Top Chef Colorado Recap
By Jason Lee
January 8, 2018
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Needless to say, they have no idea what’s going on.
Tom quickly brings them up to speed. Last Chance Kitchen has taken a different route this season. Four Top Chef vets (Kwame and Lee Anne plus the infamous Marcel Vigneron from Top Chef season 2 and Jen Carroll from Top Chef season 6) started out cooking against each other and then each of the eliminated cheftestants from this season.
The only ones left standing are Kwame, Lee Anne, and Claudette, who’s been on fire lately, winning the last two Last Chance Kitchen challenges. The trio are cooking offal, with the winner punching a ticket back into the competition, immediately.
Jen Carroll warns the current cast that they should worry about whoever makes it back in, and Tom echoes that, saying some of the best food on the season so far has been in Last Chance Kitchen. The cheftestants start discussing internally who they’d prefer to see win . . . and most agree on Claudette. They have no interest in having a vet re-enter the competition, and after what happened last year, where the vets absolutely demolished the newbie chefs, I don’t blame them.
Time runs out and Claudette goes first with a picadillo tetala with chicken livers and cherries. Kwame goes next, serving a chicken heart sofrito with crispy shallots and confit potatoes. Lee Anne rounds things out with some beef liver dumplings with garlic, shallots, and chili oil.
Tom praises the chefs for not shying away from the offal, offering minor nitpicks—Lee Anne’s liver sauce was a tad too thick, Kwame’s choice of serving platter didn’t let the food breathe, and Claudette’s dish was a bit anchovy-forward. As he ponders his decision, which he calls “one of the tougher decisions” over the past fifteen seasons, Padma comes in to show off the shiny new Top Chef coat that the winner will have the pleasure of donning in mere minutes.
That person will not be Kwame. Tom cuts him first and Kwame is visibly devastated—he tells us that it’s almost worse being cut now because he was so close to making it back in. It’s down to two chefs for one spot and Tom is agonizing over his decision. In the end, he decides to “go with his gut” . . .
IT’S A TIE. OMG OMG OMG. That’s freaking insane. Tom declares the whole thing a TIE and both Claudette and Lee Anne are rejoining the competition. Tom promises us that this was not planned and that his decision was made on the fly, simply because both dishes were so darn good. Padma is clearly surprised, saying that she only has one Top Chef jacket but will try to find another one.
Meanwhile, the cheftestants are not happy. Not only do they get a vet in the competition, but they also get an on-fire Claudette who’s ready to show everyone why she deserves the title. They are afraid. And you know what? They should be. Very afraid.
The Last Chance Kitchen cook-off will take the place of today’s Quickfire, so the cheftestants are headed straight to the Elimination Challenge, and it’s a doozy. Padma notes that no trip to Colorado would be complete without a trip outdoors, and thus, the cheftestants will be going camping in the Denver mountains and snow in Estes Park. They’ll have to make their own fire, pitch their own tents, and make a five-star-worthy meal using camping equipment and whatever they can pack up from the Top Chef pantry.
The chefs’ faces say it all—this does not promise to be fun. Once Padma leaves, they book it to the pantry table and attempt to grab every possible ingredient they might consider using (cause if they don’t get it now, they ain’t getting it later). Produce gets dropped, eggs splatter onto the floor—it’s a disgusting mess.
The chefs head into the cars to go out and buy some campfire cooking equipment, seemingly making some strange decisions along the way. Carrie has an idea to bake a cake outside in a large dutch oven like her dad used to, while Bruce toys with the idea of making a fresh pasta, despite the obvious absence of a pasta machine.
Upon arriving at the campground, the chefs find that (as Tanya puts it) it’s worse than they thought. There are feet of snow everywhere, and so the chefs immediately get to work digging out the picnic tables from under the snow so that they’ll have space to start preparing their dishes. They also vainly (until Carrie takes over) attempt to pitch their tents.
With nowhere to wash their hands and seemingly no sanitary place in which to prepare food, the chefs strap lights to their heads (the kind that coal miners used to use when heading down into the tunnels) so that they can get some of their prep work done before night descends. Between the spooky forest, increasing darkness, and flood of narrow beams of light emanating from the chefs’ foreheads, it looks more like Top Chef: X-Files than Top Chef: Denver.
