Staff Blog
Top Chef Las Vegas Episode 11: Under my Nigella, ella, ella, ey, ey, ey
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| bravotv.com | |
Welcome back, Top Chef! I was getting tired of watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta reunion show (parts one and two) On Demand over and over while I waited out your return.
Quickfire: There are more than 67,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas, but there’s only one that features the transcendently beautiful Padma and her wingwoman Nigella Lawson wearing bathrobes and lounging in bed like two oversexed debutantes just back from an Upper East Side sex toy party. They direct the remaining six — Kevin, Mike, Bryan, Eli, Jen C and Robin — to a kitchen “deep in the catacombs” of the Venetian and tell them they need to whip up and then deliver a breakfast-in-bed dish in 30 minutes.
Jen, whose 10 Arts is in the Ritz-Carlton here in PHL, is wholly comfortable with room service, so she rocks out shit on a shingle. Nigella makes a face. Eli does a reuben-inspired eggs benedict with 1000 Island hollandaise, which sounds like it would kill you in the tastiest way possible. Mike does some Cuban shit and acts real serious about it. Robin does wack blintzes, Kev puts together a delicious-sounding coffee-dusted steak and eggs plate and Bryan does something with egg and crab that also elicits Nigellaface. Eli takes it home, earning a page in the Top Chef Quickfire cookbook. Nigella says the tang of his sauerkraut “slapped the jet lag out of me,” which, disappointingly enough, was probably the most sexual comment the notoriously randy British TV cook dropped on this episode. So for the Elimination, the chefs had to … wait, what’s that, Nigella?
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Yes, I would love some cherries, thank you. So this week’s Elimination challenge involved the cheftestants heading to the … wait, I’m sorry?
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Pasta? Why not? I really appreciate you feeding me and all, Nigella, but I have to get back to
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Dessert already? How’d you eat that pasta so fast? You’re too kind. But seriously, we’re getting off topic. The Elimination had …
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Christ, who invited you, Giada? You’re getting tomato everywhere. Sorry, I meant POMODOROOOOO. NOW CLEAN IT UP.
Elimination: Each of the cheftestants draws a random Vegas casino from which to cull inspiration for a dish to serve 175 guests. Jen C visits the Excalibur, where she meals out on a Cornish game hen at the Tournament of Kings and watches wizards and knights doing medieval magical shit; she goes with a NY strip dish meant to ape the sword in the stone. Bryan gets Manadalay Bay and decides on a sustainable seafood dish. Robin’s inspired by the vibrant, colorful Chihuly sculpture on the ceiling of the Bellagio, so she does a … panna cotta. Kevin’s sockeye salmon dish comes to him after a visit to the Mirage. Eli gets Circus Circus and makes the troubling decision to put peanut, caramel apple and raspberry frothy elements into a soup. Mike, who draws New York New York, does a slightly trippy buffalo wing-inspired plate. “Firefighters, it’s something they eat,” he explains of his thematic inspiration. There’s probably some truth to that, but I would’ve just gone with the fact that Buffalo is located in New York.
At the top: Kevin, who’s praised for the tomato broth element on his plate; and the Voltaggio bros, who seem to be fostering more and more unspoken disdain for each other as we get closer to the finale. Toby calls Mike’s food “effeminate,” to which the chef replies that he’s a “strong believer in putting your personality on your plate.” Haha, you just said you’re a girl. She He wins, though, taking home a big-ass bottle of wine and probably an off-camera reacharound from Nigella, since she’s so
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Oh, you’re still here? If that’s the case, then yes, I would like a Bellini.
At the bottom: Jen C, who Tom criticizes for her apparent “lack of knowledge of medieval cooking” (you tend to stay away from the Ren Faire, huh Jen? GOOD); Eli, whose Barnum and Bailey soup was deemed a textural failure; and Robin, whose panna cotta, according to Nigella, lacked “the quiver of a 17th-century courtesan’s thigh,” which is apparently an imperative on the bizarre sex planet Nigella lives on. Robin also screwed up the hardened sugar meant to represent the Chihuly glass, so she’s sent home. Seems about right.
Next week: Thomas Keller and Mike dissing the shit out of Kevin.
I laughed out loud. Six times.
Thank goodness I don’t actually watch the show. I’m sure I wouldn’t get so much pleasure out of these recaps if I did.
danya–they’re even better when you’ve watched the show. You outdid yourself this time, drew.
Ha, glad you guys like. Nigella’s still here.
Bravissimo. Seriously. No Top Chef in Italy… thank you for your recaps!
Hahah. Hilarious. Nigella is amazing and I love her and I wish that they would make her a regular fixture on this show. However, she definitely went a little overboard with the excalibur/sword in the stone/wench jokes when talking about Jennifer’s food, right? It was like she was competing with Toby to make the worst joke. Take it easy Nigella.
Stop. Just stop. With the photos and the innuendo. Nigella needs to feed Giada some pasta. Take that any way you wish.
Brutal in a great sort of way.
Most hysterical recap so far. Keep it up!!
The real irony is that just about everything Tom said about medieval cooking was completely wrong.
I felt bad for our local girl. When I saw what the challenge was with casinos, I knew they’d throw the Excalibur into there, and that’s the lamest one on the strip. You can see a joust with cornish game hen and root veggies anywhere they have medieval nights; Vegas has many better things to do.
But she made it, so that’s good. I’m happy that they actually have a top five with mostly everyone who has really stood out. Early on, she and Kevin and the brothers established themselves. Don’t know about Eli, but he’s had some good dishes. Top Chef always likes to have surprises, so I figured someone good would go too early and someone everyone hated (like, oh, Robin?) would make it far, but this is a very strong group. Maybe their best top 5 ever?
Doc, can you elaborate? I’m curious to hear what aspects of medieval cooking Tom allegedly misrepresented.
What aspects of medieval cooking did Tom get wrong?
The big one is that he repeated the Victorian era myth that medieval cooks used lots of spice to cover the taste of spoiled meat. It’s simply not true. Just from an economic point, such a practice doesn’t make any sense.
Why would they use the equivalent of $100 worth of spice on a $2 chicken?
Why would they slaughter animals and then let them sit and spoil instead of waiting to slaughter them until they were needed?
I can give you lots of other examples, but in short they didn’t.
Further, given that almost none of the recipes in surviving cookbooks note the amounts of the ingredients to be used – so anyone saying that medieval cooks used a lot of spice has no basis in fact for their assertion.
Medieval cooks did use a wide range of spices in their cooking, but no more so than any other cuisine in the modern world (with the possible exception to modern, stereotypically bland, English cooking).
Take a look at my website – I’ve got heaps of research and recipes there.