Top Chef NY recap week 2

With 15 contestants still in the running, we never see them all or their food and still can’t keep them straight. So it’s a mess of bodies at the penthouse the morning the episode begins. As we watch Ariane slop breakfast into her mouth, she tells us she deserves to stay and smug Stefan says Fabio, the other European, is his biggest competition. You get the feeling he means his only competition.

When they get to the Top Chef kitchen with its product placement shots, they meet this week’s guest judge, Donatella Arpaia, who owns or co-owns a bazillion New York restaurants. Padma rattles off their names and for good measure, a cheftestant follows up with the usual echo chamber about the guest judge. Padma sets up the Quickfire by telling them it involves a food New Yorkers spend $100 million dollars per year consuming. Foie gras? Steak? Cheesecake? Nah, you’d think the producers knew a recession was ahead: it’s hot dogs!

If they had known we’d all be broke now, they could have pitted the cheftestants against Gray’s Papaya, a Manhattan institution with several locations and near-permanent signs advertising a Recession Special: 2 dogs and a beverage for not much money. $3.50 the last time I noticed. But not being psychic, we see instead a hot dog cart being wheeled in by a woman identified as a dog vendor in Queens. And I swear on a stack of The Joy of Cooking, one cheftestant blathers that her dogs are da best.

Their challenge is to create a signature hot dog in 45 minutes, the key word being “create” as in make them from scratch. Fabio says, “I love hot dog. Do I know how make hot dog? No. I have no idea how make hot dog.” He decides to stick with what he knows and make sausage for a pannini. Stefan is going the pannini route too, with what he calls a ’round the world dog because he’s using Irish cheese and French bread. Whatever. Jill from Baltimore decides on Asian-style dogs wrapped in rice paper, which sound ghastly. But when Donatella and Padma do their tastings, Jill’s faulted for not having made the dogs. Still, that’s better than the woman, I think her name is Jamie, who did make them but with an unexpected added ingredient: crushed bone. Padma got it.

They get to Stefan, Donatella tastes his global dog, makes a face but says nothing. She does wash it down with some beer he helpfully provided. Oh, those sophisticated Continentals! When she puts him in the bottom, she tells him she wouldn’t want to go anywhere around the world for his global hot dog and he tells us, big surprise, “I am boiling.” Deal with it.

The Quickfire winner is a quiet young woman named Radhika, who put an Indian spin on her kebob dogs, which look delicious, and tells us the win means she can make good food. She really said that.

For the Elimination Challenge, Padma reminds them what a tough audience New Yorkers are and tells them they will be serving 50 New Yorkers tomorrow in a real New York restaurant. There are three teams, one for appetitzers, main course and dessert. They have to do New American Cuisine, which made Tom Colicchio famous, and they seem to think it means whatever they want it to mean.

So they go shopping at — back for a second season — Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. Their entire budget is $2500 and right away they’re buying up crabmeat and the finest beef, making me wonder if they’re going to be reduced to serving Lorna Doones for dessert. You’d think Baltimore Jill (or “Ballamer” as natives say it) would have made a beeline for the crabmeat, but no. She’s fixated on ostrich eggs, which she thinks are so “original.” They’re eggs, Jill. Big eggs. She buys them for a quiche. So original.

In the kitchen, she can’t wait to see what’s inside them, as if old Beanie Babies might pop out. She can’t crack them open, so somebody helps her and guess what’s inside? A yolk and a white. Big ones. Ariane, meanwhile, is on the dessert team and whines that she’s not a baker. We know. Every season they tell us they’re cooks, not bakers, but never this early in the season.

Chef Tom strolls in to remind them they’re in the Tough Audience Town and to throw two curveballs: the restaurant they will be working in is Craft, owned by his very own self, and the 50 patrons are New Yorkers who auditioned for the show but didn’t make it. The cheftestants are understandably not thrilled at the prospect of serving 50 rejects who probably hate their guts.