Tom lightens the mood when he brings them ingredients with which to make s’mores. It’s easy for him to play good cop when he gets to leave and sleep (presumably) in a warm hotel bed, while the chefs rough it in their camping tents.
Six hours later, the chefs are up and at it again. While her fellow chefs fight amongst themselves for space over the fire, Carrie has created an oven by burying coal and her cake batter (contained in individual cups, as she was unable to find a camping dutch oven) under the snow. Her first batch goes badly—the batter is heating up too much, too quickly. She adjusts and hopes for the best.
And hope she must, as she’s part of the first group for service. She serves her upside down cake with strawberry, rhubarb, and blueberry jam next to Joe’s braised and roasted squab with farro, Fatima’s cacao-spiced duck breast with sunchokes, and Bruce’s egg yolk cavatelli with wild boar and roasted ramps. Everything is a huge hit. Fatima’s duck is delicious, Bruce’s pasta is fabulous, the judges can’t stop eating Carrie’s cake . . . the only slight slip up is the fact that Joe’s squab is a bit overcooked.
The next group approaches the judges, which elicits a “Oh my goodness, it’s Lee Anne Wong!” from Gail. Yup, fourteen seasons later, Lee Anne is back and on top of her game. She has a goose confit with goose cracklings and fiddleehad ferns. The judges absolutely devour it, going back to scrape more sauce off of the serving platter. They also love Adrienne’s quail stuffed with mustard greens with purple corn grits, though the breast is a bit overcooked. Claudette guajillo-spiced elk wins raves, which is tender and juicy. Moustache Joe has a warm trout fumet (some sort of broth) which the judges love with his roasted trout with foraged greens.
With no obvious weak links so far, it’s down to the final group. Tanya has what looks to be a faux Thanksgiving platter with a grilled lamb loin with a mushroom sauce, warm farro salad, and blackberry compote. The dish confuses the judges—they have no idea how to eat it or what the intent is for any of the components. Chris has a buffalo chili with buffalo flank steak. While the judges enjoy his chili, the buffalo steak is dry as a bone. They also have issues with Tu’s rabbit three-ways (soy poached, loin medallions, and fried foreleg), which is dry and accompanied by flavorless garnishes. Finally, Brother serves up a lemon-herb pheasant with rutabaga and ramps, but his protein is overcooked and chewy.
As the judges start their discussion, it’s clear that most everyone in the first two groups did well, and that the weakest dishes were all in the final group. In the end, Bruce, Lee Anne, and Carrie come out on top. Bruce’s sauce was delicious and paired really well with his cavatalli, which he ingeniously rolled out using the grooves in his mandolin. Lee Anne’s fiddleheads were well appreciated by Gail, and Tom praises her sauce as one of the most delicious things he’s tasted in a long time. Finally, Carrie earns well deserved plaudits for her cake, which could have gone so wrong, but ended up being light, fluffy, and having just the right amount of sweetness. One gathers that the cake would have ended up as one of the top dishes, even if made in a regular kitchen.
But as impressive as Carrie and Lee Anne’s dishes were, Bruce takes home the win, which he credits to the lesson he learned of cooking his food the way he knows how to cook it. He pledges to abide by that lesson for the remainder of his time on Top Chef.
Tanya, Chris, and Tu are on the losing end of things. Chris was done in by his buffalo steaks, which was really dry. Tu was far too ambitious in trying to do rabbit three ways, which would have been a struggle to accomplish in a regular kitchen, much less a campsite. As for Tanya’s dish, the judges express total confusion as to what her intent was. She explains that the mushroom sauce was supposed to be eaten with her lamb, while the compote was supposed to be eaten with the farro, and the judges all let out an involuntary “Oh!” of understanding.
It looks like Tanya has saved herself from elimination—while her error seemed to be one of conception, it now looks more like one of plating. That pales in comparison to Chris’s error of drying out his buffalo and Tu’s error of trying to do too much, sacrificing execution.
And that does him in. His dish was overly complex and left little focus on the garnishes. Tu says that he was expecting the result, though it doesn't make it any easier to accept. He’s grown during his time on Top Chef and says that he’ll keep finding ways to evolve through his culinary career.