Top Chef Power Rankings

Top Chef - S5E4 Power Rankings

Pssssssst. Shauna! If we wanted to see who's the best caterer with their hands tied, we'd watch this show. If we wanted to see who's the best food television personality, we'd watch this show. But we're watching your show. Can we get back to seeing up-and-coming chefs showing off their skill, style and creativity in an attempt to win seed money for their restaurant/catering dreams? Kaythanksbye.

In truth, my annoyance with this week's elimination challenge has waned with time. I'm still not entirely comfortable with Top Chef making forays into the realm of some... other... shows, but at least I can appreciate the logic. Yes, once casting has finished their job, the competition is about your food, not your ability to mug for the camera (I'm looking at you, Danny). But at least the challenge wasn't framed as a television star casting call, but rather as an exercise in the blunt reality of working in high profile restaurants these days. Like it or not, today's best chefs are celebrities, and even if they don't seek fame, fame will seek them. You don't have to have a Food Network show and a book deal and a line of signature cookware, but if you aspire to the heights of the profession, it's probably a good idea to learn to be comfortable cooking on camera. And though timing, personality and knowing your audience all figured into the mix, in the end the chefs had to make a good dish. A number of chefs didn't finish in time or embarrassed themselves on camera, but the ones who found themselves on the chopping block were those who made bad food.

Once again, though, I totally dug the quickfire, even if far too many of the cheftestants were unclear on the concept. "One bite" is the phrase that's tossed around a lot, but that's an overly simplistic and narrow definition, I think. Yes, small is important, but it's as much about refinement and excitement as it is about physical size. Amuse bouche is a fun little tease. It's the one time that it's okay to be overly precious. Amuse needs to be small, it needs to be highly refined, it needs to be beautiful, and its flavors need to absolutely pop. The chefs were presented with a real-world challenge that asked them to produce something they should understand and be able to execute, and by putting amuse bouche in an atypical context -- breakfast -- they were given another avenue to express their creativity. Once again, the quickfire tells us more about our chefs' core cheffing abilities than the elimination.

And yet, we're still left with a large pack of chefs who have made a splash here and there but failed to firmly establish themselves as favorites. Reading around the 'net, it seems that most people see this as an indictment of this season's contestants. I think most people have short memories. The general consensus is that Richard and Stephanie had established themselves as highly talented heavy favorites very early on last season, and that's not completely untrue, but I think time has exaggerated the memory. In the first three episodes, Richard had a couple of really interesting winners, but also had a chicken soup and paella that were strongly criticized. It wasn't until episode four that he really broke out, and then he immediately followed that with the sous vide salmon fiasco that put him on the chopping block. Stephanie, meanwhile, got that first win with the great looking duck dish, but Rocco savaged her pizza, she survived a lousy crab salad in episode two because she was lucky enough to be on a team with the only two chefs who performed worse than her, and her episode three win was for a fruit crumble. Meanwhile, Antonia, Dale and even Mark looked very strong in the early running. Point being, as easy as it is to say in hindsight that we all knew they'd be there at the end, and while many of us did, in fact, have them at or near the top of our lists, I don't think it was the obvious call at the time that so many remember it to be. Don't misunderstand, I'm not yet convinced that this season's latter stages will have the same kind of heavyweight bout vibe of last season's, but it's early. I say give this season a few more weeks to develop before deciding it's populated by a bunch of hacks. There's good stuff beneath the surface. The kids can play. We've yet to see their best.

And precisely because we've yet to see their best, no number one again this week. Digging through this pack is still tricky. Nobody's really broken free, and the fact that they've been kneecapped in half of the eliminations so far doesn't help, but we're eight dishes in and if you look at the complete body of what they've made so far, it's possible to get a sense of where they're coming from, even if they haven't made it crystal clear for us just yet. So with this week's rankings, I'm starting to shift away from the week-to-week horserace that typifies the first quarter of the season, and look a little more at the big picture. By no means are we throwing out last week's rankings or ignoring this week's results, but having just done a review of each chef's performance thus far, I'm bumping them a notch or two based on the impression I'm left with. Incidentally, I'm up against multiple deadlines, leaving for an important trip at the end of the week and the sickness has just descended upon me, so forgive me if I breeze through some of the less interesting cheftestants this week. I hope to be myself again next week.

The power rankings are not purely a prediction of who is most likely to win, or an assessment of last episode's dishes, or a reflection of the contestants' historical performance, but rather a nebulous amalgam of all three, combined with a little bit of gut feeling, to provide a relative measure of current awesomeness.

Wins

Top

Bottom

2 Leah Quickfires 2 2 1 Last Week: 4 Eliminations 0 2 0 She isn't doing much with the eliminations, but if she keeps winning quickfires I suppose she doesn't have to (for a while, anyway). Her fried quail egg with spicy tomato, bacon, parmesan and and fried sage was fairly straightforward but absolutely perfect from a technical and philosophical standpoint. She kept it compact and pretty. Working her herb in as a fried crisp on top made for both a great presentation and a textural contrast that might've been lost in a larger dish but pops in a single bite. And where Jamie used a slice of fresh tomato, Leah cooked tomato down until almost dry, intensifying the flavor so that the tiny bite would carry more oomph. Decisions like these may seem small, but they aren't made lightly and they separate the good from the great. In comparing the first quarter of this season to last, what struck me as the biggest difference was that last season had featured a few more wow dishes at this point -- the creative dishes that display an unusual level of sophistication. And yet, Leah's turned out two or three that, in my estimation at least, seem to fit that category. Dishes like the farotta with snapper and the asparagus soup with tuna would fit right into the finals. Even her scallop and apple dish, though she arrived at it by being slow with the knife, looked interesting and well-executed. We don't know how her seared duck with corn, blueberries and citrus sauce was received since the judges seemed more concerned with her lack of presence on camera, but in the pure tests of culinary skill she's turning out some impressive dishes. There's no breakaway performance here and she's not without stumbles. I'm keeping number one in my back pocket. But she's won two quickfires in a row and she's turned out a couple of the most impressive dishes. In this field, that earns her the not-number-one-highest-available-spot.

3 Jamie Quickfires 0 3 0 Last Week: 2 Eliminations 0 2 1 Unlike most, I do think Jamie was in real danger this week. Yes, her error was small compared to Melissa and Alex, but eliminations on Top Chef always have a logic to them -- even if that logic isn't always consistent from episode to episode -- and I started to worry when I could see the logic behind which they could separate her from the other two. Melissa grossly overspiced and brought her palate and judgment into question by insisting there was nothing wrong with the result. Alex made a decision so far disconnected from reality that his dish was dead in the water before he even started cooking it. Jamie's sin, slightly underestimating the time she needed, seems minor in comparison, and it is, but it produced what I would consider the worst consequence. If the host of the show goes rushing for water you might not be invited back, but capsaicin junkies will be intrigued and the rest of the audience might even be amused. If your crème brûlée doesn't set, it still looks pretty and the host probably won't say anything. But if the host balks at eating an undercooked egg or -- god forbid -- brings up the S word, you could have a full blown PR problem. I don't mean to suggest it would be warranted. I'm in the camp that resents having to pull teeth to get a raw egg with my sukiyaki, much less the accompanying visual assessment of how likely I am to sue. But raw egg hysteria is widespread, and the argument that in a live television context Jamie's mistake was potentially the most disastrous is, I think, a fair one. I'm less inclined to lend any weight to the criticisms of her attitude. It seemed clear to me that she was upset only with herself, she stepped right up and calmly took her lumps like a grownup at Judges' Table, and while it doesn't excuse her performance, I doubt anybody honestly believes that's how she would have reacted if she were really doing a live demo rather than a staged one. In any case, I can't justify leaving somebody at the top after landing on the chopping block, but with the given that she survived, she racked up another near win and this particular elimination hasn't done anything to change my opinion of her performance or her prospects.

4 Stefan Quickfires 1 2 1 Last Week: 3 Eliminations 1 1 0 Like just about everybody else in the top half, Stefan had a decent week but still hasn't gotten back to the expectations he set in the first episode. His amuse, the huevos rancheros served in the shell, was a perfect example of why amuse shouldn't be so narrowly defined as "one bite". Rocco had it absolutely right. It was more than one bite, but that was amuse in spirit. Like Leah, he went for intensity by going heavy on the yolk in his mix. The flavor profile wasn't anything special at all -- egg, cheddar, cream, salsa. But by poaching instead of scrambling and going with a beautiful presentation, he elevated it and made it special. And then he did a completely mundane minestrone (I smell a tactical decision not to do anything risky) and, apparently, didn't do much to sell it. But the reason I have him at number four isn't fading episode one glory. I still love what I've seen in some of his recipes. I see some neat ideas, nice pairings and interesting flavors in clean, well-articulated dishes. And even if we'd never seen episode one, I think I'd still feel that way. Incidentally, for all of those who want to run out and start topping eggs, it is a fun presentation, if a ton of work. For Iron Chef Egg, I did a spicy Asian egg salad trio that was served on little round toasts under eggshell caps (we tipped them slightly so you could see the food for the photo), and a souffle trio that I got to rise out of eggshells. Two dishes x three eggs x fifteen diners = 90 beheaded eggs. I gave up on the topper that Stefan used after about ten of them, and went to the sanding band on my Dremel. Worked shockingly well. It would sand through the shell while leaving the membrane intact, so I could then rinse away the eggshell powder before exposing the egg inside. I got perfectly smooth cuts in seconds and I got to cook with power tools. What's not to like?

5 Fabio Quickfires 0 1 1 Last Week: 6 Eliminations 1 3 0 Am I the only one who rolled my eyes when Fabio expressed trepidation at this week's elimination? You could sit in front of the television blindfolded and still know that he's a natural for this. Fabio could be eliminated next week, and he would have already won Top Chef season five. If he wants it, he'll have his own show before the end of next year. But when it comes to actually winning the competition, I just can't put him any higher. He's made some smart moves and earned some praise, but I still haven't seen the kind of distinctive, sophisticated, confident dishes that he'll need to get past the middle part of the season. His amuse would have been fine if you like sweet breakfast and a milkshake (I don't). When it comes to the elimination, however, I greatly appreciate the need to stay simple, but there's simple fresh and interesting and there's simple boring. Sesame crusted tuna, roasted carrots and asparagus and balsamic reduction screams early '90s -- if not late '80s -- to me. Keep it simple, fine, but give it something. Just one little twist, one little unconventional ingredient, and you can make that dish fresh and interesting again. Maybe he's holding back, but as much as I like the guy -- he's impossible not to like -- he has yet to cook like a winner. He's had some success, he seems to be capable (atrocious plating aside) and my feeling is he'll probably be hanging around late, so I'm reluctantly putting him near the bottom of the top tier, but I do so with significant reservations.

6 Gene Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 5 Eliminations 1 2 0 If Gene had given me anything to go on at all this week, I would have left him above Fabio. Who knows? Maybe he did. But the editors didn't show us a thing. So to keep you abreast of what he's doing, his amuse was a one bit pork sausage and bacon sandwich on rye made with an over easy quail egg and bacon yamamomo vinaigrette. I'd like to know how the sausage, rye, egg and fruit blended, but even more, I'd like to know where the hell he got yamamomo. Yamamomo, or mountain peach (yama = mountain and momo = peach in Japanese), is a funky little stone fruit from China and Japan that looks kind of like a large, spherical raspberry and it has a really pleasant, clean sweet flavor. But while I've gotten them in American restaurants and I don't doubt they're obtainable by the general public, I don't think I've ever seen one in a store in the States. And in any case, it was a quickfire, so he couldn't have shopped for it. There's no way that's part of the TC pantry, and despite a lot of freeze framing, I couldn't spy them on the breakfast table. Did he bring some along? Can you buy canned yamamomo? Anyway, his elimination dish looks nice and I thought it was a pretty good choice. He did a tuna sashimi with snow pea shoot salad and daikon vinaigrette. It wasn't overly complicated, anybody can do it, but between the ingredients and spooning sizzling oil over the raw fish, it had some wow factor for your average viewer. Perhaps the judges thought it too complicated, or perhaps he just wasn't quite as strong as the top three. Or maybe they were also concerned about the fact that he didn't seem to know the difference between sushi and sashimi. Here's hoping he was just frazzled by the clock and couldn't get the answer out. In any case, with Gene, he's showing creativity, he's articulating a style, he's met with some success, and I think the questions with him is one of finesse. A lot of his dishes look kind of heavy handed, which could get old quickly. We'll see.

