...the judgment used to select this craptacular piece of headgear. However the male ego is an interesting thing and for a second there I thought that our two male chefs were going to grunt and belly bump to cement their ritualistic macho bonding.
Obviously cooking and plating a hundred servings in an hour is a challenge that requires a fairly simple dish but still have some decent flavor for the judges and not forgetting the aforementioned consistency. Mike and Richard decide to go with pasta with a Bolognese sauce, highly confident that their status as "The Ones To Beat" will automatically make their Quickfire the winning dish and thereby crushing the girls. This, my little Crack Monkeys, is a luscious tidbit of foreshadowing, an amuse bouche of smack talk with a gelée of impending karmic justice. Antonia and Tiffany decide to do a seared beef salad with lentils, celery leaves and a chimichurri sauce. Notice that there are four components. Blais continues with some smack talk about how someone with no vision will fall back on a seared meat salad. He feels that their pasta with meat sauce, with it's two cooked components is much more ambitious due to the fact that they are making their own pasta in an hour. What's funny is that the very advice he gave to Mike, "Don't get confused by the technique, it's about the plates being perfect" is lost when he looks at the other team's dish. That they made their own pasta doesn't matter, it's those four components on the plate, all being consistent being compared to their two components of a pasta and a meat sauce. Could come back to bite you Richard.
Not to be outdone in the smack talk department, Mikey puts forth that he could have made all of Antonia's and Tiffany's dishes, by himself. Bold talk from a guy only made and cooked pasta and choked at Restaurant Wars searing lamb.
Of course the Red Team wins...
and something definitely got crushed...
...as possible Therapy money flies right out the window. I'm thinking Mikey and Blais are finding the Karmic Justice Gelée a wee bit bitter.
4 comments:
Noodling around the interwebs and found an interview with TomC. - had some of the behind the scenes stuff I like.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/tom-colicchio,53253/
I think the purpose of the quickfire was the usual reason - product pimpage. I think Butoni put up $5K.
As soon as Blais and Mike teamed up I knew they were doomed. They made a perceived stacked team against a perceived underdog team - boys against girls. A guy/girl team puts both teams on equal ground. And the judges also weren't watching how much effort was put into their dishes. Even if they went out back and slaughtered their own cow (which would have been cool to see), that would have no affect on the final plates.
I didn't like this quickfire at all. Having team catering challenges with the final 4 is not what anyone wants to see.
Thanks for linking that up Froggy. I thought is was a very interesting interview. Off the top of my here's what stuck out. I think the Elia post elimination comments stung a little more than Tom would like to admit. I think Tom flipflops on chefs defending their dishes. He says he thinks the chefs know when they make a bad dish but within the same answer he begins to describe when he gets a bad review from a restaurant critic he'll call and defend his dish. But the biggest thing is the whole "we don't take in consideration a chef's past performance" explanation. I still find that very hard to swallow. If they judged all the dishes blind, they could make that arguement much easier but they've refused to do that from the very beginning so yeah, sorry Tom, it's just not very believable.
Sorry Buzz, a wine company put up the scratch for the QF. I'm not naming them because they aren't paying me. And yes a team catering challenge did seem kinda silly.
Thaanks for posting this
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