Top Chef Charleston Recap: Episode 8
By Jason Lee
January 24, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
That’s up to our usual judging panel and our two guest judges, Daniel Humm and Will Guidara, who are partners in one of the country’s most celebrated restaurants, 11 Madison Avenue in the Flatiron District in New York City. It took them ten years to get that restaurant up and running. Our cheftestants, per usual Top Chef practice, will have a day to get theirs operational.
The chefs draw knives for the luxury of deciding which two chefs will get to pick their teams. Katsuji and Shirley get the honors, leading to groans by Emily - our resident rookie overachiever (can you believe that of the eight rookie cheftestants, she’s one of only two still standing? It’s absolutely flummoxing). Emily knows, based on schoolyard practice, that she’s going to be the last person selected.
And she’s right. Joining Shirley’s team by default (i.e. the last chef picked) along with Brooke and Sylva, they’ll have to do their best to top the team of Katsuji, Sheldon, Casey, and John. In a development that will surprise no one, Shirley is not only quick to establish her leadership (she’ll be serving as Executive Chef, thank you very much) and the tone of her team (she firmly puts her foot down in rejecting a beef-based pasta dish proposed by Emily, but is quite supportive of a version re-worked by Emily to fit the team’s theme). They’ll be doing a seafood-focused restaurant named Latitude.
Katsuji’s mess of a team is awash in egos and passive-aggressiveness. Katsuji doesn’t want to be executive chef, prompting John to volunteer (despite the fact that he didn’t actually participate in Restaurant Wars his season). Instead, Katsuji wants to cook three of the team’s six dishes. Oh yeah, and he wants to make some roasted nuts as an appetizer. Then, in a minute of picturesque pique, John suggests that Casey should work as front of the house because, you know, that’s a woman’s place in a restaurant (welcome to 2017!). Instantly recognizing the misogyny underlying that suggestion, Casey sucks it up and accepts the appointment cause, hey, ya know, (a) it’s a damn important position for Restaurant Wars and (b) she’d be damn good at it. You go girl.
In terms of order, Katsuji wins the coin toss and opts to go second. Thus, team Latitude spends four of their hours in the Top Chef kitchen prepping for their service the next day. Shirley is, quite appropriately, in everyone’s business - tasting their food and sauces and reigning them in where she feels appropriate. Whaddya know, women can make great leaders! By the end of their prep, Brooke deems Shirley “bossy, but in a good way.” I think that’s chef-talk for “job well done.”
Before we know it, it’s time for service and Brooke, who Shirley picked for front-of-house duties, ushers in a line of eager diners - among them, our five judges (Padma, Tom, Gail, and our two guest judges). Team Latitude kicks things off with a cured king salmon with pickled kohlrabi from Brooke. Tom adores the different textures incorporated in the dish, declaring that she did a really nice job. Resident underachiever Emily has a squid ink pasta with calamari. Tom finds the pasta mushy and the sauce heavy. Gail finds that the sauce lacks seafood flavor. For those scoring at home, it’s a hit and a strike out.
Next up are two entrées - a snapper with bone broth from Shirley and a pan-roasted halibut from Sylva. Again, it’s a hit and a miss. Sylva’s dish deftly incorporated earthy flavors through the accompaniment of mushroom rice while Shirley’s snapper (though well cooked) might have been better done if braised.
Finally for dessert, we have the only disaster of the team. Worrying that her panna cotta wouldn't set in time, Shirley adds a couple of extra sheets of gelatin before leaving her dessert to set. The minute she starts serving, she knows it’s wrong (too firm). The texture of her plum wine panna cotta with cherries is roundly panned, with Tom saying he’d never order that again. Emily’s poppy seed buttermilk cake with miso butterscotch, though, takes the cake (ba dum dum), with smart, savory flavors.
Having gone one-and-one in each round, I’m firmly convinced that if Katsuji team’s is deemed the winner of the challenge, Shirley is gonna go home. Thankfully, Katsuji’s team is a hot mess. Having chosen to do a restaurant focused on southern cooking, and having picked the name Southern Belle, most of the dishes have nothing whatsoever to do with southern food, much less southern hospitality. Casey is slammed at the start, spending too much time chatting about the theme of the restaurant while ignoring the line forming at the reception desk.
Meanwhile, in the back, John has worked out the worst possible system for coordinating orders between the back of the kitchen (his cooking staff, Katsuji and Sheldon) and the servers, who seem utterly perplexed by his incomprehensible orders (“Fire three number fours and tables 2L and 2R!”). Add to this the fact that John and Katsuji are already at each other’s throats - Katsuji is totally overwhelmed by the prep-work needed for his three dishes (having long forgotten his desire to make roasted nuts as an appetizer), having commandeered his entire team to do mise-en-place for him, thus screwing over people like John and Sheldon who need to oversee the entire operation (John) and prep for his own dish (Sheldon).