7 Jeff Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 9 Eliminations 0 1 1 I've been looking for an excuse to bump Jeff up, and making Kathie Lee's head explode seems as good as any. The fact that his sumac spiced malfouf roll with muhamara sauce put him on top pretty much blows the theory that Gene didn't make top three because his recipe was too complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on in that recipe, and I'd love to see how he got through the demo. This only further bolsters my impression that the guy is fast fast fast. Which doesn't help him unless he's also good, but it's interesting. It's hard to see what Kathie Lee found so offensive in that recipe, but it wasn't just a matter of spice, as some have suggested. When Ariane did her demo on Thursday morning, Jeff's dish came up, and Kathie Lee used the word "putrid" to describe it. No matter how fast and charming Jeff may have been during his demo, I can't believe the TC judges would have put him on top if his dish didn't also taste good, so I guess that tells us something about Kathie Lee's palate that I'm sure surprises exactly nobody. His loaded potato and yogurt sorbet with fruit skewer amuse looked fine, but man, this guy has got to learn to do less. You get the impression that it might finally be sinking in, and I just have this feeling that he's going to start to shine when it does. We'll see what he does next week.

8 Radhika Quickfires 1 1 1 Last Week: 7 Eliminations 0 1 0 Radhika also received scant coverage this week, and what little coverage she did receive was to cover the fact that Rocco didn't cover her dish. Thanks, guys. That was a valuable use of screen time. She nailed size and presentation with her amuse, making a little potato cake with a marble-sized plain jane omelet with hollandaise. I'm thinking it lacked pop. Her elimination dish, on the other hand, certainly wasn't lacking for pop. Her sweet heat shrimp calls for a cup of garlic chili sauce, two cups of sweet chili sauce and curry powder. It looks like a bit of a mish mash, but I'm not comfortable passing judgment without tasting. Too bad she didn't finish on time, or we might have learned something about it. In any case, mostly due to a lack of information, I'm letting her tread water.

9 Hosea Quickfires 0 2 0 Last Week: 8 Eliminations 0 1 1 Ditto Hosea, for whom we got even less feedback than Radhika. His amuse was a sweet potato hash with fried quail egg, curried bacon, spinach and maple syrup. I can see that all working right up until I hit the maple syrup, which gives me pause, so I wonder if that's why we didn't hear more about it. His elimination dish was a crispy ahi roll with spicy ginger dipping sauce, which combined wasabi and sriracha and strikes me as muddy pseudo-Asian. Not that I have a problem with pseudo-Asian, but it tends to get overly busy and sweet and I suspect that's what happened here. Though I do like the idea of using crushed wasabi peas for texture. Anyway, as with Radhika, I'm going to punt on Hosea this week.

10 Ariane Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 13 Eliminations 2 2 2 She's won half of the elimination challenges on my scoreboard, but I can't put her higher than ten. You'd think this means I have something against the lady, but I swear, I don't. I kinda like her, actually. And unlike some, I'm not going to knock her salad. Yeah, it was taking the easy way out, but what's wrong with that? It was a smart move. Maybe not quite as smart as it seemed, since she didn't know she'd be cooking for the Today Show's fourth hour gaggle until after the fact, but still, simple, easily obtainable local product, tasty and a combination of flavors that, even if it's obvious to food nerds, is going to strike your average viewer as kind of interesting. Her cream cheese and bacon stuffed french toast with chile syrup even got a little nod from Rocco. So why can't I bring myself to put her any higher? I think it's because when she's winning, she's doing so by cooking turkey in a toaster oven and making a really, really simple salad -- skills that will be meaningless by the midpoint of the season. Meanwhile, what she's screwing up are the kind of fundamental cooking skills that she can't survive for long without. He failures speak more to me than her successes. And while the little bit of confidence she's managed to muster these past two weeks may very well allow her to flourish going forward, I'm not kicking her up until I see it. I don't care what the scoreboard says.

11 Carla Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 10 Eliminations 0 1 0 Add Carla to the list of people with a non-episode. Her amuse was just a small version of pancakes with fruit and strawberry syrup. She needed to either elevate it technically or creatively to stand out, and she did neither. One gets the impression she thought, "Hey, silver dollar pancakes are small," and then stopped thinking. The judges said her elimination dish tasted fine, but she didn't finish, and it was Tex Mex tortilla soup. She's not screwing up, and her flavors seem to be solid, and that will probably carry her for a little while. And again, it's nothing personal. I know she's rubbing some people the wrong way, but she seems like a sweetheart and while I'm not down with grand pronouncements about spirits and the universe, she's got a quirky kind of charm. But strictly from a competitive standpoint, while many are saying she deserves more respect than she's receiving, I just don't see what I'm supposed to be getting excited about. Competence in preparing pedestrian dishes?

12 Danny Quickfires 0 1 1 Last Week: 14 Eliminations 0 0 1 Apparently Tex Wasabi is alive and well and on the set of Top Chef. I could almost get behind Danny's oafish but enthusiastic charm... right up until he pointed at the camera and said Baba Booey. While I've pretty much lost interest in watching him, I give him credit for knowing what he wants and not being afraid to admit it. That said, I'm sorry, Danny. The role of breakout personality this season has already been taken. The reason Danny's so close to the bottom was perfectly encapsulated in his amuse. Zucchini blossoms stuffed with bacon, potato, garlic and mushrooms and breaded and fried with corn flakes? Seriously, Danny? Zucchini blossoms are a delicacy, and a delicate one at that. I'm all for high brow / low brow fusion, but it has to actually work. I don't know how you can even taste a zucchini blossom with all of that going on, much less determine how it matches up. The reason Danny's not all the way in the basement, however, is perfectly encapsulated in his elimination dish. There's no recipe posted, but he did a ginger sweet soy marinated skirt steak with cabbage salad, and Padma, at least, seemed to like it. So even if he made an ass of himself and set off every smoke detector in the building in the process of making it, he seems to possess the ability to stumble his way through an edible dish every now and again...

13 Melissa Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 12 Eliminations 0 1 1 ...which is more than we can say for Melissa, who removed her magical cloak of Top Chef invisibility only to make a completely inedible dish and narrowly avoid elimination. There was absolutely a case for her elimination as well, and a lot of people -- Lee Anne included -- think she should have been the one to go. And it wasn't just a matter of too much heat or Tom's narrow palate (an accusation, BTW, that I think has been vastly overblown). Rocco called it inedible. Padma all but called it inedible. And Lee Anne pointed out that not only was it unfathomably hot (seriously... she blew out the entire panel), but that it was completely lacking acid and salt. Like Rocco, Lee Anne is convinced she's lying and there's no way she tasted her dish, or if she did, she has no tastebuds whatsoever. I think the judges would have liked to eliminate Melissa. The problem was that while she gave them a terrible dish to taste...

14 Alex Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 11 Eliminations 0 0 1 ...Alex didn't give them a dish at all. There's been a lot of muttering around the boards -- others didn't even finish making their dishes, so why were Melissa and Jamie, who completed problematic ones, put on the block when it seems all they would have had to do was say, "Oops! Couldn't finish in time!" to save their skins? The answer is that as part of the demo, everybody had a completed plate ready to swap out for tasting. Everybody, that is, except for Alex. For starters, this decision to make crème brûlée was absurd. We're not talking about underestimating the time you're going to need by a little. We're not talking about underestimating the time you're going to need by a lot. We're talking about a full-blown disconnect with reality. Unless you have a 30 foot long scarf, travel around in a flying police box and can alter the laws of time and space at your whim, you don't make a slow braised dish for a 15 minute quickfire, and you don't make crème brûlée when you have one hour. So not only was it not set properly due to a completely baffling choice, but Lee Anne points out that he forgot to take it out of the freezer, so he didn't even have a completed dish for the judges to taste. They were left with the little bit of hot custard he had at the demo table. How do you let that slide? And what was the incredible creative inspiration that got him so fired up he couldn't even tell the difference between one hour and four? Adding a little bit of rose water to a plain crème brûlée. Woo. Alex seemed like a really sweet fellow. And, good for him, he apparently has a new BFF waiting for him in the sequester house and a beautiful bride waiting for him back home. Maybe the anticipation of seeing both was simply too much for him. Whatever the reason, Alex's head clearly wasn't in this competition.

EPISODE FIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Huzzah! It's time for the culinary bee! With a twist! The chefs are paired? Any guesses? I'm stumped. Will one try to fool the other? Will they taste each other's dishes and attempt to identify the ingredients? It can't be the latter... I have no idea how you'd standardize that across pairs so that you could declare a winner. If we were at eight or sixteen remaining chefs, I might think playoff brackets. But I'm looking for thoughts, because I have no clue what they're planning. Or, you know, I could just wait two days and find out.

As for the elimination, it looks like we get a real honest-to-god straight up cooking elimination again, even if it's a team effort. The chefs cook for Gail's wedding shower, and do four courses based on the old "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" line. I've seen some complaints that we're getting another catering challenge, but it doesn't look like the group is THAT big to me. The chefs are working out of a real kitchen and the numbers look manageable, so in practice I think this is going to end up looking more like a large dinner party than a catered event. In any case, we even know the teams from the preview. I'm thinking Stefan, Jeff and Hosea doing something old look like the ones to beat. I might have put Leah, Fabio and Melissa up there, but they're being asked to do a blue dessert? That pretty much saddles them with blueberry, right? I suppose they could interpret it a little more broadly and do something with bleu cheese. In any case, that draw is looking like a severe handicap. I'm sure they'll pull through, but I'm not pegging them for the top. On the other end, I'm thinking Carla, Danny and Gene doing something new looks like the team that could be in trouble. Of course, the always misleading preview leads us to believe that Ariane has some serious problem cooking lamb, and we all know how much Top chef judges loooooove lamb that isn't cooked properly. So for the win, given that he’ll have a teammate with a strong personality who knows restraint and can reign him in a bit, I’m putting my money on respected team leader and prep beast Jeff. If that teams wins, I could also see it going to Stefan who, with his catering experience, could come out looking like the hero. I'm thinking it'll come down to whoever's fingerprints are on their dish concept. And I'm going to say that we lose either Carla or Danny this week, with an outside shot at ousting Ariane.

Here's hoping I'm healthy by Wednesday.

Top Chef - S5E4 Postmortem

Weeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooooooo, that was a close one.

This is exactly why I hate these challenges. I don't mean to suggest Jamie would have had anybody to blame but herself, but still, we just came thisclose to losing one of the best contestants in the first quarter of the season.

On one level, okay, I understand. This is the era of the celebrity chef. Even if you're not seeking broader opportunities ('course, you'd have a hard time making that argument from the set of a reality show), you have to be prepared to handle them should they come looking for you. But still... c'mon.

Anyway, disaster averted. I would've liked to have seen more of Alex. I think he had a little more than we saw. But I didn't see him going deep, and his head clearly wasn't in the game.

Rankings Monday... really, this time!

(P.S. - Does this mean I have to watch the Today Show tomorrow? Oy.)

ADDENDUM: So I just scanned three hours' worth of the Today Show, and the only cooking demo was done by Eric Ripert. I went back to check the Top Chef episode just to be sure. Padma couldn't have said any more clearly that she'd be on the the morning after the episode aired. Did Ariane get bumped? (Personally, I'd rather watch Eric Ripert than Ariane, but, you know... research and all.)

Top Chef - S5E3 Power Rankings

Will the favorite please step up?

Seriously, can we just call it a four or five way tie for the number one spot this week? Everybody at or near the top kinda did pretty well or paired a good dish with an off dish, but nobody made a strong case for the top spot. Makes for great television, but frustrating power rankings.

