Befuddled by coffee romesco

Beer, coffee, and COVID

Welcome to Top Chef, Not Top Scallop, the world’s greatest Top Chef recap blog. This is a review of Top Chef: Portland, episode 2. My name is Randall Colburn and I am going to make fun of Richard Blais a lot. 

“From a pedigree standpoint, this could be the best collection of chefs we’ve had on the show in 18 seasons.” So says Tom near the end of this week’s episode, echoing Padma’s observation last week that there’s not a sous chef in the bunch. This batch of cheftestants are all either restaurant owners, executive chefs, or former Colicchio & Sons employees. Neat? Well, not for me. One of the things I’ve always liked about Top Chef is how it serves as a level playing field, with sous chefs and sauciers competing against, and often toppling, industry vets and James Beard winners. Remember when Kenny King strutted into D.C. like he was untouchable, then spent the six episodes trawling the bottom before getting booted? Amanda lasted longer than him! Amanda!

Amanda reading this:

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy this group of chefs, but underdogs are important. I’m usually rooting for the underdogs. Remember Jim from Alabama? I loved Jim from Alabama. Anyways, that probably explains why I’m head over heels for Sara. Sara, to be clear, is not an underdog. Per this Eater interview, she’s both a James Beard Award semi-finalist and was named one of Zagat’s 30 under 30, but she tends to operate like an outsider, relentlessly toeing this pit of despairing self-deprecation while refusing to openly acknowledge what a big deal it is to be on Top Chef, perhaps as a means of not collapsing beneath the weight of expectation. We’ve seen self-deprecation on the show before, but never quite like this. Where others—I’m thinking specifically of Jesse from Vegas and Danyele from Seattle—crumbled in their despair, Sara just grins through it. Sure, it helps that she’s consistently been on the top, but I have a strong feeling she’d bounce back from failure just fine. Her lack of outward reverence for both the industry and the competition is weirdly refreshing. These people are often so damn self-serious.

She serves as a contrast, too, to the other chefs, several of whom clearly have a lot invested in the competition. Sasha and Shota, for example, both reveal that they’ve gotten sober during the pandemic, the impact of which led them to self-medicate. Stories of personal struggle and sobriety have long been part of the show’s humanity, but it hits different here, if only because the wounds are still so fresh. The pandemic, which has devastated the restaurant industry, is ongoing. They’ve yet to come out the other end. When Shota leaves the competition, he’s still going to have two closed restaurants to reckon with. Obviously, that Top Chef rub will help them rebuild, but the future’s as uncertain now as it was when they filmed this.

Anyways…

Tom Colicchio @tomcolicchio

Top Chef time

Quickfire

I have been waiting 13 goddamned years for Top Chef to return to a diner. The Chicago Quickfire where the chefs had to get up at the crack of dawn and poach eggs on the line at a chaotic greasy spoon is the kind of challenge this show needs more of. It’s funny (and revealing) to see the world’s best chefs be cooks again, operating under a level of sweaty, real-world pressure that’s light-years more stressful than a timer in the Top Chef kitchen.

But, yeah, this challenge wasn’t that. It couldn’t be that. The air is poison. I still dug what they came up with. It works like this: One of the guest judges requests a diner-style dish, then the chefs ring a bell if they’d like to whip up their own version of it. Only the first two chefs who ring in are allowed to make each dish, which ladles on the pressure to ring in fast. You might not want to ring in fast, though, because you might want to wait until the next judge requests a dish that’s better suited to your style. I dig those multiple modes of anxiety, that combination of rushing and waiting. It was fun to see how torturous it was for the chefs to not cook as their peers were getting started on their own dishes.

Notable dishes include Gabe’s steak and eggs with black garlic molasses, a dish that also included adobo. It was adobo, lest we forget, that sent Roscoe home last week. A tribute or an own?

You decide.

Shota, too, is praised for his shrimp dumpling mochi, a true feat in just 30 minutes. Chris and Nelson, meanwhile, get some participation points for being stuck with Blais’ sprawling order of corn beef hash with eggs over medium, hash browns, and hollandaise. (To be honest, I would’ve preferred to see all the chefs be forced to throw together such a common, but complicated, diner staple in the time frame. That still doesn’t mean I like Blais, though.) The winner is Jamie’s cheddar polenta with cajun gochujang shrimp, which had Kwame swooning the second it landed in front of him. And my winner is Cowpoke Jamie’s rootin’, tootin’ guns-blazin’ victory dance. She gets immunity.

This season’s got some weirdos, y’all.

Observation: The Top Chef kitchen being ginormous this season has resulted in the sweatiest presentations in Top Chef history. The huffing and puffing is off the charts. They need to towel these people off. Disgusting.

A personal note: I am 100% more invested in Byron now that I know he worked at Burger King as a teenager. As someone who toiled away at McDonald’s for two years in high school, I have grown to revere and respect anyone who’s been through fast food hell.

Elimination Challenge

The elimination challenge seems so straightforward at first: Cook a dish incorporating either coffee or beer, two beverages that are well-represented in Portland. It isn’t long, however, until Tom “The Joker” Colicchio arrives with a twist.

The chefs, who have already picked up their ingredients, thought they were working individually, but they’ll instead be paired into teams. Chefs who drew coffee must now work with a chef who drew beer. And, given that they’re both drinks are known for their bitterness, that combination isn’t the most natural. Tom specifies that each cohesive dish must feature singular elements from each chef, ensuring that no chef just abandons their own planned dish in favor of the others. The team creation must be a fusion.

