Top Chef NY recap week 1

Hoo boy! Season 5 of Top Chef is upon us, and if it seems like only yesterday that we saw Stephanie’s final deer-in-the-headlights look before she won Season 4, it’s because it wasn’t too many yesterdays ago. But talk about bad timing all around!

Season 4 was in Chicago, when it was just the boring Home of Deep Dish Pizza and not the jazzy Home of That Skinny Black Guy Who Made History. Too bad, Windy City. Season 5 is finally in food-obsessed New York, but filmed before the economy went down the garbage disposal. So now we have a competition with ingredients from stores nobody can afford to shop at anymore, cheftestants making dishes we can’t afford to reproduce and being judged by chefs whose restaurants nobody can afford to eat at. Hey, this sounds like fun! Season 5: Remembering When People Had Money.

So we meet the eleventy-hundred people who want to win this thing. There are too many to remember at this point, but among them are a few with New York and European accents, which will annoy a lot of viewers, some with so many tattoos they look like they’re wearing coloring books, a couple of likely non-winners who are self-trained or in culinary school but can pad out the show and, thank you sweet universe, no fauxhawks this time. We also have the self-proclaimed Team Rainbow, the Bravo-requisite gays and even if this season turns ugly like Season 2, they will be treated better by their peers than California voters treated them last week. Who can cook? Let’s find out!

The Quickfire takes place on Governor’s Island, near the Statue of Liberty, and it’s drama right off the bat. Padma Lakshmi and Chef Tom Colicchio announce the three-stage Quickfire will have an elimination for the very first time! The 17 contestants are shocked — honestly? they haven’t watched enough to know how many team challenges are ahead and you can’t divide 17 into teams? — and they’re all on edge as they proceed to peel 15 apples each. The catch is that they have to do it the difficult, old-fashioned way, with a paring knife. We had to do that in pastry school when we made fruity things like apple strudel and I’m rooting for the guy who cut himself almost as soon as he picked up the knife. I totally understand. After an ellaesque inventory of his thumbs and a warning to Tom that the apples are bloody (”That’s okay, I’m not going to eat them.”), he is safe and I have a girlcrush on Chef all over again.

In stage two, the bottom eight have to brunoise the apples. It’s a tiny, precise dice and is pronounced broon-WAHZ, not broon-WAH as one contestant who ought to know better says. The bottom four from that round then have to make a dish with their brunoised apples and we get a salad, another salad, a chutney and an apple hash. Broon-WAH woman and her salad get knifed after a ridiculous amount of face time that proves the producers haven’t lost their heavy-handed touch for telegraphing the loser. She departs with the most unfortunate choice of words in the show’s entire history: “I’m going down on apples!”

They draw knives marked with some of New York’s ethnic enclaves and have to cook foods inspired by them. One named Hosea Rosenberg gets Brighton Beach in Brooklyn and says he has no effin’ clue about Brighton Beach and what they eat. Hint, Rosenberg: cook what your bubbe used to. Somebody named Melissa gets Little Italy, calls herself a country mouse and says she doesn’t cook Italian. [Aside to fellow New Yorkers: does she look like a young(ish) Robin Byrd with better teeth, or is it just me?]

They go to their fancy-schmancy penthouse, also in Brooklyn, that’s probably lost value since I wrote about it last summer. Stefan, a Finn who won the Quickfire and immunity for the Elimination challenge, is already Mr. Boasty Boast Know-It-All and is ticking people off. One contestant says, “He holds his head high.” Cocky is a better description and I already don’t like him.

The next day they shop, they go into the kitchen to cook, but first we have long, loving product placement shots to keep the sponsors happy. We have a return of sous-vide, of sliders, of fish bones, of what-the-hell-went wrong and a lot of boring blah blah.

Our guest judge this week is Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who is such a renowned chef (seriously) that we have the cheftestant blatherings before and after Padma tells us who he is. Our regular judges this season are of course, Chef Tom, along with Gail Simmons of Food & Wine and at some point we’ll see food critic Toby Young. Young replaces chatty Ted Allen, who jumped ship for his own show on another network. Padma is Padma. Monotone and boobage.

We settle in to see who, if anyone, gets dinged by Colicchio for using too much salt or not enough. They approach the Judges’ Table in pairs and first up are Boasty Stefan and Ariane with Middle Eastern food. They like his and she tells us she doesn’t want to go home. Rosenberg, having discovered Brighton Beach is Russian Jewish territory, apparently figured you can’t lose with caviar, creme fraiche and something that requires actual cooking. And he was right. Padma said his dish had — wait for it! — a “culinary eloquence.” Please tell me she meant “elegance”, which is still a big word for her, but makes a little more sense.

Young Robin Byrd sorta look-alike managed to cook something Italian and DING – Chef Tom faults her for not enough salt. And pepper. One of the coloring books has Indian food and Indian Padma tells him his tzatziki isn’t anything like what tzatziki is. We hold our breath for a moment until she says that without knowing it, he created curds and rice, a classic South Indian dish. She is so beaming and he is so cute.

She reminds us that in three of the first four seasons, the winner of the first elimination challenge won the whole shebang, so this is a big deal coming up. Boasty Stefan wins and smugly tells us he wants to be the first European to win Top Chef and seems damn confident. Apparently they didn’t hear about Dewey Defeats Truman in Finland.

The bottom two are the culinary student, Patrick, and Ariane, who tells us she’s “swea’in’.” On that basis alone I’d like her to get knifed, hating it when I hear that or “di’n't”  or “ki”en,” although I really don’t want to hear talk of kittens on any cooking show. When Colicchio asks how she’d manage Middle Eastern in her restaurant and she says she’d have a book, there is a fourth-trimester pregnant pause before he tells her, “We don’t learn to cook from books!” His publisher probably plotzed. Still, Patrick’s cliched, faux Chinese did him in and he is told to pack his knives and go.

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