Not as frustrating, however, as the episode was itself. I hate episodes like this. The quickfire? Aside from the fact that we've reverted to only seeing about half the dishes, I have no complaints. I made my peace with cheesy promotional challenges a long time ago. As a ten year commercial-skipping DVR veteran, I figure I have only myself to blame (welcome to the future of television, folks). But the elimination challenge was pretty much the worst of everything. Massive teams where the winner and loser do little to reflect on individual performances. Bad conditions and dumbed-down equipment creating a situation where even the best chefs could totally screw up. A massive curveball that required complete retooling of all planning done the night before. A catering challenge. Hordes of dishes leading to incomplete or omitted recipes, scant coverage of what was made, and confusion over who made what. Yes, we had a rock band and a fun storyline (setting aside the whole "we're pretending our 'Thanksgiving' isn't in the middle of the summer" thing), and I understand that a show like this needs to cater both to food nerds and reality TV fans, and that some episodes will favor one over the other, but let's just say that this is the kind of episode the food nerds hate... if I may be so bold as to speak for the food nerds.

Doubly disappointing is that this is the episode Achatz drew. You have one of the keenest, most creative minds in food today and you're serving him out of chafing dishes. Just seems like a waste. If you're going to force the chefs to prep for a holiday chow line with microwaves and toaster ovens, at least bring on Bourdain to maximize our enjoyment of the carnage. Though, in all fairness, I was a little taken aback by how solidly the chefs did. This was definitely a challenge that had total meltdown written all over it, and while there were plenty of flops to go around, it seems like the quality of the fare in general was surprisingly high.

Two totally random side notes before we move onto the rankings. First, this is now the second week in a row that there's been a random 30 second segment of the show thrown into the middle of a commercial break. Can we just stop this right now? Please? Second, do we all look that lame at concerts, or is it just chefs? I'm going to see one of my favorite bands on Friday, and I'd like to know so I can decide whether to rock out or quietly hang back in a corner nursing a beer. This is important stuff.

This week was a massive pain to try to decipher when it comes to the rankings. I've done my best, but even if I thought this week's elimination was a good measuring stick (I don't), so much info is completely inaccessible that what little scraps are left are probably overvalued. My take? This is one of the rare weeks where the quickfire means a lot more to me than the elimination. So if the top spots seem a little arbitrary... well... that's because they are. In the absence of a clear frontrunner and good intel, I'm letting my gut do a lot of the talking this week. In fact, you know what? Screw it. Nobody gets number one this week. I'll bring back the top spot when somebody grabs it.

The power rankings are not purely a prediction of who is most likely to win, or an assessment of last episode's dishes, or a reflection of the contestants' historical performance, but rather a nebulous amalgam of all three, combined with a little bit of gut feeling, to provide a relative measure of current awesomeness.

Wins

Top

Bottom

2 Jamie Quickfires 0 2 0 Last Week: 3 Eliminations 0 2 0 Ideally, I'd like her to make a bigger splash before moving her into the not-number-one-highest-available-spot, but with everybody else in the top tier running a little hot and cold, I'm loving her consistency right now. She's banging out great dish after great dish and she knows it. This week, she kicks out another great soup, this time based on chickpeas with vadouvan -- the culinary world's pet spice du jour -- an herbed yogurt and pickled chiles. Again, relatively simple with a little personal touch, and Achatz gives it top mention. In the elimination, her charred corn salad with cucumber dill dressing and wax beans with bacon, onions, sage and toasted almonds were fairly straightforward, but Team Sexy Pants' (ugh) savories were well-received, and this one was about adaptation and survival, not creative brilliance. I'll feel better about her when she busts out a win or two, but she's always right there with the best and the fact that she hasn't broken through yet is, I think, just a matter of happenstance.

3 Stefan Quickfires 1 1 1 Last Week: 1 Eliminations 1 1 0 Some seem to feel that Stefan is simply treading water since starting off with a bang, but I'm not sure I agree. It's true that he did ham, beef and turkey in an exceptionally uninspiring manner for the elimination, and apparently dried out his turkey a bit. But as mentioned above, I'm disinclined to read too much into an elimination like this, and though he didn't get top mention for his soup, Achatz' comments made it seem as though he must have just missed, and I love the look of it. It's the sort of light, refined Asian dish that reminds me a lot of some of Harold's work from season one -- a coconut and curry based bisque with Thai aromatics and gently poached shrimp and scallop dumplings. He hasn't pulled down the wins in the past couple of weeks like he did at first, but I still love what I'm seeing in his recipes and I'm leaving him near the top.

4 Leah Quickfires 1 1 1 Last Week: 4 Eliminations 0 2 0 I might've given Leah the top spot if she hadn't made mashed potatoes for the elimination. Not that there isn't an art to perfect mashed potatoes, especially under those circumstances, but talk about using your immunity to take a vacation. I'm kicking her up here based on good vibes from some previous dishes and a really, really impressive quickfire this week. The genius of the quickfire was that it should be relatively easy to turn anything into a soup. Provided the flavors work together, there should be a way to make them do so in liquid form. That said, she drew the short straw, then turned right around and knocked it out of the park. White asparagus, nicoise olives and raw tuna? Took it right in stride. She hasn't been totally consistent, but she hasn't made any mistakes and she's put out a couple of really sophisticated dishes. So I'm bumping her up. Or I would be, if not for the lack of a number one shuffle.

5 Gene Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 5 Eliminations 1 2 0 Now's probably a good time to mention that my win/top/bottom count doesn't necessarily jive with the Bravo site's. Though I let them influence me, I keep my own scorecard for the episodes where it isn't cut and dried. Tom says in his blog that he would have given wins to Gene or Ariane if given the chance, and that's good enough for me. So chalk one up for Gene. Anyway, as much as some of our top chefs have been running a little hot and cold, I've been running hot and cold on Gene. I know I like the guy. I'm just not sure from week to week whether I believe in him or not. Episode one, he looked strong. Episode two, he looked a little gimmicky. Episode three, he looks calm, capable and above all, resourceful. Everybody loves the field-rigged hibachi (especially Jeff), and they should. Once again, the guy's using his head and refusing to get rattled, and that'll go a long way. His soup, since you didn't get to see it, dropped a seared scallop in a shiitake beef consomme (not actually a consomme, but we'll give it to him) and paired it with a fennel, mint, yuzu and pickled grape salad. Meanwhile, the fruit of his hibachi, the maple smoked pork loin, was done with cranberry marjoram sauce and an apple chili chutney, and was one of the most interesting elimination dishes out there. He's going big and brash, and I'm still not sure whether he's doing so skillfully or just making noise. On one of the website videos, a chiron pegged him as an executive chef for Roy's, which I believe is the first hint we've had as to his actual background (Addendum: Apologies to commenter riry, whose link to this article provides this information and more... I just caught your comment, riry!). His food looks a lot like Roy's. Big and brash and loud. I found Roy's, while enjoyable, not terribly refined and overly sweet. If that's what Gene is doing, he'll survive for a whlie, then take a header close to the finish line. But if he can take that style of cuisine, exercise a little restraint and keep adapting as well as he has, he'll have a shot.

6 Fabio Quickfires 0 2 0 Last Week: 2 Eliminations 1 2 0 Fabio takes a bit of a dive this week, partially because last week's jump was borne more of a sense of obligation than genuine enthusiasm on my part, and partially because he nailed two of my pet peeves this week. First, at the risk of being immodest, here's what I wrote last week: "If they think they're going to impress Grant Achatz with some funky technique, they'd better know what they're doing. I've eaten at Alinea, and Achatz isn't just doing crazy for crazy's sake. He's one of the wackiest guys out there, but his wild techniques and presentations have real thought and purpose behind them. He won't be buffaloed because something's 'cool'." And here's what Achatz had to say in his blog interview about Fabio's use of alginate and xanthan gum with the asparagus and olives in his soup: "I think Fabio was trying too hard. He is a smart guy ... and read me and my cooking style ... so he went for a more advanced approach to technique to try and impress ... but it was a bit off. To me that is a sin. Play with fancy technique only if you can make the overall dish better." I can't object to Fabio's pumpkin tiramisu on a tasty level. The recipe looks like a winner and I appreciate him marrying the traditions of his home country and adopted country. But I know tiramisu. I live a block away from the guy who probably invented it and his wife. We eat at their bakery all the time. My toddler loves her so much he cleans her display cases every time we visit. And Fabio, ladyfingers and coffee do not tiramisu make. Especially when you're adding cream cheese. I bet your dessert tasted great, but the term has become debased enough without actual Italians helping. In all seriousness, though, I still consider Fabio a contender. I just think he's been a little uneven.

7 Radhika Quickfires 1 1 1 Last Week: 8 Eliminations 0 1 0 I still have some serious reservations about Radhika, but now she has my attention. My initial impression was that her food looked overly trendy and more flash than substance, and yet she continues to collect good comments. Another week or two like this and I'll have to put her among the contenders. Her soup -- another that wasn't shown -- was a very basic white bean, bacon and onion affair that she perked up with a curried meatball and quick pickled pear and apple. I'd like to taste it, but it looks neat. And her vegan stuffing, though it doesn't look like much on paper, was universally praised as one of the best of the spread. My gut still tells me she's cooking a little too cute for her own good, but she's threatening to prove me wrong.

8 Hosea Quickfires 0 2 0 Last Week: 7 Eliminations 0 1 1 Hosea had a quiet week, which probably isn't a bad thing after last week's near miss. His soup, a tomato and corn affair with some shrimp, cilantro oil and chipotle, was probably tasty even if it isn't anything I can get too excited about on paper. His elimination looks pretty basic, but was among the well-received Sexy Pants desserts and apparently beat Carla's similar offering in a head-to-head. It's a basic peach and blueberry crisp with candied walnuts flavored with tons of spices. He hasn't fully bounced back from last week, but I still think he can be a contender and I'm curious to see what he brings over the next couple of episodes.

9 Jeff Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 6 Eliminations 0 0 1 Jeff is my big enigma these days. My gut and reading of his recipes still tell me that he's a lot better than he's showing, but at some point you need to get it on the table. And his recipes that look really interesting to me are frequently ignored by the editors. Whether this is because I'm misreading them, or because he isn't executing them, or because they're setting him up for a big comeback, I don't know. But I dig his soup. When I do fennel and apple soup, I like to do it with a lightly sweetened juniper cream. But I think I like his idea better. He does it with a fig and bleu cheese custard, and I think that sounds awesome. What's indisputable is that he's a take charge guy, and what's more impressive is that nobody seems to mind. He's clearly a natural leader. And I know there's a lot of bellyaching out there, with people complaining that leaders are frequently sent home when they don't perform and their team loses and that Jeff should have gone as well for consistency's sake, but I say get over it. The show wouldn't be made better by perfect consistency and ironclad rules. It'd be made boring. Allow the judges a little flexibility and let them suss out who they think does and doesn't belong. Besides which, his tendency to take charge may yet come back to bite him in the ass. But my feeling is that, despite his current standing, there's nobody in the middle of the pack more capable of suddenly rocketing to the top. If he can do less and do it better, I think he'll light it up.

10 Carla Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 9 Eliminations 0 1 0 Carla, like Radhika, is one who I'm reluctantly acknowledging. She said she's here to prove that caterers can bring it too, and she's already proven that she can do more than most of the caterers we've seen. Whether that's going to translate to significant success, I still have my doubts, but let's give some credit where credit is due. She's another who, like Stefan, appears to have just missed top three in the quickfire. She drew a tough knife, having to turn Lia's poached shrimp with avocado and cucumber into a soup. That sure screams gazpacho to me, but I'm kind of impressed that she went hot with her soup, and Achatz seemed to like it a lot. It wasn't... um... particularly pretty, but flavor's what really matters. It's a little difficult to get a handle on what she did for the elimination challenge, since the website editors saw fit to throw her cobbler, pea and feta salad, green and yellow beans and various accompanying sauces all into one frankenrecipe. I'm not seeing anything here to get excited about, and from the Judges' Table conversation it sounds as though she narrowly avoided the bottom three, so I'm keeping her on the lower end of the middle of the pack. But she's hanging in there.

