OH MY GOD. IT’S STILL NOT OVER YET. THIS SEASON WILL NEVER END. ABANDON ALL HOPE. WEEP SOUPY TEARS OF SOUP.
Every season of Top Chef, this happens. I think the finale — the final finale-finale — is a good one or two episodes sooner than it actually is. They start making such a big deal about the Final Four and then the Final Three and they switch production locales and I vaguely remember some seasons having three chefs at the very end so I get all prematurely excited that hooray! Finale time! And then they drag things out for like, seven more weeks.
I have hit the mothercheffing WALL, is what I am saying. I’m not even sure if I’m recapping an actual new episode of Top Chef that aired last night or some really boring dream I had. Because BORING.
Quickfire Challenge
“Hey, Beverly! Sorry we didn’t provide any Asian ingredients for you to cook with last week! To make up for it, we’re gonna do an entire challenge around Asian cuisine and let you cook with a master chef and…wait. Where’s Beverly. What? Oh. Shit.”
It’s a tag team challenge, and one we’ve seen before: One chef starts a dish, another comes in and does the next step, and so on and so forth, with each team member trying to guess at what the previous chef was doing and not mess things up too badly. They are each paired with a former Top Chef Masters contestant: Takashi Yagihashi, Anita Lo and Floyd Cardoz.
Stuff happens. Ingredients are combined in different ways to create “food,” which is then put on plates. The food then gets eaten. It’s really something, you guys.
Since Beverly is not around anymore (much to Sarah’s unbridled, hateful glee at the very beginning of the episode) to completely smoke these fools and Paul adds too much chili to his dashi and Lindsay sucks, Sarah manages to win with a seared cod dish she makes with Floyd, who ruefully remembers that he never won a single Quickfire during his time on Masters. (And then he won the whole thing, and I am actually still a little bitter about that, because I was rooting for Traci des Jardins.) Sarah also wins $20,000 — a stupid amount of money for a dish she was only half responsible for.
MY “WHATEVER” READING IS OFF THE CHARTS.
Elimination Challenge
Blah blah Texas was hot and Vancouver is cold so blah blah your theme is “Fire and Ice” so like, I dunno, do that. Be all symbolic and metaphorical and shit. For 150 people. Make some booze, too.
I perk up briefly here, actually, since the last time the chefs were encouraged to be creative and interpret a theme was the Charlize Theron/Evil Queen episode, AKA the one brief shining highlight in this soupy mess of a season. But the chefs don’t seem to really get what they’re supposed to do with this theme. Cold food? Spicy food? Cherries jubilee served with an ice sculpture of a swan?
The good news is that Lindsay is making halibut because Beverly messed up her halibut that one time and I’m really glad we got to listen to her whine about that some more because I was worried Lindsay would stop giving us reasons to hate her but NO WORRIES THERE YOU GUYS.
The bad news is that I completely tuned out for like, the next 20 minutes and have very little recollection or notes about anything that happened. Just: live lobster torture, grated tomatoes and something called an Anti-Griddle. There. You are now informed.
Paul is consumed with self-doubt and thinks everything he does is terrible. This means he wins because duh. He actually gets some criticism for not using ENOUGH spice this time, and his face is like, “dudes, make up your ever-loving minds.”
Sarah ruins an otherwise lovely-looking pasta dish by putting a damn frozen mousse on top of it. It looks utterly disgusting and borderline inedible, but the judges don’t seem to come down that hard on her. Gail is the most critical, but I guess she gets overruled because…
Lindsay is out. Her halibut was cooked perfectly but there was too much going on and her Bloody Mary was weak and watery. Lindsay turns and leaves, perhaps silently trying to find a way to blame this all on Beverly. She has no regrets! Regrets are for suckers, or people who try to learn from their mistakes and improve going forward.
It’s been clear for ages now that Paul was going to make it all the way to the end of this season of Top Chef, so no suspense there. This season is his to lose, and thanks to all those team challenges with convoluted elimination loopholes, he isn’t even up against an all-that-worthy opponent. I would have loved to see him up against Beverly, Nyesha and maybe Ed or Ty-Lor or Grayson in the end. He has EIGHT Elimination Challenge wins to Sarah’s three, and has only been in the bottom once all season. Sarah has been in the bottom five times. So now there’s nothing to do but tune in next week and see if he chokes or not. And then the week after that to see the reunion and whether or not Beverly just up and chokes some bitches.
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