They go to Craft. Hosea Rosenberg, who is making the crab and obviously not keeping kosher, wisely checks for salt and pepper. Ariane asks one of the Team Rainbow guys to taste her dessert, which is a lemon meringue martini. Go figure. It’s too sweet but he tells us, not her, since he’s in it to win it. She knows it’s too sweet though and says — where’s my stack of Joy of Cooking? — she considered re-doing it “but you know, this is what I made. This is what I’m going to serve.” Remind me never to eat wherever she might be cooking.

Colicchio will stay in the kitchen during service to expedite and probably to make sure nobody takes anything for a souvenir. And with four seasons of this show under his toque, he prudently reminds them not to put the tasting spoons back into the food after they’ve been in their mouths.

The moment of truth arrives, food goes out and sure enough, the rejects are all, “This is awful, I could have done better, you mean this garbage is why I’m not on the show and still peeling potatoes at Le Hole in le Wall, nope I’m not bitter.” Lucky for the cheftestants, the table that matters is the one with Donatella, Padma and Gail. Well, not so lucky. They’re not exactly displaying paroxysms of joy over the food, nor is Colicchio who’s eating in the kitchen, but he’s hard to read.

Hosea brings out his crab dish, confident he’s nailed that little sucker. Nobody likes it. Fabio’s luckier with his carpaccio, which Padma calls “beautiful.” She says it in four syllables: bee-yoo-tee-ful. Baltimore Jill brings out her ostrich egg quiche; Donatella says it tastes like glue and Gail agrees. We get more opinions from blunt Gail now, with Ted Allen not hogging the camera. Stefan’s halibut goes over well and Radhika serves them an avocado mousse. She has immunity, having won the Quickfire, and Gail wonders aloud why else would she make such a sorry dish that’s basically puffy guacamole.

Whiny Ariane presents the too-sweet lemon meringue martini she was too lazy to re-make. Donatella mentions sugar shock and Padma gags. Then spits it out. Dramatically but delicately, into her napkin. At another table, a reject diplomatically says, “I think there were problems with it.”

Tom joins the ladies in the dining room and is not pleased. New American Cuisine, he says, turned into clunky regional American. Padma digs deep into her expertise to opine, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.”  “Of course,” Chef Tom says. Shut up, Padma.

At Judges’ Table, with the top three and bottom three, Tom is still sputtering about what they did to what he does so well. “If this is your take, you set American cuisine back 20 years.” But he liked the pastry in a dish made by Carla, a caterer who said last week she waits for her spirit guides to inspire her.

“Fabio,” one judge says. And Fabio flips out about his carpaccio, how he uses filet mignon, the finest of everything, sells a million of them a week. “I don’t know why I’m here,” he huffs. “You’re here because we liked it,” Padma says. Oh. They all rave about an olive he used, making this week’s takeaway for aspiring chefs: know your olives. He wins the challenge and promptly tells us he won, but says it in Italian and we get subtitles that aren’t gratuitous for a change. He notes he and Stefan are now tied and says it a thousand times, the way Chris Matthews annoyingly frames a question three different ways before giving the interviewee a chance to answer even once.

That leaves the class dunces in front of the judges. Hosea of the non-kosher crab dish is surprised he’s there because he thought he’d win. Not even close and DING, it “wasn’t seasoned,” Tom says. Ariane defends her so-awful-it’s-spit-outtable dessert by saying she’d made it before but when Baltimore Jill is asked to defend her ostrich egg quiche, she rambles like Caribou Barbie trying to explain the Bush Doctrine. “It just didn’t taste good,” Gail says and that, in a nutshell, is what counts in cooking. When the judges are alone, Gail points out Jill’s defense of her dish was “the lamest in five seasons.”

So Jill is told to pack her knives and go back to Ballamer, where eggs are normal. Of course she tells us this is not the end of cooking for her, but it is the end of her chance to win a bunch of money.

Next week, the night before Turkey Day, they have to cook Thanksgiving dinners even though it was summer when they filmed. I will be in my own kitchen and not watching or recapping. I might not recap again till the field is smaller and the show gets more interesting. But, like seasoning a dish for Tom Colicchio, you never know.

Tagged as: reality tv, recaps