11 Alex Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 10 Eliminations 0 0 0 Not much to say about Alex. He seems to be making a point of staying completely out of the spotlight. No wins, no tops, no bottoms. And then, this week, he gives us a roasted squash soup with a little saffron and shrimp, and a five cheese mac with bacon. If it weren't for the Foos' bacon fetish, he would have gone completely unnoticed for another episode. Seriously, man, can we get something to work with here?

12 Melissa Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 12 Eliminations 0 1 0 Also competing for least notable contestant is Melissa, whose only marks on the scoreboard come courtesy of this week's team victory and her status as sixth fastest apple peeler in the field. Going with an Italian wedding soup seemed a pretty obvious route given her recipe, but Achatz didn't seem to feel she did a particularly good job of it. And then she did old school sweet potatoes with some stewed fruit and apple cider. I suppose not standing out is better than getting your neck on the block, but Melissa has yet to demonstrate why she's here.

13 Ariane Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 14 Eliminations 1 1 2 Perhaps most amusing this week was watching Ariane acting all surprised and perturbed that her teammates were keeping her on a short leash. If the centerpiece of my team's menu rested on the shoulders of somebody who completely botched the last two elimination challenges, I'm thinking I might be a little cautious too. Shockingly, it turns out that she actually was in control, making a nice orange-brined turkey breast with mushrooms and caramelized shallots. So she pulls out the pseudo-win, and I pull her out of the basement. But I'm not moving her any higher than a notch for two reasons. One, her lamb soup with couscous looked a little clumsy to me and Achatz didn't like it. Two, if preparing a Butterball turkey breast in a toaster oven is what it takes to get your mojo back, I'm not entirely certain that qualifies as a ringing endorsement of your abilities.

14 Danny Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 13 Eliminations 0 0 1 Just when the guy finally shows me something to get excited about, he turns around and immediately blows that goodwill. He also had one of the tougher draws in the quickfire, but he seems to have made a hearty, fun dish out of it, and I love the idea of dropping a whole poached egg right into the middle of his soup. Then he undercooks his potatoes, puts vegan "bacon" bits into his stuffed mushrooms, produces a plain Jane fruit salad and makes balsamic ranch dressing by doctoring up a bottle of Hidden Valley. A lot of people think he should have been the one to go, and based on some of the extra intel that didn't make it into the show, it's not an unreasonable conclusion.

15 Richard Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 11 Eliminations 0 0 1 The honor of being the one to actually depart, however, goes to Richard, even though we only got a little part of the story. Turns out that Richard did not one but two other dishes that were never shown or mentioned on air. The Foos apparently expressed an affinity for caprese salad in their rider, so Richard took it upon himself to make one, no matter how inappropriate to the holiday. No recipe was posted, but it sounds as though he went the common and shameful route of making a pesto dressing, thereby taking the simple elegance of a caprese salad and muddying it up. He also made one of his old favorite T-Day dishes, his spicy sweet potatoes, and to hear him tell it the judges rather liked them. So unless he's patting himself on the back, this means he had one solid dish and raises the question... why him and not Danny, who appears to have mangled everything? For starters, the s'mores were just a terrible, terrible idea. It's like they were just thrown out there without any real thought or consideration, and the judges tend to find that insulting more than anything. The judges, Top Chef bloggers and forum commenters all over have tried to articulate what, precisely, was wrong about them, but speaking as somebody who writes over 5000 words about every episode of this damn show, I think this is a case of overanalyzation. It doesn't take a food genius to look at the spread, look at Richard's s'mores and say, "Those are really dumb." So there you have it. They were dumb. And that's not how you want to stick out. But even if that isn't enough to make you feel that Richard deserved the axe, I wonder if this is one of those episodes where the quickfire didn't sneak into the elimination a little bit. Danny took a tough draw and made a neat soup, while Richard did a pseudo-Mexican mish mash and forgot to add lime juice. As tiebreakers go, that isn't a bad one. While Richard seemed like a pretty decent guy on the show, his exit left me a little annoyed. Setting aside the ultraweepiness, he made the mistake of explaining how he was such a good guy for not throwing Danny under the bus. Good guys don't make a big point of explaining how they're such good guys, Richard. Doubly annoying since the claim that you actually had something of value to tell the judges seems rather specious. Based on what you said in the exit interview, it sounds less like meaningful intel and more like general bitchiness. Triply annoying because this is coming from the same guy who effectively said on camera that he lied to Ariane about what he thought of her parfait in the hopes she wouldn't fix it. If you're going to pat yourself on the back for taking the high road, it's best to make sure you do so consistently. In any case, moot point. Competition goes on, and with Richard gone, maybe we'll be spared Tom's strut in slo-mo.

MINOR EPISODE FOUR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Next week Rocco's back, and though he's always a little smarmy, I've actually enjoyed him on the show and he usually has some very intelligent and illuminating things to say. Preview video reveals the quickfire as a breakfast amuse bouche challenge, which I really like. It takes a very specific type of dish that will allow the chefs to show off some technical skill, and puts it in an unfamiliar context that will allow for a creative take on the same. Wish I could say I felt the same way about what looks like the elimination challenge. I like Top Chef precisely because I don't care who the next food-related television personality will be. I'm interested in Harold Dieterle, not Tex Wasabi. But as with every episode, this is mostly speculation based on very little actual footage. We'll wait to see what happens. Looks like there's some serious culinary carnage, so hopefully we'll be able to define the pack a little better.

Discuss!

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 :-)

Top Chef - S5E3 Postmortem

We have a contender for weepiest departure ever.

Not to come down too hard on Richard. He seemed like a nice fellow. But you can't combine graham crackers, sliced bananas, melted chocolate and marshmallow fluff and expect to stick around, regardless of the conditions.

And speaking of the conditions... well... I suppose there will always be episodes like this. *sigh*

Rankings most likely on Monday... maybe Tuesday due to the holiday (depends on how late we get back Sunday night).

Have a great T-Day, everybody!

Top Chef - S5E2 Power Rankings

Who are these people and what have they done with my Top Chef cast?!?

Fighting over who gets to do dessert? Did I miss something? For a couple of years now, we've been chiding the contestants for not having a dessert recipe or two up their sleeves. Now it's like they all studied up and when the first opportunity presented itself, they fell all over themselves trying to show they were prepared. Odd.

Odd week in general, really. One of the first things we learned is that the editors have finally figured out how plainly they've been telegraphing the results. Used to be you had a pretty good idea who was getting the axe within the first five minutes of the show. Nervous about how the number of chefs is dwindling? You should be. Feeling like you're finally hitting your stride and looking forward to today's challenge? Yeah, not so much. Thrilled to be bonding with this other chef who's totally making the competition tolerable? She's so gone. But did we hear anything from or about Jill this week? Not a peep.

This marked the second consecutive week we've seen a challenge that totally should have been in Chicago last season, and I was gratified to see nary a chef acting as though the hot dog was beneath him. To be fair, though, nobody actually presented a hot dog except for Jill, and she got hammered for not making her own. But even if the challenge was judged rather loosely and framed with a little superfluous window dressing, it was still a good one. Then we got another very free and open elimination challenge, though some chefs seemed to have issues working even within the context of New American, and Tom seemed to take their efforts rather personally. But his response to Fabio and Jill's dishes served to hammer home and old point. Fabio's Italian carpaccio wins while Jill's quiche is, according to his blog, too French for a New American challenge? Despite the dubious claim in his blog that carpaccio has been absorbed into American cuisine (in a substantively different manner than quiche?), this nicely demonstrates the old Top Chef truism that if you make great food, you can get away with stretching the very same rules that will be used to hammer you if you don't. To be clear, I have no issue with this approach to judging nor with their decisions this week. But it's instructive.

I'd like to briefly address one sentiment I see coming from a lot of bloggers/commenters this week. Between Fabio's carpaccio and Arianne's cherry surprise, we had a couple of very plain admissions from chefs that they were cooking dishes they serve in their restaurants. This seems to be rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, and I just don't understand why. First off, if you don't think every single chef on the show has done the same, sending out dishes -- primarily, even -- that are at least close variations on their tried and true, you're kidding yourself. Second, so what? When these chefs walk through the doors of Top Chef kitchen, are they supposed to forget every great idea they've ever had? Yeah, it's exciting when they come up with something totally on the fly, and sometimes they're forced to do so whether they want to or not. But this isn't Iron Chef. Their mandate is to express themselves through food and articulate their culinary style, not reinvent themselves the moment the competition starts. And to expect them to leave behind everything they've done and created is to ask them to abandon the very thing it is the purpose of the competition to discover. To best determine who is Top Chef, I want to see how these guys improvise and adapt and create, sure. And the challenges ensure that happens. But you can't deny them who they are, and their go-to and signature dishes are a large part of that equation. Don't deny them that.

Tough week to get a handle on the rankings. As is frequently the case this early in the season, we're left with more questions than answers. Aside from Stefan's quickfire stumble, last week's top three went into hiding, our number four had a Jekyll and Hyde week, a couple of contestants who previously looked weak made some noise, and the heart of the pack still failed to distinguish themselves in any meaningful manner. Plus, Lee Anne had the audacity not to post her blog by Sunday night, even after all of the nice things I said about her last week. Thankfully, I don't mind a little rankings volatility in the early part of the season. A couple more weeks and we should have a clearer picture of where everybody belongs.

The power rankings are not purely a prediction of who is most likely to win, or an assessment of last episode's dishes, or a reflection of the contestants' historical performance, but rather a nebulous amalgam of all three, combined with a little bit of gut feeling, to provide a relative measure of current awesomeness.

Wins

Top

Bottom

1 Stefan Quickfires 1 1 1 Last Week: 1 Eliminations 1 1 0 Tough call here, but I'm going to leave Stefan at the top for the time being. Admittedly, that quickfire seemed totally out of left field. I can't say I've tasted thyme sausage, cheddar cheese and tartar sauce together, and combinations that looked stranger on paper have turned out beautifully, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that one. On the other hand, his seared halibut with celery root tortellini, champagne sauce and dill oil is a sophisticated little dish that looks great on paper. It seemed to get an awful lot of love in the dining room -- including a direct contrast with Jill's quiche on the merits of cream sauces -- and I was surprised he missed top three. Donatella's assessment of his sausage notwithstanding, he still has two of the four wins out there, I like what I see of his recipes, and I have some minor misgivings about Fabio's performance this week, so I'm going to let him hang onto number one.

2 Fabio Quickfires 0 2 0 Last Week: 8 Eliminations 1 1 0 Fabio is one of the week's big movers, winning both the elimination and my respect with his impassioned declaration of love for hot dogs. We also learn that Stefan considers Fabio his strongest competition, though whether this is a matter of dispassionate assessment or man crush remains unknown. Fabio was on top of both challenges, and I've no doubt his dishes deserved the praise, but the fact that they were both built on others' work kept me from getting overly excited about them. First, you have his Mediterranean dog, which was essentially premade andouille sausage blended up and cut with a little extra pork. He did take the time to smoke the resultant Frankensausage, and the zucchini, goat cheese and sun dried tomato seemed like it could be a tasty if uninspiring angle, but still, that was basically somebody else's sausage. As for his elimination dish, I actually had less of a problem with it than many seem to. Yeah, it was a mostly conventional carpaccio, but the grilled lemon angle was a nice one that Gail loved, and a touch as simple as the spherical olives, if it's the right one, can make all the difference between rehashing a standard and giving it a fresh face. Of course, the spherical olive technique isn't nearly as new as Fabio would lead us to believe (nor is it his), which is fine. Chefs, like other artists, borrow all the time and even if they weren't new to the universe they appeared to be new to the bulk of the panel, which is all that matters for the purposes of this competition (see: Ilan Hall). But again, I'm a little concerned that what makes him stand out isn't his own creation. No foul here -- just mild concern about what this means for his future chances.

3 Jamie Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 5 Eliminations 0 1 0 My preseason favorite makes a little move in episode two and looks strong. Her quickfire dish, a bacon-wrapped hot dog with sherried onions and hot and sweet peppers, looks nice to me even if it escaped attention on the show, and then she demonstrates that she can work magic with simple ingredients by wowing the judges with a chilled corn soup. Of course, she then has to talk about how she "just want[s] to celebrate the season" (the culinary equivalent of "we just have to take it one game at a time"), but clichéd chefspeak aside, this is a great Top Chef dish. It's technically sound, a perfect choice for the challenge, evocative of a pure flavor that everybody loves, and yet with the touch of mint and drizzle of chile oil, she adds a couple of subtly creative touches that elevate it just a bit and make it hers. My conviction that we're going to see her in the finals remains firm.

