to eliminate someone from one of them. There has been much discussion of whether or not Angelo threw the challenge because Kenny is on his team, since he had immunity and Kenny is his stiffest competition (no cooko). But here is the thing, Angelo, you STUPID: it is so early in the competition. Kenny is not going to get eliminated just because YOU made CELERY STICKS. The judges know that he is good at cooking, and there are so many crap chefs waiting in line to be eliminated that basically all you have done is shown Kenny your cards. Now Kenny knows what your cards are! You hold the Ace of Disliking Kenny.
Big deal. So Jaqueline goes home because in the challenge to make a healthy meal for children, she cooked two pounds of sugar with some bread.
Goodbye, Jaqueline. Turns out some of you (you) were there to lose.
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“Hop in this apron and roll with me!” – The Cheftestants, more than likely
Is anybody else watching Top Art? I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. It’s weirdos, and that show is full of them.
I agree. This show is highly recommended. Last night they had to make a cover for a Penguin Classic and most of them struggled to not make the whole history of literuature cry. Afterward, my wife and I always have really good conversations about art, which is really nice.
With Top Chef, more and more the contestants seem like half-awake infants who smoke and sous vide. Plus, I don’t know their goat foam tastes good. However, I am fully capable of judging the Top Art peices, and judge them harshly at that.
I love that it became very clear that very few of them had ever read a book! Especially when that blonde lady kept referring to “Mr. Darby” in Pride and Prejudice.
I wish I’d had the balls in high school art class to build myself a bed and sleep in it during class claiming it was performance art.
I have a such a huge crush on that guy
You and the judges, He should have gone home for that terrible bed that had nothing to do with anything, but he IS way too cute.
top art is fucking awesome! bad art + pretentious pricks = high komedy!
I’m enjoying it so far. I think the challenge for that show is that so many of the artists are less judgmental and jaded and traditionally competitive than counterparts on other shows. Most of them seem to genuinely like each other to varying degrees and tend to win or lose by their own hands, as opposed to the dirty tricks of others. And so the focus is on … art. Which is refreshing. Still, it bothered me like fuck all how poorly read the artists are.
No kidding. I would think that to be a great artist you would want to have some life experiences and exposure the fruits of the human mind so as to better find some sort of artistic vision. Being and artist is about more than “I want to do it” and “why not.” Really, art is nothing without intellectual and moral purpose.
I was very surprised about that. However, Miles deciding to spend half the allotted time reading Frankenstein is probably the coolest thing I’ve seen anybody do on a reality show.
I love how he timed himself reading a few pages to figure out how much time he needed to read the book. Obssesive. Compulsive. Mad. Scientist. Artist.
That show has more than the usual number of good-looking lady contestants, right? I mean, it also has the guy who painted a JOHN WAYNE GACY CLOWN, but still, there’s lots of pretties.
Top Art is so awesome. It probably (definitely) is questionable to have art created and then critiqued in this way, but whatever…blah..blah blah. Miles is awesome. Also how about how the one girl spelled Jane Austen wrong on her book cover…Whoops! I can’t wait for next week with Andres Serrano and the crazy performance art chick, “is that poop? I don’t smell anything…”
As many of my comments show, I am sympathetic to typos and bad spelling in general. That said, let me add: come on.
And nothing says early 19th century fashion like a bowler hat.
What makes it really beautiful is that it was a visual pun on the name of Lizzie’s love interest, Darby.
I, too, am enjoying it. The only thing I don’t like is when they finally get to the art show part and barely show the art. Most of them are on screen for a few seconds and we see more of the judges faces than the art. Except for Miles whose art is everything he is doing on the show which is most clever.
What a cool show! I wish I had a TV!
Me too!
I fell to 1037th place in my Top Chef Fantasy game because I picked miss Sherry Chicken to be on my team!
I like to think of her as Leah Part II.
I know, they are the dumb face twins!
Sam Kass is totally dreamy. I’d share an apron with him any day. *groan* Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out…
Can I just point out that “pork carnitas” is redundant? She probably also cooks beef barbacoa and avocado quacamole. Big dummy.
I admit it. I mostly only know that because of Chipotle…
I miss contestants like this:
I don’t.
Sorry, I meant specifically Carla. I own A Bugs Life, I can hang out with her whenever I choose.
And what freaked me out was that she was once a model. Where’s Steve Winwood when you need him?
More on topic, fucking sherry? It’s not just that it’s innapropriate(and to be fair, the alcohol does cook out, although I’m sure parents would love seeing sherry chicken on the school menu), it’s that she totally screwed her team using something so expensive. “Sorry, you can’t make your dessert, I really want to serve these kids wine.” Basically.
Yeah, exactly! I couldn’t believe she wasn’t sent home for that. But more importantly, she’s a fucking bitch and I hate her and her stupid ass face and don’t want to see her again.
