Rankings Coming!

Hey, all!

Back from Cleveland, but we rolled in after 1:00 AM late last night, so I need another day to get the rankings together this week. Sorry for the delay... check back tomorrow! UPDATE: Uhhh... still working on it. Sorry for the delay, folks. Though judging from Canasian's comment below, my work here may be done :-)

Comments

[michael]

What's going on?! By my reckoning you've had over 12 hours since getting back at 1 am. I can't just be sitting here accomplishing things at work instead of reading the power rankings! That's just not right. It's just not right.

[canasian]

Since Dom is gone, I'm going to fill in. Don't have time to be quite as thorough, but his job is too fun to not give it a try.

1. Fabio - this is a tough one. Really, no one near the top of the rankings hit it out of the park this week, and the bottom dwellers didn't quite win me over, but Stefan had a bit of a slip this week, so let's just call Fabio #1 by default. Pumpkin tirimisu doesn't sound very appetizing to me, but it is the most creative dessert this week and it sound like it was perfectly delicious, so he wins that round.

2. Gene - He was the only one smart enough to look outside the kitchen for cooking methods. That type of creativity will carry him far in this competition. But all this underscores the fact that it looks like he made one of the three dishes this week that were really good. Smoked pork tenderloin isn't the most original thing in the world, but it was a great way to reimagine the holiday ham.

3. Stefan - I don't have all that much to say about Stefan. He still has one that sacred double win, but that gets less impressive every passing week he spends in obscurity. His turkey was dry, but really, how do you not make a dry turkey with a toaster oven? (Maybe he should've asked Ariane...)

4. Leah - Well she did win the quickfire, even if the recipe just doesn't excite me that much. Credit where credit is due, though, she did manage to make a winning soup with the hardest materials to work with (but I could just be biased against the idea of it because the only tuna soup I've ever had was essentially a few cans of tuna, water and all, with a can of corn, water and all, with a can of chicken broth that was boiled until the tuna was somehow drier than it was before it was cooked, if that's possible). I don't think her choice of teammates were necessarily the strongest, though.

5. Jamie - I would've picked her for the quickfire win, but again, that may be the tuna soup bias talking. As for her elimination dish, it was a pretty normal corn salad. She threw in some twists, and it looked solid

6. Radhika - Our Chicago girl officially has as many wins as Stefan, but niether of them interest me that much. We didn't see her quickfire soup, but it actually sounds much more interesting than her "winning" stuffing. She made a Curried whitebean soup with pork meatballs, pears, apples, and bacon bok choy. The stuffing was just a standard cornbread and roasted vegetable stuffing, and I think everyone was more in love with it because she labeled it as vegan than because of the creativity that went into it.
7. Hosea - Hosea was also listed by Bravo as a "winner," but the judge's comments made itsound like his berry cobbler was servicable at best. His quickfire was a smoked tomato soup. Not wowing me with the creativity.

8. Alex - another one who didn't really wow me, but he had a better week than Carla and Jeff, so he comes back up. There's no recipe on the website for his quickfire soup, but his elimination was f standard mac and cheese with bacon. The Foo fighters loved it, and I guess it was technically sound, but it's mac and cheese with bacon... yeah.

9. Jeff - Jeff had a rough week, but at the end of the day his leadership saved him. His quickfire was an apple-fennel soup, which sounds fine. But his dessert for the elimination justs sound, looks, and apparently tastes so wierd. But he is the best leader in this entire bunch, and that will carry him a long way in the early part of the season that is always so full of team challenges.

10. Carla - Carla did marginally better than Jeff, but Jeff has a better track record at this point, so she gets pushed down. The comments on her dessert started somewhere around "too sweet" and changed to "okay" to "nice" to "the best dessert," so you can judge which of those is the most genuine.

11. Ariane - Concensus is that she put out the best dish of the night, but braised turkey doesn't outweigh undercooked farro and that - thing from last week, so she gets a little bump, but for me, I think she needs another week to prove she doesn't belong in the basement.

12. Melissa - I don't know if she even made anything this week, and her previous record doesn't inspire me enough to go check. At least she managed to make Leah think she's good enough to have on her team, though.

13. Danny - Geez, what a trainwreck this one was. Undercooked potatoes that he served anyway, really underwhelming stuffed mushrooms, and a textbook fruit salad would spell goodbye if it weren't for the fact that Richard did next to nothing. I'll gove him credit for a nice soup, but between the potatoes, his "sweet smoke" dog, and the chicken salad, this guy just does not look long for the competition.

14. Richard - Dom said it perfectly in the postmortem - you can't mix banana slices, graham crackers, marshmallow fluff, and melted chocolate and expect to live. LeeAnne says he also made a salad, but it sounds like a basic caprese salad, which doesn't redeem those s'mores. At least he set up Grant Achatz for that great little analysis - I'll never look at a s'more the same again.

Okay, that was fun. Now it's Dom's turn to flip my rankings completely upside down and embarass the heck out of me.

[Joanna]

Canasian - great rankings! That whole group from Alex to Melissa is difficult to nail down, I think. Melissa made sweet potatoes this week that were generally well-received, but like you I'm not really inspired enough to go digging for the recipe.

Honestly, I hated this challenge. Since Thanksgiving is all about comfort food, the chefs probably didn't want to stray too far from the norms. This is especially true because they were cooking for the Foo Fighters, and while I don't doubt that the band appreciates good food, their rave reviews of the mac and cheese with bacon kind of reveal the low standards of originality that the challenge inspired. Instead, the focus of the challenge was on execution -- but to throw them outside with only microwaves and toaster ovens placed a huge burden on them when it came time to execute. It reminds me a little of the $10 challenge last year, where the end results tell you very little about how the chefs would perform in a more typical environment.

[Lon]

I too yearn for the episodes where the chefs cook in a real restaurant or at least in circumstances where they produce the foods they like to cook. While I understand the show has to develop methods of elimination to fill 15 or so shows, using microwaves and toaster ovens don't really give a sense of the contestants ability to flavor and design. There are too many factors that work against them.

To me, the best Top Chef episodes come when the contestants are fewer and they can concentrate on real food.

[canasian]

Did you enjoy that? I always kind of have an ideas of how I would rank the chefs before I come here and one of my favorite parts of reading the rankings is seeing how closely my thoughts match with yours. I gotta say though, I never really thought about how much work it is going through all those recipes. I have a new appreciation for these posts.

So how about we challenge all your readers? Next week, everyone must do some research on the episode and write their own power rankings. Might be interesting to see what what people come up with, and their reactions to seeing the light.

[Jason]

I would be down with canasian's idea. My wife and I have started doing power rankings for the show already, so it'd just be a matter of fine tuning some thoughts into a postable item. (Right now Jamie is in my #1 spot, as she seems to be the most consistent)