Top Chef Boston Recap
By Jason Lee
October 20, 2014
Kristin and Tiffani make their way over to Stacy’s booth. “You’re the only one from Boston?” Kristin asks. Yep. Kristin and Tiffani tell her that she has to win for Boston. #GirlPower #BostonStrong
The diners start to arrive... or as Stacy puts it, it’s time to “bend over and grab your ankles.” What a delicious metaphor to kick off our food festival. The diners start to dig in, and the camera gives us a passing glance at Katsuji wearing a cowboy hat. In Boston. At a food festival. Okay, I have no idea what’s going on with him anymore.
The judges - Gail and Tom paired up, and Padma and Richard paired up - start sampling, and overall the reactions are quite good. There don’t appear to be too many disasters, which is amazing for the first episode of the season. Typically, the judges in the first episode eliminate the one chef who really had no reason even appearing on the show. It’s very often a “WTF were we thinking?” moment. And though I can identify a couple of candidates for that honor, for the most part, the chefs appear to have done really well.
Given that there were 15 dishes sampled, I’ll spare you the details on each one. Suffice to say that there was a lot of chicken served, but no mechanical screw-ups and no procedural screw-ups. If any of the chefs excelled or made mistakes, it was generally due to the conception of their dishes. A few examples.
For example, Katsuji serves up what he calls “Petroleum shrimp,” with saffron couscous, serrano aioli, and squid ink fondue (I’ll refrain from making a BP gulf oil spill joke right about now). Richard criticizes, in passive-aggressive fashion, the number of ingredients that went into the dish. Padma criticizes, in blunt fashion, the plating of the dish.
Michael grew up on Russia on a farm, and drawing on memories of making corn soup, serves chilled corn soup with pickled cherries and sriracha caviar. The color is a revolting shade of yellow. Like orangey, highlighter yellow. If you were to come across a tree frog of that hue, the color would indicate, “I AM A HIGHLY POISONOUS TREE FROG SO YOU’D DO BEST NOT TO EAT ME.” Tom tries the dish, dislikes the “fishy finish,” and gets no heat from the sriracha. Michael declares that he got sufficient heat upon tasting the dish and thus he’s not sure what’s wrong with Tom’s palate.
Let’s just pause for a moment and take that in.
Gregory, drawing on something his grandmother used to make, offers up Haitian stewed chicken, fried bananas, spicy “pikliz” (Is that some different spelling? Is Bravo going gangsta on me or something? Is this some iPhone lingo I’m not down with?). Richard asks about his use of Scotch Bonnet Pepper in the dish. Gregory responds that when he was young, he and his cousin would run around eating Scotch Bonnet Peppers and his uncle, a tailor, would grab them and scratch their tongues with little bits of fabric.
Let’s just pause for a moment and take that in.
Finally, we have Aaron, who’s doing bacon and eggs reimagined in the form of temari-braised pork belly and a miso-poached egg (very Asian). Except that by the time Padma shows up, he only has one really fatty piece of pork belly left. Padma inquires whether he meant for her piece to have so much fat on it. He says no. She puts it in her mouth and very visibly gags. She spits the meat out into a napkin. “My apologies,” Richard says, turning red. Richard tries to help Aaron save face by complementing his compote, but Padma will have none of it. “I would love to see you clean up not only your act a little bit, but also your station,” she says, gesturing to his booth.
#THROWINGSHADE
As she walks away, Aaron comments that he “just got burned by Padma.” A few feet away, Padma turns to Richard and says, “I didn’t even eat the fat part. It’s a mess - mess, messy mess.”
I love Padma.
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