Tonight’s episode neatly demonstrated two important rules that all Top Chef contestants should know going in, yet some invariably stumble over them every season. And since one of the rules gets broken in the Quickfire and the other in Elimination Challenge, I’ll divide this recap accordingly:
Rule #1: Pay attention to the frickin’ assignment.
That one seems pretty easy, but some people just refuse to listen. If you’re going to compete on Top Chef, you really have to prepare to work within certain parameters: Whether that means freezing your food for Bertolli-style boil-in-a-bag pasta or making something sophisticated out of gas station fare or using the leftover ingredients from last night’s restaurant service. Otherwise, it’s not really a “challenge,” is it? And yet there’s always some resistance, usually arising from some high-falutin’ principle about how food should be prepared, when the challenge is about how food can be prepared. If you’ll remember Harold, our winner from Season One, he nearly always prefaced his participation in a challenge by saying something like “that’s not what I’m about,” but he survived by sucking it up and making some extraordinarily inventive dishes out of limited ingredients (e.g. popcorn ceviche in a junk food challenge.)
Tonight, Rick Bayless served as guest judge, an appearance that will surprise no Chicagoan who recognizes him as the ubiquitous upscale Mexican entrepreneur behind Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, and various semi-fancy over-the-counter salsas. (My experience with Bayless’ conjoined restaurants is this: Frontera Grill takes no reservations and is a huge tourist attraction, thus making it impossible to get into unless you want to wait hours for a table. And much as I’ve always wanted to try Topolobampo, I usually don’t think a month or two in advance about where I’m going for dinner, so I haven’t made that happen, either.) Appropriately enough, the Quickfire assignment involved turning the humblest of Mexican street foods, the taco, into something upscale.
Sounds simple enough, right? But oh, the rending of garments! A handful of contestants seemed to feel that it was an insult to our neighbors to the south—and, er, our neighbors at the burrito stand around the corner—to take their cheap, unpretentious dish and gussy it up for the foodie elite. Erik was particularly incensed about it and he was among the few who revolted by keeping the “street food” as is, thus defying the essence of the challenge. On a certain level, I can appreciate Erik’s perspective: Perhaps it is a little arrogant to “elevate” perfectly delicious peasant food into something snootier and less accessible to the masses. But then, isn’t making something new and inventive and transformative with food what great chefs aspire to do? And is it really such a slap-in-the-face to imagine a taco that isn’t the usual ground beef and fixins’ stuffed into a shell? Don’t worry, Erik: The taco shall endure.
The irony, of course, is that Erik ignores the challenge and still can’t make a half-decent taco. Much like his nacho cheese soufflé, his taco plate was just plain ugly on the plate, with yet another of his patented black-bean poop smears. The ever-clueless Ryan, too, wasn’t into making “upscale tacos,” either, or else he wouldn’t have wrapped them in the paper you get at corner carts and ma-and-pa fast food joints. At least Spike—who along with his beard buddy Andrew, appears to be into imitating Borat a year too late—straddled the line a bit by acknowledging the taco as street food, but pushing the flavors to a “soul-satisfying” level. Still, there was no question that Richard had this one in the bag, since he completely reconceptualized the taco by making the tortilla from jicama and packing it with the light, cooling flavors of avocado, papaya, and cilantro stems. I’m not sure if it’s the dish I’d most like to eat from the Quickfire—I’d go with Spike’s for sure—but Richard wins for simply understanding the assignment better than his competitors.
Rule # 2: Think about how your dish will taste when it’s eaten. Emphasis on “when.”