TV cooking contest shows

[Blarg]

Yep it is.

CJ's burger looked awesome. I am horny to eat one.

[katyseagull]

Top Chef

Ok I watched it and I liked it [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

I just wish they would spend a little more time showing the chefs putting together their dishes.


Couple quick thoughts on tonights show --

- I wish I could chop onions as fast as Sara. Holy crap she is fast. (lol at Casey getting all fancy and neat)

- what on earth was Dale thinking when he chose jeans and a polo shirt for the dining room? That guy just strikes me as not too swift. He is pretty good at describing dishes however.

- Howie's lamb looked really undercooked to me. Is that the way lamb tastes best?


I will comment more tomorrow after you Pacific Coasters get a chance to see it. (oh, and holy moly that Padma has one hell of a good figure, yeah? She looked great in the dress she was wearing tonight.)

[Blarg]

Well, I was disappointed at the results of this show but at the same time think it was fair.

Tre got booted, and I had thought all along that he would be the winner. But as executive chef he screwed up in notable ways two episodes in a row, and made a dish one judge said was the worst he had eaten in a long time, and another person said was disgusting. People were actually wincing while they were eating it. It was the salmon with a thick pesto and nuts. As executive chef, he should have not only caught his mistakes, but everyone else's. He did none of that.

I think the other calls, about the passivity of Brian and CJ and Casey, were decent. Casey really crashed hard this show, being just flat out ridiculous when it came to the onion chopping quick challenge. This was to be done for speed, and she just appeared to give up the fight. I'm no pro and have zero knife skills and she wasn't even any faster than me. That was more than just sad, it was asinine. And she completely botched her monkfish. She looked like she was going to cry when the guest judge told her that once the fish is already dead, it's not like you have to kill it! She also was one of the team who let lots of stuff go out that night that was subpar.

CJ, for his part, did seem to stop taking responsibility for the team once he chose it. He made a dish nobody liked and then didn't check anybody else's.

Brian was better up front this time, but didn't contribute a dish. Dale, who was very good up front as usual, also contributed a dish that was well liked by the judges.

This all goes to point out the lack of passion and critical oversight in what looked like it would be easily the winning team. The judges were dead on in their comments on it.

What I have to think of as "the Howie team" -- that is, any team that has Howie in it automatically centers around him and takes his name -- stepped up their game dramatically. Sara, so chastized last time, told both Hung and Howie to do some of their cooking over again, and by god, they did it! Good move, lady. Didn't know you had it in you, or that those two bull-headed guys would take it like a man and do the job right without further complaint. Excellent all around!

Notably, Joey, the guest in the Howie restaurant(Quatre), said he knew immediately that the lamb chop was a Howie dish, and said it was undercooked. Undercooking it was the problem Sara noted too. Maybe this one went out before Sara had her eye on it. Katy, as you noted, a picture of the finished lamb plate made it look very undercooked -- it was purple raw in the middle. I can't eat anything like that but tuna, myself, and it didn't look appealing. I'm kind of surprised Howie would mess up a red meat like that, but Joey identified by the meat alone who cooked it, so I guess there is a pretty big and consistent flaw in Howie's cooking that didn't come through in earlier shows.

I guess the Howie team showed how beneficial pressure can sometimes be. The underdogs fought hard to up their game, and they did. The favorites phoned it in and forgot you were supposed to win, not just finish.

This show had some fun to it too, unlike the somewhat dull previous one. It was pretty funny watching Hung debone the chicken and seeing his team and even judge Tom Coliccio's WTF?? face, shaking his head in disbelief at how fast Hung was.

[katyseagull]

[ QUOTE ]

Brian was better up front this time, but didn't contribute a dish. Dale, who was very good up front as usual, also contributed a dish that was well liked by the judges.



[/ QUOTE ]

There is no way either of these guys is going to win.


[ QUOTE ]
It was pretty funny watching Hung debone the chicken and seeing his team and even judge Tom Coliccio's WTF?? face, shaking his head in disbelief at how fast Hung was.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hell yeah it was cool. I've deboned quite a few chickens and I absolutely hate it. Watching Hung was very entertaining. The oyster thing looked like a pain in the ass.

I don't like the name monkfish. It needs a new name. I would never order that at a restaurant.

[Blarg]

I actually kind of like deboning chicken, Katy. It's because of a Chinese story I read that probably has equivalents in other cultures. It was to the effect of a good butcher never needing to sharpen his knife because he always cuts between the bones, not through them. The story isn't told strictly about utility, because someone who chops and smashes through carcasses with his knife might be just as fast; it was just about the efficiency and level of skill, which I liked. Since then, I've tried to concentrate on not just cutting, but doing it right. It's makes cutting up a chicken a bit more fun.

[katyseagull]

Top Chef is back on tonight, Blarg! [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] Hope everyone is planning to watch it with me. I really missed it last week.

[katyseagull]

Did anyone watch Top Chef last night? I did. I thought it was pretty weird how some of the chefs played it safe and went with those boring appetizers. Granted they didn't have much of a budget but still it seemed like they failed to understand the challenge. I wish the producers and judges would come up with some better challenges. This one just seemed uninspired to me. $350 to feed 60 people? That's not really fun for us to watch. I would rather they allowed them to spend more money so I could watch them make something spectacular. (p.s. Howie is a trip.)

[Thanir]

I thought it was interesting how Howie's attitude all of a sudden changed from being an arrogant ass, to someone who wanted to be a team player. I liked the fact he didn't present anything at the quickfire because his product wasn't good enough to serve; he did however act like an ass throughout that who quickfire though.

Lastly I thought it was funny when the judges turned down Howie trying to step down from the comp. "You don't decide who leaves, we do" lol great line, and I agree with it. In other shows I've seen people take themselves out to 'save' another person, but thats not what these shows are about. They signed up for a competition, and the judges should make the decisions, not the contestants.

[Blarg]

This was the first one I watched out of the corner of my eye, because I was busy doing other stuff, but I grooved on Howie being pigheaded for righteous carebear reasons instead of being pigheaded just because it seemed like his natural response to every situation. I thought it was kind of funny, in that it seems like his own hard-assedness came back to guilt him up into, as he was saying, being even more of a team player now to make up for it, and therefore almost cancelling himself out of the competition. He needs to find a happy medium between the two crazinesses. It spoke well of him that he cared enough to try, especially after he kind of painted himself emotionally into a corner in all those other shows that made it embarassing to try to tiptoe your way out of.

I loved it when he said, "Do I LOOK like I give a f*ck about fashion? This is retarded." No, Howie. No, you don't look like that at all. And I have to admit, I like you better for it. It was especially funny coming after Hung's endorsement of looking sharp.

The fish sausage sitting on a cucumber looked interesting to me. And I liked that the chefs had the integrity to not serve some stuff they thought was not up to their standards.

Also, I liked that one of the waitresses looked and dressed like a high-end stripper.

[katyseagull]

[ QUOTE ]
In other shows I've seen people take themselves out to 'save' another person, but thats not what these shows are about. They signed up for a competition, and the judges should make the decisions, not the contestants.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, I agree. I've seen people try to do this on other shows and it looks dumb. It's a pride thing. It's like "I'm gonna quit so you can't fire my ass. What do ya think about that?"