4 Leah Quickfires 0 0 1 Last Week: 3 Eliminations 0 1 0 Leah might as well have sat out this week. The only thing we learned about her -- that she prefers to be in relationships and is apparently going to cling to Hosea for the rest of the season and provide us with a painful plotline -- was totally unrelated to the food and kinda creepy to boot. But there's some interest to be found in her recipes, even if it isn't enough to have any substantial impact on the rankings. Her dog was pretty simple, beef and bacon with onion powder, garlic powder and paprika, but she gets the big thumbs up from me for busting out sriracha mayo -- one of my most beloved secret weapons, even on hot dogs -- with a little lime and fresh herbs as a topping. I see why it didn't earn praise, but I know and love this combination. It works. Her elimination is a little harder to get a handle on. While I'm not a big fan of the plating (it'd be right at home in some contexts, but stuck out like a sore thumb at Craft), I'm not so sure about Padma's '80s characterization. As to the food itself, she's taking seared scallops and Yukon potatoes, then dressing them with almost completely pure grapefruit and orange flavors, combined only with a little crème fraîche, lemon zest, pink peppercorn and chives. It's the kind of minimal ingredient approach that I've no doubt could be stunning in the right hands, I'm just not sure those hands are hers. We'll let her tread water this week.

5 Gene Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 2 Eliminations 0 1 0 Gene also maintains a low profile, but I'm dropping him below my other wallflower because of some reservations I have about his recipes this week. Last week's struck me as creative, but these strike me as maybe a touch gimmicky. His sausage (not his own) was stuffed with boursin, panko coated and deep fried, then wrapped in pita and dressed with a horseradish/soy ketchup and a bourbon/honey mustard. His elimination meatloaf, meanwhile, was done as a roulade and served with a mushroom ragout and creamy gouda sauce. I'm guessing the latter had some flavor appeal (search me on the first), but both just seem kind of unfocused to me. He's doing things, and I'm not sure why, and that makes me worry that there isn't really a good reason. But he's pushing unusual pairings, he's trying to stand out, he's already met with some success and he's a driven family man who worked his way up from the bottom and is giving every indication he's going to keep his head down and stay focused, so he has some things going for him.

6 Jeff Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 6 Eliminations 0 0 0 Two weeks in and we've barely heard a peep from Jeff (aside from a little bit of take charge this week that may or may not be meaningful down the road), but my gut is telling me this is a good thing. His dog was a lamb sausage seasoned with fennel, paprika, caraway, coriander and cumin, topped with champagne pickled cucumbers, sweet pickled hot peppers and onions, croutons, harissa ketchup and lemon mustard (not doctored prepared mustard -- dude made mustard). His elimination dish looked like a simple grilled chicken, but it was marinated with mustard and herbs, the corn bread was done with cheddar, scallions, sour cream and chorizo, and he worked in fried okra, an heirloom tomato chow chow and a buttery honey mustard chicken jus. If nothing else, the guy is humping. My gut tells me he isn't being bold enough to stand out in a massive crowd, but that this complexity and attention to detail will mean more when the numbers dwindle a bit and the judges can focus in more closely on the finer details of what every chef is doing. For now, he's stalking the pack.

7 Hosea Quickfires 0 2 0 Last Week: 4 Eliminations 0 0 1 Hosea takes a hit this week, and now I'm feeling unsure of what to make of him. On one hand, you have the executive chef of a successful Boulder restaurant who made a nice splash last week and followed it up with a top dog (sorry) that seemed to set the stage for more success. It wasn't the wildest one out there by any means, but his pork and bacon sausage with smoked paprika, garlic, poblanos, serranos and vinegar looked solid and earned him a top mention. And then he bumbles his way through the elimination, tanking a dish that should be squarely in his wheelhouse and narrowly avoiding the axe. It's just puzzling, really. What makes a seafood guy think canned crab will be okay? How does he miss basic seasoning issues that seem obvious to everybody else in the room? Having looked at his restaurant menu, I mentioned in the preseason rankings that I had concerns he might have a bit of a heavy handed approach to seafood that wouldn't play well in New York. The love thrown at last week's smoked fish and latkes temporarily allayed those concerns, but hearing this week's commentary and seeing his recipe, I'm back to my first gut reaction. Tom's right, those flavors should all work together. But even setting aside the canned crab issue, you have a crab salad that looks like it's half mango, it works in egg yolks and a lot of honey, and the citrus and vanilla are delivered in the form of a sugary syrup. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds less like he's dressing his crabmeat and more like he's smothering it?

8 Radhika Quickfires 1 1 1 Last Week: 10 Eliminations 0 0 0 Radhika's another one who started out strong and then stumbled her way through the finish -- the difference being that she had immunity and escaped pointed abuse. Her dog did, indeed, look really tasty. It was a lamb/pork/beef mixture with garlic and tandoori masala, topped with pickled cucumbers and capers, and dressed with a tomato jam made with tomato paste, cumin, mayonnaise and cream. To me, that definitely has winner written all over it. But her dessert is clumsy at best and bizarre at worst. Avocadoes whipped with butter, limes and a ton of powdered sugar? "Sweet guacamole" just about covers it. I did a little poking around to see if this dish might have had some Indian progenitor and couldn't find anything but, y'know, India's a big place, so I'd be curious to hear if I missed something. Setting aside the avocado, however, you have a chocolate wonton and chocolate milk with kahlua? I'm betting that immunity was the only thing keeping her out of the line of fire. The dog was a winner and I'll consider the possibility she consciously slacked on immunity, giving her a little bump, but I wonder if the lesson here is that no matter how much she wants to avoid being pigeon-holed as the "Indian contestant", it might be in her best interests to bleed that angle dry.

9 Carla Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 13 Eliminations 0 1 0 Some have said I'm being a little hard on Carla, and that may be true. I still haven't seen anything from her that I can get excited about, but she's starting to look a little stronger than the average caterer. One of last week's commenters pointed out that despite her bio, she does have some executive chef experience (his Google-Fu was stronger than mine, apparently). And she got a top mention in the elimination and some nice words from Donatella in the quickfire. And while I'm starting to think she might stick around for a little while, I'm not giving her any more of a bump than this. Her dog seemed like it was well-crafted, and the sausage worked in lamb and a couple of different chiles, but the toppings were basically sautéed onions and a quick sauerkraut. As for her dessert, I've no doubt that pastry was nice, but it was a textbook apple tart and it's hard to believe she couldn't come up with some way to work that cheese in. I don't see anything that leads me to believe she can go deep, but at the very least she's looking conventionally competent which goes a long way in the early stages, so I'm pulling her out of the basement.

10 Alex Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 7 Eliminations 0 0 0 Alex has been kind of a non-factor so far, and while I want to think he can bring more to the table than Carla and maybe even Radhika, he has yet to show it and his lackluster elimination dish didn't help. We didn't get to see Donatella's reaction to his dog, which was a basic pork and veal affair with poblanos and jalapenos. It's topped as well, but the recipe doesn't list them nor did we get to see them, so it's basically a mystery. He also chose to pair the dog with tortilla chips and a basic black bean dip, which strikes me as a poor choice. A completely separate chip and dip for a quickfire? If you want black beans in there, integrate them, man. Top the dog with them or stick them in the sausage itself! His elimination dish looks interesting, at least. He grills pork tenderloin and sauces it with a honey-sweetened roasted beet demi-glace. Too bad the judges seemed to think it sucked.

11 Richard Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 11 Eliminations 0 0 0 Richard continues to hold steady at 11 which, this far down the list, isn't exactly a ringing endorsement. For those who didn't catch it, if I recall the lingo from my days in SoCal, the "TJ" in his "TJ Dog" is referring to Tijuana, Mexico, a brisk walk from his home in San Diego. In that sense, his dog represents Mexico about as well as Tijuana does -- eschewing the depth of authentic Mexican cuisine and instead riffing on the booze tourist's Mexico through the judicious use of tequila and canned chipotles. I've no doubt it was munchable, but it strikes me as a missed opportunity. His dessert was similarly snacky, though I suspect less edible, growing more out of nostalgia than good sense. Chefs have successfully done creative things with PB&J (see: Grant Achatz' take), but when it comes to this version, I couldn't have put it better than "after school snack". His "grape gelato"? Store-bought vanilla blended with jars of concord grape jelly. No joke. Richard is rapidly emerging as the Top Chef Season Five Stoners' Choice. But the judges seemed to like the seasoning on his sliders last week, and satisfying the munchies can get you to the midpoint of the season, so I won't drop him just yet. One final note: while it was really an individual challenge despite the app/entree/dessert divisions, our cuddly West Coaster with dreamy blue eyes has already thrown his first teammate under the bus. Not that Ariane didn't deserve it.

12 Melissa Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 12 Eliminations 0 0 0 Melissa continues to play wallflower, getting almost no play of any kind, and traditionally speaking this can be read one of two ways. She's going to make a late move and the editors are waiting so she can suddenly make a big dramatic splash, or she just isn't doing anything particularly interesting. Looking at her recipes, I'm inclined to believe the latter. You'd think a Latin specialist would take a more sophisticated angle than a chicken "Tacodog". Powdered chiles in the sausage, candied red onions and basic tomato/avocado salsa look perfectly edible, but... yeah. And her grilled avocado and stone fruit salad just looks messy to me. She gets points for trying to do something interesting by grilling the avocado and caramelizing the fruit, but it's still avocado and fruit in a balsamic vinaigrette, and there's an awful lot of sugar going on, both granulated and brown. She's not screwing up, but she's not inspiring or working clean. I haven't seen anything to make me believe she's going to turn that trend around.

13 Danny Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 15 Eliminations 0 0 0 Yeah, he put together a good dessert, but I still haven't forgiven him for the Chinese chicken salad, so he stays in the basement for at least one more week. His pound cake actually looks kind of nice, done with ricotta, amaretto and pistachio dust. The strawberry "compote" is just simple syrup blended with strawberries and a little lemon juice, but it seemed to go over well, so it's difficult to criticize. I found his dog a little odd in that the sausage was primarily seasoned with his "sweet smoke" sauce, which is a nice way of saying he walked down the condiment table and mixed ketchup, mayo, mustard and sweet relish. The dog was topped with frizzled onions, and I'm trying to respect his claim that he wanted to stick with authentic NY dog flavors, but he's still in my doghouse. I'll get over it next week if he shows something.

14 Ariane Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 14 Eliminations 0 0 2 When somebody has a hard time getting her head in the right place and she narrowly avoids elimination, you wonder if it'll help her get her ass in gear, or if it'll further erode her confidence and destroy her. When it happens two weeks in a row, you wonder twice as much. But without a dramatic turnaround, she's gone gone gone, and probably should be already. If dessert isn't your thing, why did you choose it? If you're going to ask advice, why do you ignore it? And seriously, can we get over the self-pity? Last week, she at least was working creatively. But between a straightforward chicken and bacon sausage with spicy onion relish and a dessert that -- setting sweetness issues aside -- was plain cherries and plain lemon curd topped with plain meringue and plain Nilla Wafers, you have to think she's either scared to take any chances or just paralyzed. Either way, she's hanging on by a thread and I don't care what the universe says, Carla... she doesn't deserve to still be here.

15 Jill Quickfires 0 0 1 Last Week: 9 Eliminations 0 0 1 That said, Jill didn't exactly make a strong case for sticking around. Her hot dog was a non-denominational generic Asian summer roll that substituted a tube steak for a traditional filling which, frankly (sorry), sounds like a disservice to both summer rolls and hot dogs. And I say this as an enthusiastic devotee of dogs that have been dragged through the garden! The ostrich thing, however, is just irritating. Egg size aside, it's quiche. Rice and pecan crust, okay, but it's still mushrooms, asparagus, gruyere and fontina. At a New American lunch. But between the show and her exit interview, it's clear Jill felt she was making a bold, creative move by using an ostrich egg. But really, Jill, big F-ing deal. I'm all for bold and creative (and Blais appreciated what he considered to be her moxie), but there's nothing more frustrating -- especially in the MG era -- than chefs who go out on a limb without a purpose in mind. Don't just feed us something crazy for the sake of feeding us something crazy. Do that on your own time. Save the wild and crazy ideas that work -- the ones that contribute to the dish rather than confusing or distracting from it -- for when you're feeding the public. I'm not saying you don't audible and run with something on the spur of the moment, I'm just saying you should at least know what you hope to accomplish by doing so other than being able to say you did. Jill essentially admitted that she used an ostrich egg to be able to say she used an ostrich egg. But did it have any implications whatsoever for her dish? I've never had an ostrich egg, and I've heard from different sources both that they're exactly the same as chicken eggs only bigger, and that they have a slightly different but very similar flavor. Jill, we know, had never tasted one. So depending on which story she heard, she was either buying an unusual ingredient that was exactly the same as the ingredient it was filling in for in every way but size and calling it a bold and creative move, or she was attempting to do something genuinely creative by adapting a classic to suit a core ingredient with a slightly different flavor, but was doing so without any clue as to what that flavor might be. Do either of those sound particularly smart to you? I think the judges came to the same conclusion, and I think that's why she got the axe over Ariane. Fortunately for Jill, this early exit is unlikely to have a negative impact on her career. As she explains in her exit interview, she doesn't particularly want to be a chef. She'd rather be either a food writer or a food stylist, the latter of which would allow her to prepare food exclusively for its ooh and aah factor and with total disregard for its flavor. Though that last bit may have been my words and not hers.

MINOR EPISODE THREE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Speaking of chefs who do crazy things with a purpose in mind, ladies and gentlemen, Grant Achatz! It's truly a shame that he couldn't make it on the show last season where he really belonged, but the guy obviously had more important things to deal with and it's a gift that he's here, working, and we're able to see him on the show, period. For those who haven't seen the preview, the chefs draw quickfire knives with seemingly random numbers, from the low 40s to the mid 160s. My guess? That's the temperature at which their dish must be served. If so, I love this challenge already, less for its utility than for its philosophy. Ingredients taste different at different temperatures. Hot is not always best, and there are a whole range of temperatures between "hot" and "cold" at which food can be served. And even though this'll probably just devolve into a hot dish / cold dish challenge, it will be very telling to see which chefs get it. Also, they'd better be careful. If they think they're going to impress Grant Achatz with some funky technique, they'd better know what they're doing. I've eaten at Alinea, and Achatz isn't just doing crazy for crazy's sake. He's one of the wackiest guys out there, but his wild techniques and presentations have real thought and purpose behind them. He won't be buffaloed because something's "cool". There's also some total curveball that's thrown at the contestants about 15 minutes into their prep time, but I have absolutely no idea what it could be.

The elimination challenge has all of the earmarks of something that's going to irritate me. Thrown outside at the last minute, cooking in terrible conditions? I understand the whole "you have to roll with the punches" thing, but c'mon. Somebody's going home who probably doesn't deserve it. At least not for what they did that day. Interestingly, the teaser seemed to clearly show who the bottom three are. I won't name them, but it'll be interesting to see if that's how it actually shakes out, or if this is more misdirection.

As always, looking forward to Wednesday.

Top Chef - S5E2 Postmortem

"I'm not sure it explains why they'd be such difficult critics. Other chefs, I think, having been on the firing line themselves, tend to prefer to be supportive rather than critical."

Shows what I know.

Well, I had Ariane's banner halfway done when Jill got the dreaded PPYKAG (and then it took me 20 minutes to get a decent screenshot of Jill because she wouldn't keep her farking head still in the exit interview... but I digress). Going to be very curious to hear what the blogs have to say this week. My suspicion is this is one of those episodes where a lot of criticism was left on the editing room floor to maintain suspense. Somebody at the table -- don't remember who -- mentioned that the quiche tasted like glue, to general agreement.

Can't say I was terribly enthused about Jill, but I did think she'd hang on a little longer than this.

Thoughts?

Top Chef - S5E1 Power Rankings

Couldn't have been much happier with that start!

Strong field of competitors, great challenges, very little in the way of technical flubs (impressive for the first episode) and a cameo by my personal hero. Tom seems to feel we're in for a great season, and thus far I'm inclined to agree.

Speaking of Tom, it's widely believed that he is the one person the loss of whom the show couldn't survive. And while it's true that he'd probably be the most difficult to replace (unless Bourdain decided to clear his calendar), I'm increasingly of the opinion that the show's silent star is Lee Anne Wong, under whose direction the culinary challenges and setups -- the real substance of the show -- have become increasingly compelling, meaningful and less gimmicky with every passing season since she came on board. What we got this week were two perfect challenges. First, a elimination series following a natural progression from brute prep to refined prep to actual cooking, all centered on an ingredient that was a corny yet appropriate reference to the new setting. Eliminating somebody right off the bat was, indeed, a little harsh, but the structure of the quickfire made it less arbitrary, I thought. First, you could peel your way out of elimination. Failing that, you could chop your way out of elimination. Failing that, you could cook your way out of elimination. And if you couldn't do that, well, it's a little harder to write it off as a fluke, isn't it? Then the elimination challenge resurrects the great head-to-head format that kicked off last season, this time simultaneously introducing us to the city's ethnic neighborhoods. I'm sure this season will have its share of groaners, but you can't argue with this start.

It's looking like an interesting field this time around. As Lee Anne put it in her blog, there are no Marcels or Hungs or Blaises -- no wild, showy technicians who demand attention. It's almost a bit of a throwback to season one in that respect, where the cream of the crop were creative but restrained. It should make for a tight competition, and it also makes handicapping a little tougher than usual in the early going. For those who didn't read last season, the power rankings aren't strictly a prediction of who is most likely to win, or an assessment of last episode's dishes, or a reflection of the contestants' historical performance, but rather a nebulous amalgam of all three, combined to provide a relative measure of current awesomeness. And so, without further ado, let's get to the rankings.

Wins

Top

Bottom

1 Stefan Quickfires 1 1 0 Last Week: 7 Eliminations 1 1 0 Well, that didn't take long. One episode and my preseason dark horse is already sitting atop the rankings with a rare double win. He proved the quickest with a paring knife in the quickfire, and then put together a nice Middle Eastern inspired dish for the elimination. His lamb chops with tabbouleh and hummus and beef skewer with onion didn't reinvent the wheel, but they were his own take on the region's flavors and they were crisply executed, garnering him the unanimous win. Plus, he showed that killer instinct, going for the sweep rather than accepting immunity and slacking off in the elimination. He'll have to get a little more creative to succeed in the later stages, but we're only one dish into this thing and he's already proven that he knows what he's doing. It also seems clear that he's the early favorite for editors' whipping boy (deserved or not, TBD), and here's hoping he continues to back up the brashness.

2 Gene Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 15 Eliminations 0 1 0 Gene made it clear in his intro video that he doesn't care to be underestimated, and while we have yet to get a clear sense of just how strong he is, he's already assured that he's going to be taken seriously. Padma certainly fell all over herself praising his dish, and I liked how he brought himself to the challenge he was assigned, working in macadamia nuts (Hawaiian) and crispy fried lamb fat (awesome). There are those who think he might've just gotten lucky, and it's certainly possible, but I think he showed us otherwise. What I liked most about him is that he had the misfortune to draw a cuisine he'd never prepared, but instead of wandering around the market with a dazed look like some of the other competitors who were out of their element, what did he do? He went to the prepared foods table and immediately started tasting. His first instinct wasn't to shoehorn Indian ingredients into his style, looking for whatever was most familiar, but rather to open himself to the cuisine and allow himself to be truly inspired by it. His bio was paper thin, but what he showed this week was talent and great instincts. We'll see if he keeps it up.

3 Leah Quickfires 0 0 1 Last Week: 5 Eliminations 0 1 0 Leah got herself into trouble in the quickfire with a slow knife, but while those fundamentals are important, I'm reluctant to weigh them too heavily, especially when it afforded her the opportunity to present two excellent dishes. Her seared scallops with dried apples, vinegar and apple juice has no posted recipe, but it was well-received both by Tom and in the TC blogs. And the comments about her farro risotto with seared red snapper and piopini mushrooms -- which married fennel, guanciale, shrimp stock and mint in an earthy context(!) -- were so glowing that you're almost surprised she didn't get the win. Italian is definitely her thing, but her quickfire dish wasn't particularly so, and her elimination dish was Italian in a very modern, creative fashion (as you'd expect from somebody who's been working under Anne Burrell), so I'm not concerned about versatility at this point. She looks strong.

4 Hosea Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 4 Eliminations 0 0 0 Hosea was another of this week's fish out of water, but he knows fish, and he was fortunate to get a cuisine that hits the smoked and cured varieties pretty heavily. He was another chef who took inspiration from his neighborhood and made its flavors his own, turning out a creative trio that carried thematic ingredients across three different smoked fishes, but tailored them to each. The salmon got a potato latke, crème fraîche, caviar and dill oil, the turbot's latke worked in yellow beets, yellow beet syrup and pickled cabbage, and the trout received a red beet latke, red beet syrup and fresh apple preserves. His plate looked a little busy, and I keep waiting for the judges to sour on trios, but by all accounts he nailed it and just missed the top three.

5 Jamie Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 1 Eliminations 0 0 0 Jamie, like Stefan, took a very restrained approach with her ingredients, but put her mark on the dish nonetheless. "Deconstructed" is another word that's starting to get dangerous, but even if that's the word she used, I think "reconstructed" would have been more appropriate. She didn't take the elements of a Greek salad and scatter them all over the plate. Rather, she took those flavors, jumbled them up a bit and put them back together in her own way, resulting in a dish that was perfectly concise, just... different. She sliced cucumbers the long way on a mandoline and used quartered cherry tomatoes for textural interest, broke out the olives both into the dressing and into a puree that accented the fish, seared and butter-basted a bass fillet to take it beyond the "just a salad" phase, and worked in a smoky eggplant puree to ground it. Lee Anne called it "sophisticated and simple", and the flavor profile may have come across as simple, but some real thought and technique went into this dish. Another strong start.

6 Jeff Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 2 Eliminations 0 0 0 Give it three more weeks before I throw something at his winking mug while watching the intro, but setting aside the whole pretty boy annoyance for the moment, Jeff was one of the more interesting ones this week. He really struggled with time, which will absolutely destroy him if this is anything more than a fluke... but let me remind you that Stephanie was really rattled by the pressure in the first episode last season, and she did okay. Yes, she ended up nailing her first dish and Jeff didn't, but the point is that nerves can strike even the best contestants at the beginning. As long as he can quickly pull it together, he'll be fine. He also might want to try to do a little less. As mentioned in the preview, he's the only one who really seems to be coming from a fine dining background, and the recipe for his Cuban coffee tenderloin with plantains, black beans and rice may be the single longest, both in terms of individual ingredients and prepared components, of any I've ever seen on the Top Chef website. The dude -- and I use that term pointedly -- bit off a mighty big chunk. In any case, more ingredients doesn't equal better, but as much as there is going on, it looks awesome. What's more, Lee Anne, who apparently has some previous experience with him, seemed surprised that he struggled and feels that he's one of the stronger competitors, and I'm inclined to believe her. And let's not forget that he won his head-to-head despite these issues. Time will tell whether this was just a case of opening day nerves or a serious problem with pressure, but I'm inclined to think it's probably the former.

7 Alex Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 8 Eliminations 0 0 0 Alex fell into the category of "strong losers". He put together a very solid dish, he just had the misfortune of being paired up with the Hawaiian wonder. His lamb chops with curry ragout and basmati rice looks like a soulful little dish, and he did a really nice job of working the Indian flavors into his style. He's right that Indian and Latin have a natural affinity for one another, but he still handled that crossover in a rather elegant manner, merging the Indian and Latin spices into his curry, and choosing a crossover ingredient like mango for an accent that works naturally with both cuisines. He didn't get the win, but I like what I see.