“Sherry is a completely reasonable and natural ingredient to include in a school lunch for kids that are not adults,” said Bizarro US Department of Agriculture.
http://www.ochef.com/165.htm
I was really waiting for the white house dude to jump on people for dissing sherry when that is essentially his whole fucking platform. Maybe kids wouldn’t refer to all food as ___ with that disgusting stuff, if they tried some different delicious things.
The REAL failure was how TERRIBLE that chicken looked, Like that wasn’t crack head chef level
I would like to express my anger with calling these shows “reality” TV. They’re game shows. There are winners, losers and prizes. The Bachelor has winners*. The Biggest Loser has winners*.
Shows like John and Kate plus 8 are reality because they’re all losers (sorry kids). K, I’m done.
*aka losers.
Just once I want there to be a reality tv contestant with whom I can identify. “I’m here not to win, but because it seemed easier than breaking my lease!” or even “I’m not sure what’s going on. Who are you people, and why do you have cameras? Where’s my mother?”
That’s one of the reasons I like Miles on Top Art, he’s all “I’m here for the free food and art supplies.”
Why and when did Amy Ryan join the cast of Top Chef?
and why is she acting like a “cunt” (Gabe’s words)?
Let me ask this question: Is anyone out there grossed out by the mewling chefs gathered around to smoke furiously every chance they get? No offense to those of you who smoke, but something about fancy-pants-chefs smoking seems gross and weird to me. Partly because it seems unclean to me but also because I would think that this would alter their tastebuds or something.
The Top Chef contestants all seem like personality-less ameobas who mechanically crank out the same cliched art-food year after year and remind me of the smoking area at my high school where jean jacketed youth would smoke and stare at the cracked pavement while sadly rubbing their blood-shot eyes.
Most chefs I know smoke multiple substances. It’s a crazy lifestyle. You work when most people are relaxing or sleeping and the pay sucks and it’s nearly impossible to succeed and the pace is unforgiving. Drugs of all kinds are par for the course. Trust me, there are likely harder things being consumed in the Top Chef house, off-camera. BTW: I don’t think smoking dulls the senses so completely as to render one ‘tasteless.’ It’s not a great idea, but not a total dealbreaker (ladies!).
Thanks. I’ve never worked in a restaurant so I don’t really know much about this stuff. Television is mostly smoke-free now, so when I see people smoke on television, I notice it. In such close connection with food, it seemed weird, but then I am an innocent young lamb.
“Jeb, I agree with you.”
It kind of grosses me out more than doctors smoking, because of the tastebuds. Doctors smoking is like the best joke in the world, but chefs–they’re wasting their abilities.
I agree to a point, but the degradation of taste (full disclosure: me = ex-smoker) isn’t as profound as one might assume. And any loss in fidelity doesn’t negate one’s insights into flavors, pairings, etc. I would put it like this: having perfect taste doesn’t make one a great chef any more than having 20/20 vision allows one to be a great artist.
one
Um. You can get Carnitas (pork) Tacos at Chipotle. No kid.
No porko.
Or any fucking Taco stand in the history of taco stands (the best ones are in CO)
I think you are missing the MEXI
Man. You better get royalty checks when Kelly launches her douchey Mexico-Colorado fusion restaurant called … mexiCO (C) 2010 concert_addict
“I love vodka!!”
“I love vodka!” – Gail Simmons
“I love Gail Simmons!” – Me, forever
I didn’t intend to post this twice but my pic didn’t show up at first and I thought I messed…
I miss the Glad Family of Products.
“Honestly, I’m happy that they aren’t shoveling plate after plate of goat foam and Swiss chard into my each week. That shit was disgusting and too heavily salted.”
–Trashbag, a member of the Glad Family of Products
last night i considered the fact that if somehow someone could gain from it, the people behind top chef could use different chefs every week until the final seven or eight were left and i would never realize.
what i mean to say is i recognized NOT ONE PERSON in this episode from the episode last week (which i watched more than once). i am not memorizing the cast of top chef! i will learn no one’s name, unless that name is hung.
where was that sassy gay guy or the Caribbean sangwich lady last week?? i’m gonna be suspicious if an asian guy with a mohawk and a fat beard guy show up next week BUT I ALSO WILL NOT NOTICE.
“Celery is green, so I thought that counted as a vegetable.” Do these people know anything about food?
“A tomato is a fruit?” – These fucking guys
I think I understand the choice of celery. Schools don’t have recess anymore. Celery takes a lot of energy to chew.
It’s food AND exercise in one.
Wait, is that true? Schools don’t have recess anymore?
Many don’t.
And some only give the kids 20 minutes for lunch.
Double
don’t mean to be THAT guy, but Jaqueline made banana pudding with strawberries (and 2 pounds of sugar) and some other guy that i can’t distinguish from all the other guys made BREAD pudding
yeah i was watching this DVRed while reading the recap.