©2008 Harry Kenney

Ahh, so good to be back. To have “them” back: I’m referring to Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio, of course. (Not time for Ted Allen and Gail Simmons yet.) The judge for the first Top Chef Quickfire was Rocco Dispirito. He joined Padme and Tom again for the Elimination Challenge segment which included Anthony Bourdain as the fourth chair.

As this was Chicago, the QF had to do with making the best Chicago-style deep-dish pizza that also reflected your personality or cooking style. With a few exceptions, none really sucked, though they still divided it between 1/2 good and 1/2 not good. Which lead to the Challenge portion that paired two against each other in eight classic dishes.

Long story short, the one that freaked me out the most was the two contestants who tried to make Chicken Piccatta. I know chicken picatta. It’s so easy. The name actually means sharp, and may even have come from the same word as picollo. One uses lemon and capers. The basis of the dish is it must have that sharp, acidic taste.

The guy, Ryan, who lost that one never got what it was supposed to be the entire show. That was driven home after successive judicial interrogations. So when they had the four worse to choose from what did they do? Natch, got rid of the woman who put too much salt in her shrimp scampi, Nimma. Apparently too much salt in a dish is a greater violation then being totally freaking clueless as to what a classic dish is made of to begin with! Huh??? Yes, the season has just started and already I’m starting to disagree with the judges (somewhat). The only thing that doesn’t get me majorly pissed is it’s the first show and I haven’t made any attachments to anyone yet.

That said, really, is over salting is worse than making a totally different meal? When you’re watching on the television set, it seems obvious the totally wrong meal is the worse offender. But, I can imagine, if, like them, I were there eating it, and one was an edible wrong dish prepared, and the other one was so salty I could not eat it, that yeah, the totally unedible meal would have to be the loser between the two. So, in the end, I guess I’ll side with the judges.

One thing else though. Going through the website’s bios last week, it seemed everyone was some kind of sous chef, executive cook, even restaurant owner. But Nimma’s resume said only “cook”, and during the show we found out she was a “line cook”. That said, not even sure why the producers let her on the show. I mean hey, line cook isn’t that far away from dish washer, let’s face it.

Other news you should know is Zoi and Jennifer are lovers. Mark the Kiwi put Vegemite into a pizza and made it work. No one there wanted to get the souffle category. Even Tom Colicchio knew that so it must be some universal thing amongst chefs. Andrew has a Ramsay-esque dirty mouth that shocks some viewers but I find entertaining and real to life. One thing about Andrew though — and isn’t this as bad as the piccatta? — he didn’t seem to know during the competition that eggs and oil are the ingredients to making mayo … huh?! And there we go, an interesting start to an interesting season. We’re off and running.

{13 Mar 2008}