8 Fabio Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 6 Eliminations 0 0 0 Fabio burned through the apples, finishing right behind Stefan, but his elimination dish looked a little lackluster. I'm giving him a little love here because he's the only loser to muster a split decision (even if Tom's vote was a bit of a reluctant one) and still got a few compliments from the panel. Coming into the competition, I was concerned his focus might be a little too narrow, and he's certainly shown that he can get outside of traditional Italian. I'm not convinced yet that he can do it well, given that I have a hard time reconciling the two halves of his plate, but the judges (and others) seem to feel there's promise here. My gut feeling is that we didn't get his best here.

9 Jill Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 9 Eliminations 0 0 0 Even though Jill pulled out a unanimous win in her pairing, and got some praise from Gail, I'm not getting a good vibe from her first dish. Perhaps because it seems to come from the Bobby Flay school of big, brash, fried and crispy with Sauces!Sauces!Sauces! I'm not too concerned about slightly overcooking scallops. They're delicate, and it's her first time in a weird environment with strange timing issues. What does concern me is that her dish seemed more loud than anything, and I got the feeling that her win was more by default than merit. Gail may have had some nice things to say, but some of the comments in the blogs were... less than enthusiastic. Jury's out on Jill.

10 Radhika Quickfires 0 0 1 Last Week: 10 Eliminations 0 0 0 Jill did, however, beat Radhika, who I'm also having trouble getting excited about, despite the fact that she's my hometown girl this season. As Blais points out in his blog (a very entertaining read, BTW), her apple chutney in the quickfire was a good call, giving her easy explosive flavor, even if she had to blow the skills challenges to get there. Her elimination dish is troubling to me, however. Tasty mush, no matter how tasty, generally isn't pleasant to eat, and Lee Anne says her dish was crying out for salt and acid. It looks and sounds to me like it was simply a weak submission, and while Jamaican may have been a bit of a curveball for her, it should have dovetailed nicely with Indian (a strength, even if she doesn't want it to define her), and there's really no excuse for basic conceptual problems like that when you have a big budget and all of the time in the world to make two plates (one for the judges, one for the camera). We'll see what she comes back with next week.

11 Richard Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 11 Eliminations 0 0 0 A common question throughout the Top Chef run, and certainly in this episode, is whether technical errors or conceptual errors are the greater sin. Depends on the situation to be sure, and especially in the early going I'm disinclined to read too much into a technical goof. So I would have gone easy on Richard for the overcooked lamb and put him a little higher were it not for the fact that I just don't find his recipe all that compelling. Sliders are getting tired (I know I just swooned over one last week, but you can be as trite as you like when you're that good), and I feel like it doesn't take much to give ground lamb some Greek seasoning and slap it on the grill. Plus, pasta salad... woo </sarcasm>. I do think we'll see better from Richard, but I'm not ready to put him any higher just yet.

12 Melissa Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 13 Eliminations 0 0 0 Melissa, in all of her self-proclaimed country mouseness, didn't give us much to go on this week. In her defense, she did draw Italian against one of New York's up and coming stars of modern Italian cuisine, which hardly seems fair. Them's the breaks, I suppose. She didn't totally embarrass herself, but her ribeye steak with tomato sauce and rolled zucchini seems a little clumsy and amateurish, and if you can't season steak and tomato sauce, there's no help for you. But we'll see what she brings in the coming weeks.

13 Carla Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 16 Eliminations 0 0 0 Carla seemed to fare marginally better than Melissa, so it might be a little unfair of me to put her a notch below, but they're pretty close and I suppose maybe I'm still suffering from a bit of caterer prejudice. Most people aren't sure what to make of the fact that she's apparently consulting her spirit guide when conceiving her menu. Personally, I'd just like to know what form her spirit guide takes so I can root for that animal as a theme ingredient. But setting aside the source of her inspiration, her trout and salmon cakes with beet slaw and dill sour cream seem a reasonable if unexciting submission, but the panel sends a lot of constructive criticism in her direction. Sounds like it didn't quite come together. More data needed to get a solid grasp on her.

14 Ariane Quickfires 0 1 0 Last Week: 3 Eliminations 0 0 1 She totally blew the farro, and she earned her trip to the chopping block, but here's my take on it. Anybody can make a mistake like that, everybody will at some point in the show, and when they do, they just have to hope that somebody screws up worse. Ariane dodged a bullet, and though I wasn't sold on her going into the competition, I'm disinclined to read too much into this screw up, considering that as far as I can tell, her rack of lamb with farro risotto, dates, chickpeas, lamb jus and mango was otherwise very well received. It sure looks nice, with a yogurt, lemon, garlic and cardamom crust that used ground cous cous (a new one to me!) for crunch. I don't know how good she is, but she's better than this, and Tom seemed to know it. As long as she doesn't freak out and blow it, she'll move up before moving down. As a side note, the popular interpretation of her "Yeah, but I got books to look at" line is that she was saying she didn't need to visit New York's ethnic neighborhoods because she could just look up the recipes. It was certainly Tom's understanding. But while that's a ridiculous assertion if that is, indeed, what she meant, it strikes me that that exchange was heavily edited, and my initial impression was that she meant, as the owner of a small restaurant, that she's too busy going over the business' books to go gallivanting around Manhattan. If so, you'd think she would have corrected Tom's impression, but maybe she just let it go. If she was claiming that tasting time's tough to come by when you have a business to run, it's a little more understandable and a lot less ridiculous than the popular interpretation.

15 Danny Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: 12 Eliminations 0 0 0 First impression, I like this guy. He seems like a softer, more jovial version of our previous beefy New Yorkers. But a Chinese chicken salad? Seriously? This is a guy who claims Asian as one of his specialties, yet when set loose in Chinatown the best he can do is a mediocre retread of a twenty year old faux Asian dish? The Chinese chicken salad was trite 15 years ago, Danny, and it needs at least another 15 before it's retro. To defend Danny a little bit, this wasn't precisely Puck's famous Chinois chicken salad. But the dish is so ubiquitous that I've no doubt at least 30 restaurants share this exact recipe simply by chance. There are only so many combinations and permutations of poached chicken, scallions, cilantro, carrots, fried wontons and ginger vinaigrette out there, and I'm pretty sure they've all been done. This performance does not bode well for Danny.

16 Patrick Quickfires 0 0 1 Last Week: 17 Eliminations 0 0 1 Only slightly more insulting was Patrick's lame mirin basted salmon with sesame black noodles and steamed bok choy. If you don't know Asian (and clearly he doesn't), don't cite your Asian Cuisines class at the CIA as evidence of your comfort with the continent. Though I suppose that may explain why Patrick thought mirin and lemongrass were Chinese. When you cram so many wildly different cuisines (Asia's a big place!) into a crash course, I imagine things start to blur together. Also, Patrick chose the irritating strategy of acting as though he was struggling under some terrible constraints. They don't get any easier than this, Patrick. You had plenty of time and money to produce two plates, and the only requirement was that you be inspired by Chinatown. And please don't choose black rice noodles off a wall with hundreds of other noodle options, only to turn around and complain to the judges that you were hamstrung because you'd never worked with them before. Plus, Lee Anne informs us that he precooked and reheated his salmon. I'm being a little harsh. The guy was just trying to survive and he seems like a nice enough fellow, but sanitized faux Asian lite + poor execution + lack of accountability = episode one exit, and deservedly so.

17 Lauren Quickfires 0 0 1 Last Week: 14 Eliminations 0 0 0 Yes, being sent home without even getting to see the Top Chef kitchen is a little harsh, but when you see fit to serve a spinach salad with apples, bacon, bleu cheese and balsamic vinaigrette, a hasty exit is probably only saving you from further embarrassment. I don't care how carefully it was prepared. You might as well serve the judges a ham and swiss on rye, which might actually be a better choice since it wouldn't be a salad, and we all know (all of us except for the contestants, apparently) what salads earn you on Top Chef, even when they aren't mind-numbingly boring: Scorn.

Two down, fourteen to go! We've already eliminated some chaff, and I'd say we have another 3-4 weeks to go before the eliminations start to get interesting, and another 4-6 weeks before we start to care about them. That time should give us the opportunity to get to know who the real contenders are, and a little more about them.

MINOR EPISODE 2 SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Looking at the previews for next week, we already have a pretty good idea of what the challenges will be. The quickfire has been laid bare, and I'm kind of digging the hot dog challenge. It's not a bad blank slate for a downscale challenge, and being a Chicagoan, I consider the hot dog to be a perfectly noble foodstuff, high falutin' elevation notwithstanding. This is a challenge that will show us which contestants are the open-minded food lovers, and which are the snobby elitists.

As for the elimination, the details are sketchy. We know it's high volume, so the caterers might have a leg up (I guess Carla probably lives to see episode three), but it's the mystery over the crowd that has me curious. We're told they'll be serving 50, that they'll be really, really tough critics, and Carla describes them as "jealous". I don't think it'll be a panel of previously eliminated contestants, first because they'd have to wrangle up nearly all of them, and second because it would be prohibitively expensive to fly them all in. I think it's possible that it'll be rejected New York area applicants, which would explain the jealousy line, but I'm not sure it explains why they'd be such difficult critics. Other chefs, I think, having been on the firing line themselves, tend to prefer to be supportive rather than critical. More likely, I'm thinking they've assembled a crowd of food bloggers/posters, and Carla's trotting out the tired, ignorant trope that we all just like to sit at home tearing chefs apart because we're malicious souls who are jealous that they can cook and we can't. But that can't be it. Surely, they would have invited me, right?

Right?

:-)

Discuss!

Top Chef - S5E1 Postmortem

Well, given the dearth of good information available, I fully expected the preview rankings to be a season-long embarrassment, but I'm actually feeling pretty good about them! A couple of surprises, but two of my bottom four are already gone, and my dark horse scores a double win. Looks like another strong field. I'm jazzed. Anyway, I'll save most of my thoughts for the rankings on Monday, but I'll put up a postmortem thread like this after each show so we have a place to banter through the weekend. And we're off... rock on!

Top Chef - S5E0 Power Rankings

Well, you knew I had to come out of hiding for this, right?

We are but hours away from the premiere of Top Chef season five, and I'm totally ready. We have New York as the setting, the producers have assembled what looks like the usual band of chefs, caterers, wannabes and miscreants, and returning to praise or smack them around as appropriate are... well... most of our judges.

Sad I am to report that Ted Allen has left Top Chef (no, not just because he said such kind things about me!). As he mentions in his blog, his dance card was getting a little crowded, and the choice between guest judging somebody else's show and getting picked up for the second season of your own show isn't really a choice at all. So congrats, Ted, on the success of Food Detectives (not to mention another mystery show yet to be revealed). I can't speak for everybody, but I'll certainly miss your take on the TC contestants.

Ted's replacement is Toby Young, about whom I can't say I know much, at least foodwise. Sure, he wrote a couple of books and was a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and has made appearances on some British food shows... but all that matters to the Power Rankings is what kind of palate and food knowledge he brings to the table. For that, we'll just have to wait and see.

Since you can see from the date of my last post how much blogging time I've had as of late, let's get right to the contestants! This season, we're going to start off with a little preview of sorts. I've tried to do a little preliminary research into the crowd, checking out pedigrees and menus where I can, in the hopes of getting a sense of who we should be watching out for. I doubt I've learned anything that won't make itself fairly obvious by the midpoint of the first episode, but all the same it's nice to have some sense of where these folks are coming from, other than the microscopic bios posted on the Bravo website. Since this is a preview, to maintain a little bit of suspense, I'm going to go reverse order until we've actually seen what these people can do. Also, no elimination predictions for now -- just a little early handicapping. The folks near the top are the ones who look like they have a chance to go deep, and the folks near the bottom seem, on the surface at least, like they're probably ticketed for an early exit. Given that the producers have selected some fairly low-profile individuals, there's even more speculation than usual. But then, that's the whole point of the Power Rankings, isn't it? And so, without further ado, your season five lineup:

Wins

Top

Bottom

17 Patrick Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 The fact that he's pursuing a culinary education is more than we can say for some of this season's contestants (not that you need a degree to go places in food), but Patrick is young, he doesn't appear to have much, if any, real-world experience, and history has not been kind to the culinary students. It looks like he favors simple, satisfying vegetable dishes, which might buy him some time, but without any other information to go on, it's hard to predict that he'll be around for long. But, as one of the low-information contestants, he could turn out to be a complete surprise. I imagine we'll discover quite quickly where, precisely, he belongs in the rankings.

16 Carla Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 The Top Chef pecking order goes something like this: Executive chefs, other chefs, caterers, personal chefs, culinary students. Top Chef's caterers have been known to survive for a while on guile, but they've never gone deep, and on first glance, I don't see anything from Carla that leads me to believe she'll be any different. She runs Alchemy Caterers in DC, and the website is currently under construction (surprise!), but a little Google searching turned up an older site from about five years ago with a little information and some sample menus. When the dinner menu lists only "Chopped Hearts of Romaine With Blue Cheese, Pears, & Balsamic Vinaigrette" and "Grilled Filet Mignon With Mushrooms & Baked Potatoes" as entrees, that doesn't inspire confidence. The hors d'oeuvres are a little more hopeful, but still look like standard catering fare. Carla may very well have grown quite a bit in the years since this old site was posted, but what little I've found doesn't look promising.

15 Gene Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Gene's bio is more than a little cryptic. It lists him as an executive chef and chef consultant, says he's about to be the executive chef of a "new concept for a major hotel and casino in Las Vegas", but it doesn't actually mention anybody or anyplace he's worked for, specifically. I ranked him above a couple others for two reasons. First, because he's apparently worked his way from dishwasher up to executive chef (purportedly), and that definitely says something about his effort and dedication. Second, he's from Hawaii, which means he's probably well-versed in a lot of flavors and is coming from a place with a naturally creative culinary tradition. But all of this is really a shot in the dark. In the first episode, it could come out that he's a short order cook who tanks the inaugural challenge by boiling beef and I wouldn't be that surprised.

14 Lauren Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Lauren is the chef tournant at Jag's Steak & Seafood in Cincinnati, and though I'm mostly unimpressed by what I see, there's room for optimism. The biggest thing working for her is her position as chef tournant, which basically means she's the jill-of-all-trades who can step in and cover any station in the kitchen. Versatility goes a long, long way in Top Chef, and that could be a big asset. Plus, she's a CIA grad, which definitely accounts for something. On the other hand, the menu at Jag's, while not hers, looks terrible, and the restaurant mysteriously disappeared from Cincinnati Magazine's annual top 25 list back in 2006, not to be seen since. Also, her home is listed as "Stationed at Fort Stewart, in Georgia" and her clothing for the publicity photos is camo print. If that doesn't scream "I'm here to make good television", I don't know what does.

13 Melissa Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Melissa's one of the contestants who's difficult to get a handle on. She lists her specialty as Latin, and she works as sous chef at Centro Latin Kitchen and Refreshment Palace in Boulder, a place that, despite its name, seems to be very well-regarded locally. The problem is that it isn't her menu, so I have no idea what she's like creatively. She's one of two contenstants from the Big Red F Restaurant Group in Colorado, which I'm tempted to call a positive, but I'm not sure. Based on the bios and what little I can find, she's a tough one to peg.

12 Danny Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 This season's entry in the Beefy New Yorker division is Danny Gagnon (hey, not an Italian this time!), who's a CIA grad and chef de cuisine at Babylon Carriage House in New York. The guy has a great education and is working a successful NY restaurant, so you may wonder why I have him in the bottom half. First, again, the menu at Babylon Carriage House isn't his -- at least not officially -- so it's hard to know what he does. But more importantly, his specialty is listed as "Italian/Asian Fusion", which just gives me the jibblies.

11 Richard Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 The West Coast bear is Richard, who is the executive sous chef at Confidential Restaurant & Loft in San Diego's gaslamp district. While the gaslamp district is quite charming (great place to catch a baseball game, incidentally) those I know who have spent time there haven't been terribly complimentary about the restaurant scene. And Richard professes a love of simple food, which is good to a point, but when your favorite simple recipe is lightly grilled chicken breast with crumbled gorgonzola, dried cranberries, baby spinach salad and a light balsamic vinaigrette, the word that comes to mind is boring. Perfectly tasty, I'm sure, but not the kind of food that will take you deep in Top Chef. But on the other hand, Confidential is a trendy tapas lounge. Even if it isn't his menu, at least he's been preparing more than grilled chicken breast. I'm not sure what to expect from him.

10 Radhika Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Radhika is the executive chef at Between Boutique Café & Lounge (another unfortunately named establishment), which has the distinction of being located about three blocks away from my old place in Chicago. Too bad I left before they opened, or I might have something to report other than gross speculation. She runs a trendy, loungey world tapas kind of place, and while I can't say I'm overly excited by the menu, she's working in a lot of flavors -- including her native Indian -- which means she should, at least, be interesting. What little word I've heard around Chicago is generally positive, but Between isn't exactly flying high on the radar. It sounds like she'll hang around, but unlike Stephanie from last season, I haven't heard anything that leads me to believe she'll be going deep, other than the fact that she's a bona fide executive chef, which usually indicates good things.

9 Jill Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Jill, executive chef at Baltimore's Red Maple, rounds out the "Trendy, Loungey, Global Tapas" category that seems to be rather expansive in season five. I suppose the worst thing I can say about Jill is that, despite living in Baltimore for a year and a half now, I'd never heard of Red Maple until reading her bio. I'm not sure if this says more about her food or more about how little we've been able to get out since moving here (probably the latter), but nonetheless, subsequent resarch and consultation with local food nerds hasn't turned up a lot of love for Red Maple. The menu is ultrastylish food that hits all of the trendy ingredients, and folks who know their stuff (read: Tom and Gail) will see right through it if it isn't also well-grounded. I've no doubt she's capable, but I'm not feeling a winner with Jill.

8 Alex Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Alex is interesting enough that I wonder if I shouldn't have him higher, but something I can't quite put my finger on holds me back. He's a Spaniard by birth who worked at Calle Ocho in New York and Cuba Cuba in Colorado before landing in LA, where he's now executive chef at Restaurant 15 -- an interesting little concept place. Dinner at Restaurant 15 is a prix fixe affair, where you choose an appetizer and entree and get the chef's dessert of the day for $15. Simple elegance on a budget is something that always appeals to the TC judges, and working on the cheap is a skill that will most definitely come in handy. The biggest mark against him is some mixed reviews of Restaurant 15 in the blogosphere, but I've heard enough good stuff that it looks like there's potential there. Plus, even though he's well-versed in Latin flavors, you wouldn't know it from his current menu, so it doesn't look like he'll be a one trick pony.

7 Stefan Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Okay, remember what I said about the Top Chef pecking order above? Forget it. Yes, I know, I know, he's a caterer. But I have a good feeling about this guy that maybe I can't quite justify, but I have it anyway. For starters, his catering business is based in Yountville, CA -- as in Napa Valley, home of the French Laundry Yountville, CA. You don't succeed in food there unless you know what you're doing. And while his menu is obviously catering food (protein, vegetable, starch, doable in volume), it looks unusually good. Also, catering is a relatively recent gig for him. He comes from an executive chef background, working quite a bit through Europe. So let's just call this guy the dark horse. I have a hunch he's going to show us something.

6 Fabio Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 I suppose there's no mystery about who's taking on heartthrob duties this season. When you're named Fabio, you hail from Florence and you look like that, it's a pretty good bet that you could crack a can of Spaghetti-Os and still have a good chunk of the TC audience in your pocket. Thankfully, by all indications, this executive chef of Cafe Firenze in California knows what he's doing. My only concern is that while his menu looks fantastic, it's straight-up traditional Italian. He has one trick pony written all over him. I'm betting he executes well and chugs along great until one of the judges finally says, "pasta again?" We'll see. Of course, he's Shatner's personal chef, so -- well -- I'm just going to leave it at that.

5 Leah Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 I feel kinda dirty putting the modern, creative Italian chef ahead of the straight-up traditional Italian chef, but I'm just trying to be honest with myself here. Leah's a CIA grad who's been working with the right people. Though her bio lists her as Centro Vinoteca's sous chef, with Anne Burrell's departure (Food Network, and all) I believe she's now acting executive chef, and it sounds as though she's been largely running the show for some time, anyway. The restaurant has been very well-received, and buzz is that she hasn't missed a beat stepping in for Anne. I'd be concerned that even creative Italian might be a little narrow, but she comes from a "Filipino, Russian-Romanian, Jewish" family and professes an affinity for Thai, so she might be showing more than pasta -- at which she apparently excels, having worked at Michelin starred La Mandia in Italy. She's a little fresh on the executive chef scene, and I think it's going to be tough for an Italian specialist to go all the way, but she definitely looks strong.

4 Hosea Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Hosea is the other half of the Big Red F Restaurant Group duo, but unlike Melissa, he's built up a public reputation. He's currently the executive chef of Jax Fish House in Boulder, where he's gotten a great deal of local acclaim. He's also pulled down some awards, and he's the seven time undefeated Flatiron Chef Competition champion. Flatiron Chef is a local Iron Chef style event, which says to me that the guy performs under pressure in goofy competitive scenarios and, by all accounts, loves it. His menu is creative seafood with influences from all over the place, in terms of both technique and flavor. The only thing that gives me pause is that his dishes look a little busy and heavy-handed. But he certainly seems to have both the skill and competitive spirit to go deep.

3 Ariane Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Jersey girl Ariane is another CIA grad who's executive chef of CulinAriane (what's with the awful restaurant names this season?... says, uh, the guy whose blog is named Skillet Doux), a little neighborhood joint in Montclair, NJ. Her menu's kind of scattershot, with European and Asian both well-represented, and to be honest, it doesn't excite me. And yet, it sounds like the restaurant is quite beloved locally, and a NY Times review, while somewhat mixed, was generally quite positive. Most importantly, she seems to be executing cleanly, she's doing her food, and she's been doing it successfully for quite some time, and that says something. I'm going to let my misgivings over her menu take a backseat to the restaurant's reviews, and presume she's earned them.

2 Jeff Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 And now we get to the two who really excite me. I actually flipped the top two about four or five times before finally posting, so it's more like 1 and 1a, but I'm giving the edge to Jamie for reasons I'll explain shortly. Jeff came up gutting fish, but worked his way through Florida, then California, then back to Florida to work under Norman Van Aken, before landing as chef de cuisine at The DiLilo Beach Club and earning a 2008 Florida Rising Star Chef Award. His restaurant is, from what I can tell, the only one that's bordering on fine dining, and I think that's going to help him to stand out. His menu looks really, really crisp and extremely creative, integrating exotic ingredients in very matter-of-fact ways. And it appears that he'll only be broadening his palate, since he's just returned from a sabbatical that took him around the Mediterranean. The fact that it's hard to find any reviews of his restaurant gives me a little pause, but combined with the award, I'm going to presume it means he's just about to break. Obviously, I can't taste the man's food, but if his flavors match his creativity and what appears to be some very crisp execution, he's going to be there at the end.

1 Jamie Quickfires 0 0 0 Last Week: n/a Eliminations 0 0 0 Jamie is the executive chef of Absinthe Brasserie & Bar in San Francisco, and it looks like this woman knows what she's doing. Even setting aside the fact that she's getting great reviews in a food town as discerning as San Francisco, I'm totally in love with her menu. She's a CIA grad who worked in France for a number of years, and her menu is bistro French and Northern Italian with some creative modern American touches. She looks to me to be in the mold of Harold -- well grounded in classical technique with a great respect for ingredients, but with just enough of a creative flair to keep people guessing. Not to mention which, Absinthe made Food & Wine's 2008 Go List, so Gail's already in her pocket. If anybody could be classified as a ringer, it's probably Jamie. It's still early speculation time, but I'm picking her for the finals.

So there they are. Try not to judge me too harshly when tonight's episode airs and we discover that Patrick has some serious chops, Jamie can't boil water and Italian/Asian Fusion is going to be the next big thing. We'll be back with the usual postmortem immediately after the show, followed by the first official Power Rankings on Monday.

Discuss!