Needless to say, dinner is a nightmare. Tables don't get fed, and when they do, they get the wrong orders. The judges are left waiting for dishes without any attention from Casey, who’s gotten sucked into the black hole of John’s kitchen. Meanwhile, Katsuji and Sheldon talk smack about John while he flounders, bitter about the fact that John isn’t contributing to the cooking or plating at all, instead focusing on his cockamamie system for expediting dishes - it’s a DISASTER.
And the food isn’t much. As an appetizer, the judges get a sweet potato tamale (southern food much?) from Katsuji, which has a nasty, burnt taste, and a orangey, gloppy mess from John that’s supposed to be crab dip in the form of pimento cheese (cause that sounds delicious), but which lacks any crab flavor.
Things improve marginally in the entrées with Katsuji’s fried green tomato and almond gravy beef tongue, which all agree is good. Sadly, Sheldon’s one dish - an acorn stew with sorghum cod - has only one texture (mushy) and lacks any edge or acidity.
Heading into dessert, Tom remarks, “this dessert better be the most amazing dessert in the world.” It’s not. In fact, it can’t even be found. Casey checks in with the kitchen and finds John complaining that he needs SEVENTEEN of her desserts to be plated. Realizing that if she doesn’t get it done, it won’t ever get done, Casey rolls up her sleeves and starts plating her strawberry lemon sorbet with buttermilk curd meringue, which thankfully for her, the judges like (though don’t really see where all the work went, as it’s basically some strawberries with cream). It’s better than Katsuji’s blackberry cobbler, though, which has dough on top that’s totally undercooked.
All in all, Tom adjudges the Southern Belle team to be not very southern and not very good. It’s an easy call naming the Latitude team the winner. As a testament to (a) how hard this challenge is and (b) the amount of stress she was under as the leader of her team, Shirley bursts into tears. Tom thinks Sylva’s halibut was great, Padma enjoyed the broth from Shirley, and Emily has something to smile about for the first time in a while (lets see how she does in her next individual challenge, though...), but Brooke deservingly goes home the winner for her unflappability in the front of the house and for her great appetizer.
Top Chef takes a turn into Jerry Springer territory as the judges switch their attention to the Southern Belle team. Tom calls John’s attempt at crab-pimento cheese a “1970s recipe,” and Padma says it tasted of “tinned fish.” Sheldon’s one dish (you had one job!) was not very good, which Sheldon attributes to the “tension in the kitchen” (yeah, and the quality of my homework during middle school was poor because of the volume of my Backstreet Boys cassette tape was turned up loud to drown out my parents arguing downstairs). Casey takes some flack for not actually being present in the dining room, but she validly points out that SOMEONE was going to have to plate those 17 desserts, and if wasn’t going to be her, who was it going to be, huh?
It wasn’t going to be John, for sure, as he was busy expediting all those dishes in incomprehensible fashion. The judges ask Katsuji why he didn’t take the reins as executive chef when he had the opportunity - he blathers on about some BS about how he wanted to show off his cooking skills and allow John an opportunity to shine as executive chef. John then points out that Katsuji’s lack of restraint in planning his menu left everyone to pick up the slack, including him, in prepping for his three dishes, which, oh yeah, constituted HALF of the team’s menu. Katsuji does a pretty on-point impression of a sarcastic 13-year-old girl thanking John for how great a job he did and how helpful his assistance was. Tom asks whether Katsuji’s decision to have John work as executive chef was a bad one, and in a moment of pique, Katsuji agrees that it was a bad decision. “Sometimes you pick the wrong people,” he says with no hint of shame, prompting John to accuse Katsuji of setting him - assigning him to be executive chef but then preventing him from doing anything other than helping Katsuji prep for his dishes.
“ALL RIGHT,” Padma says, bringing things back to order before sending the chefs back to the stew room so that the adults can discuss things. While John and Katsuji continue their feud backstage, the judges consider their options. Padma takes Casey off the table, as she “valiantly” did what she could and made the best dish of the meal (her dessert). All judges agree that Katsuji bit off more than he could chew, but they also agree that John's crab/pimento cheese combination was the worst of the night. In determining who goes home, it’s decided that it’ll be the chef who bears the most responsibility for the failure of the team.
And that’s Katsuji - appropriately, I think. Padma notes that team suffered from a lack of teamwork and an over-abundance of ego, with no true leadership. As she announces that Katsuji will be packing his knives, Shirley, Casey, and Brooke all surreptitiously nod in agreement - they know it was the right decision. As he leaves, Katsuji congratulates himself for never having played it safe during this season. He took a risk every time. “There I go being like John,” he chastises himself upon more reflection, “always making excuses. ‘Yeah, I took a risk,’” he mocks himself. He did. And he deserves to go home for it.
Boy, bye.