That results in some anxiety. Byron is struggling to mesh his ingredients with Chris’, while Gabriel, who gave up his ahi tuna in favor of Dawn’s ribs, continues to cement his reputation as a shitty partner. “Gabriel’s trying to chefsplain things to me,” Dawn says after Gabriel starts spice-policing her, thus marking Top Chef’s first official use of “chefsplain,” which, believe it or not, I have used several times over the last few years. (“Foodsplain” also works, and is a handy phrase to use when someone takes issue with your overnight oats preparation, FYI.)

POV: You’re being chefsplained:

Let’s look at the losers:

Bryon and Chris’ coffee and berbere-spiced duck breast, mushroom and coffee tortellini, beer and miso foam, and beer-marinated mushroom

Byron: “I’m not confident. I’m worried about the thickness of the pasta.”

Melissa: “I love that there was a lot of beer flavor in this dish, but the pasta just wasn’t cooked enough.”

Tom: “Too much dry flour when [Chris] was rolling it out…it was a little brittle.”

Padma: “I thought the pasta could’ve had more filling.”

Gregory: “The foam is tasty.”

Brittanny and Sasha’s beer-marinated pork loin with beets, milk salt vinaigrette, coffee romesco, and coffee hazelnut crunch

Sasha: “I’m happy about the flavors we’re getting…[I]t’s really punchy.”

Dale: “Just a lack of a point of view here. It felt like two people making a dish.”

Padma: “Lacked any kind of personality or point of view.”

Tom: “Pretty bland.”

Amar: “I don’t taste the beer anywhere.”

Carrie: “It needs a sauce.”

Gail: “I’m sorta befuddled by the coffee romesco.”

Dale: “It felt like a dish conflicted. That romesco, it just wasn’t romesco.”

As the comments suggest, Chris’ thick pasta wasn’t as tough to swallow as Sasha’s coffee romesco, which was universally reviled by the judge’s table. Sad to see her go. She had spark and was clearly talented; wish we could’ve seen more of her food. But, hey, Last Chance Kitchen! When Tom was like, “See you in Last Chance Kitchen?” it genuinely sounded like he was curious. Like maybe she just won’t go. Made me laugh.

The winners:

Gabe and Sara’s espresso-cured pork tenderloin, smoked yogurt, hazelnut salsa macha, and tortilla with stout and porter that was tied with a little herb bow

Gail: “Smells beautiful, this masa.”

Kwame: “When you have time to do all of this technique and then tie something in a bow, you’re stunting on everyone in the competition.”

Tom: “You get beef, you get coffee, but it’s not bitter and over the top.”

Dale: “Talk about embracing the challenge.”

Gail: “Sara, you have a thing with yogurt.”

Gabriel and Dawn’s coffee and sour beer-braised pork rib and watermelon compressed with sour beer

Kwame: (about the watermelon) “It’s like candy. It’s so good.”

Amar: “Phenomenal.”

Gail: “It looked like watermelon and ribs, but when you tasted it there was so much more.”

Carrie: “I personally would’ve loved more pickle, more garnish.”

Padma: “It was so refreshing and so delicate for pork ribs.”

Gail: “There was this rich fattiness from the rib that paired with the beer-compressed watermelon.”

Avishar and Shota’s lobster sunomono with double cream coffee and stout reduction and carbonated grapes

Avishar: “We focused on textural components and different flavors.”

Melissa: “It was beautifully composed. Lobster’s perfectly cooked. And I love the richness of the sauce, it just sung to me.”

Tom: “The modern technique of carbonating the fruit, it’s a great time to use this.”

Amar: “It was so harmonious.”

Shota’s strong showing continues and Avishar gets a little redemption after his poor Quickfire showing and the absolute wailing he took last week. Avishar’s credited his background in biology with his idea for the carbonated grapes, which turned out to be the highlight of the dish.

Me eating carbonated grapes:

Avishar is obviously talented but there’s a boyishness about him I find incredibly charming. Look at how he leaps in the air to high-five Shota! Shota is shorter than you, dude!

Scraps

• FYI: I’ll be back in your inboxes with a brief recap of LCK either tomorrow or this weekend.

• If you like Top Chef, Not Top Scallop, please share it far and wide! I’m new to this whole Substack thing so I’ll take any help I can get in getting it out there. Also, feel free to chime in in the comments. Would love to see some discussions get going.

• The three Portland breakfast spots Gregory recommended are Fried Egg I’m In Love, Canard, and Mother’s Bistro. Have any of you been?

• It looked like several of the chefs were incorporating beers from Thunder Island, which has a gorgeous tap room in Cascade Locks.

• I forgot to mention: Carrie is here! I loved Carrie on Top Chef: Denver, and it’s lovely to see her still spreading the gospel of “fancy toast.”

• Sara says she’s doing Top Chef because she’s been out of the traditional restaurant scene for a year and wants to “keep it spicy.” I loved it when one of the chefs—Jamie, I think—brought that up during the Quickfire. I’d make fun of her, too.

• Sara also has a “good luck fish” she kisses before challenges. We might laugh, but it’s working for her so far.

• In describing the personalities of the various chefs, Sasha says she hangs out with Shota when she wants to be “crazy and a little shithead.”

• Dale calls Nelson and Maria’s chile relleno dish “a little crazy, a little cockamamie.”

• Here’s that gif of Dale eating again. I’m obsessed with it.

• Next week on Top Chef: Gregory and Kwame give the chefs a crash course in cuisine that highlights the African diaspora. Also, Tom thinks the red sauce is “kinda bland.”

• And this week in Richard Blais looking like a turd: