The Hidden Egg Roll Master of Top Chef
May 17th, 2006 | Posted by Shannon
Well. I guess I am all of a sudden realizing that I am a sucker. A sucker! I bought into this whole Top Chef thing thinking it was real and shit. It can’t be real. I am just realizing it now, but it can’t be real.
It’s TV, it’s make believe. Hello-ey, girlfriend.
Anyway, Dave got the ax, and he didn’t shed a tear - not one tear. The question is, did he deserve to lose?
First though a little on the reunion show, because I just watched it for the first time last night. It was pretty clear that everyone was HAMMERED. Except for maybe Harold and definitely Andrea. Did the producers deliberately set out to get everyone drunk? Tiffani was slurring, her eyes were like slits, and she appeared to almost puke on the side of the stage. Then there was the fight between Stephen and Kenneth… who would have thought Stephen would almost get into a fistfight? I guess it was the expensive Champagne talking, since he was holding an entire bottle with maybe a sip left by the end of the show. For the most part it seems all the contestants really like each other, with the exception of Kenneth and Tiffani who are pretty much universally disliked. Everyone even seems to like Stephen now. So take that, all you Stephen haters!
Then on to part one of the finale. I thought it was going to be one two-hour episode, but I was wrong. And four months have gone by, and now all the action has moved to Vegas. That breaks up a little of the momentum, doesn’t it?
Anyway, Dave, Harold and Tiffani, show up for the quickfire challenge at the MGM Grand only to be told that it is not a quickfire - it is an elimination challenge. So instead of a two-hour battle between the three remaining chefs, there is a one hour battle, and whoever wins goes to the next one hour battle.
Here is where the believability factor started to head into the twilight zone for me. The challenge was room service, and it was broken up into three segments. The first was room service for high rollers, the second for poker players, and the third for acrobats in Cirque du Soleil. Whatever. The thing is they only had half an hour to cook each one of these, and there were two dishes required in the first, four (!) in the second, and three in the third. And they only had ten minutes to acquaint themselves with the kitchen, and the available ingredients, which were pretty much everything you could possibly imagine.
OK. Half an hour? And with not even having a fucking clue? Come on. Nine episodes have gone by and I haven’t really tripped on the time thing, but tonight the clincher was, for me, seeing a tray of egg rolls during the poker player segment. So Dave, creator of said rolls, hasn’t got the time to even breathe while making his four different dishes in that short time period. But there it is - a full-on shot of a tray with maybe ten egg rolls on it.
You can’t make filling and roll all those egg rolls and then make three other dishes and fry shrimp and make the sauce for the shrimp and slice up salami and grill the panini, all in half an hour. You could maybe do it all, but you couldn’t roll ten perfect egg rolls, at the same time. Something is very very fishy here. Now, if the egg rolls were all crooked and had stuff coming out the corners, I would believe. But they were PERFECT. (AND NOW I KNOW WHY - THEY WERE FROZEN, PREPACKAGED EGGROLLS. I DIDN’T GET THAT ONE LAST NIGHT.)
Also - the judges in the high roller segment were Lee Anne, Stephen and Miguel… I am not sure having ex-contenders as judges is fully kosher. And they all hate Tiffani, and wouldn’t they be able to figure out which ones her dishes were? Even served blind, I have to imagine that they would guess where Harold’s spicy mussel soup came from. And to not be able to tell Dave’s plate from Tiffani’s? No way.
Anyhow. Harold totally won everything (and I was sketched because they were making it look like he was going to choke) and then it was between Tiffani and Dave. All of Dave’s dishes did really well in the judging, and Tiffani’s absolutely did not. But Dave messed up badly on the third round and only made two out of three required dishes. So he lost.
At this point, it’s all about hating Tiffani. The other chefs hate her, the audience hates her, she’s getting some rashes on her face, from everyone hating her. Which kind of sucks. The thing is, they hate her for being an asshole, but tonight she really proved that she doesn’t know fuck-all about cooking for Everyman. The poker challenge was a clear indicator of that. (Three different kinds of potato chips tossed with smoked Gouda? Um, bring me some Ruffles please.) I don’t hate Tiffani, and I feel bad that she got that nasty rash. But the bottom line is, in a year’s time, if Harold and Dave (and Stephen, and Miguel, and Lee Anne) all have restaurants, people will want to GO to them just to see Harold, Dave, Stephen, Miguel, and Lee Anne. I am not sure anyone would even want to go to Tiffani’s restaurant, at least to see her. Which is kind of sad. She is not only a villain, but she is a villain that nobody wants to see for the pure pleasure of seeing a villain. Whereas, seeing Stephen would be totally and completely pleasureable.
Well, it is TV and next week I won’t be able to see the final finale because I will be seeing We Are Scientists and the Flaming Lips at about that time… so the winner will cook and be chosen and I will try not to see who it is until I can watch the rerun the next day. I guess it will be Harold, because all that is good and true (and hot and sexy) gets ahead in TV land, and the nasty, rash faced villains only go so far, just to make it interesting.
I still love Top Chef. I am just a little pissed about the egg rolls.
