Evil in a very beautiful way

Pan-African cuisine, layered desserts, and existential questions

Welcome to Top Chef, Not Top Scallop, the world’s greatest Top Chef recap blog. This is a review of Top Chef: Portland, episode 3. My name is Randall Colburn and I am going to make fun of Richard Blais a lot. Read last week’s recap here and my first LCK recap here.

There’s perhaps nothing so punishing on Top Chef as watching a chef get dinged for a dish that means the world to them. Chefs resurrect a recipe they used to cook with Grandma, something that used to headline their own dinner tables, and get told it’s bland or uninteresting or lacking in soul. It’s like showing an adult a movie you loved as a kid; they don’t have that same nostalgic connection. You can’t be mad at them for not grasping it, but you can still be stung. It’s alienating in its way, but also revealing. Cooking is so wrapped up in identity, and one of the neat things about Top Chef is in how personality is revealed on the plate as much as it is in interviews or interactions with their fellow chefs.

Let’s look at Kiki, who ended up on the bottom this week with her beef saka saka et fufu. The personal connection is there: It was one of the first recipes taught to Kiki, a first-generation Congolese, by her father. But her desire to showcase Congolese cuisine is wrapped up in so many other heavy emotions, ones that speak to her sense of cultural identity, her culinary perspective, and her career, which appears to be in a state of mutation. As she reveals in this episode, she split in early 2020 from her acclaimed Detroit restaurants because, in her words, she was “fighting for [her] voice to be heard” in her own businesses. (Here’s an Eater article about her departure.) She got even more candid at the judge’s table: “This challenge hits home in a very deep way for me. I have spent years cooking other people’s food and feeling as though mine was not important.” If she goes home, she goes on to say, she is “not going to take that lightly.” What that means, exactly, is unclear in this context, but it speaks to the weight of what she feels is her responsibility. She admits she biffed the fufu—a balled puree that can consist of boiled white yams, sweet potatoes, plantains, or cassava—and, despite Kwame’s praise, wishes she had more time with the stew. She demanded perfection, as one does when you’re excavating your own recesses, and coming up short of that has clearly rocked her foundation. I’m thankful she’s still around, if only to hear her elaborate on the fallout of this challenge.

(Also, here’s a link to the Times piece Kiki mentions. It also features Kwame, as well as Top Chef alums Nyesha Arrington (Texas) and Nina Compton (New Orleans). I actually thought of Nyesha at the beginning of the episode, weirdly enough. When Brittanny is crying over Sasha’s departure, she says it “doesn’t feel right that one person should go home for a dish two people worked on.” Nyesha might disagree, as she went home on a team elimination where the faults rested entirely on her partner. She wuz robbed!)

And with that…

Tom Colicchio @tomcolicchio

Top Chef time

Quickfire

How convenient that Top Chef secured a deal with Talenti Gelato & Sorbetto Layers on the same season where the chefs would be tasked with creating a layered dessert. Man, sometimes the stars just do align like that. Seriously, though, this Talenti trash looks delicious, even with that moron music they were playing beneath it. It sounded like a midi track you’d hear on a late-‘90s Angelfire website about jazz.

You see, the Talenti Layers were (checks notes) “cooked for an indulgent 45 minutes to achieve maximum flavor”—Jeezus, not even Padma can sell this copy—so the chefs have 45 minutes to create a dessert that has at least three layers. “You do not need to make gelato,” Padma emphasizes. Somewhere, a sweating, coke-smeared Talenti exec is throwing a chair through a window: “I TOLD THEM THEY HAD TO MAKE GELATO.” Carrie is the guest judge, with Padma recalling the time she made a tasty cake by burying it in the ground and unearthing it, Pet Sematary-style.

The winner gets a smokin’ $10,000.

Everybody’s desserts looked goopy and delicious, though Chris got the bad kind of needle drop when he introduced his “smoked chanterelle pastry cream,” scoring him the dreaded “interesting” reaction from Carrie.

It’s Avishar who comes out on top with his buckeye bonbon with brown butter and (gasp) liquid graham cracker. It looks like a turd in snow and Padma’s intense attempts to chew it portend doom, but the ingenuity of the nugget—and Avishar’s personal connection, it being an elevated version of Ohio’s state dish—helps score him the win.

It easily had the most character of any of the desserts, not to mention a texture that Padma couldn’t stop thinking about. “I’m impressed with how cold and intact these are,” she said. Later, she added, “I loved how there was a crunch to the enrobed chocolate.” These are sentences I have not heard on Top Chef before, and for that I loved them.

Padma eating Avishar’s buckeye bonbon:

Me eating Avishar’s buckeye bonbon:

I also thought it was telling how the general reaction of molecular gastronomy has shifted since the Days of Blais. “I swear it’s not for show,” Avishar said in a cloud of gas. “I swear it has a reason.” Marcel, meanwhile, has a foam he’d like to sell you.

Elimination Challenge

The last two seasons saw Eric Adjepong introducing some African flavors to the series, and it’s heartening to see the show’s continued efforts to highlight these marginalized spices and ingredients. Gregory and Kwame split up the cheftestants for a tour of Portland restaurants that specialize in Pan-African flavors inspired by Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana, and West Africa, among others. The challenge is to create a dish inspired by these flavors. It’s an individual effort with no twists, though I chuckled at the nutty thought of Tom walking in on the chefs prepping and shouting, “Now make it Irish!”

Dawn, like Kiki, is thrilled to have the opportunity to showcase this side of her skill set. Nelson and Maria, meanwhile, find parallels in their own styles of Latin cooking, while others, specifically Brittanny, struggle to find any parallels at all. Brittanny, as the judges would go on to point out, was far too swept up in the spiciness of it all, so much so that she seems to have missed the forest for the trees. I was especially struck, though, by Chris’ journey. He grew up eating Haitian cuisine but went on to study fancy French techniques. He felt a spiritual connection to the dishes, but didn’t quite have the tools to execute them.

Speaking of Brittanny, let’s look at the losers:

Chris’ pan-fried red snapper marinated in epis, crispy rice cake, mushroom and bean puree, twice-fried plantain, pickles

Gregory: “I think he tried a little too hard to reinterpret Haitian parts of the dish.”

Tom: “Chris made a bunch of technical mistakes here.”

Dale: “There’s too much on the plate and nothing was honed in and expertly done.”

Gregory: “I was missing a lot of technique and a lot of seasoning.”

Tom: “You gave us a collection of ingredients, not a dish. No point of view. We didn’t see you.”

Gail: “He wanted to give us everything, but he didn’t know how to do everything.”

When I heard Gail say that:

Kiki’s beef saka saka et fufu

Kiki: “Being first generation Congolese, it doesn’t feel good to mess up your fufu.”

Gail: “I really enjoyed the flavors. It tasted like it had been developed over time.”

Kwame: “She put a lot of flavor in here. It’s just the fufu, unfortunately, the starch isn’t cooked out of this. And it’s cold.”

Akadi owner: “The fufu was a no-go.”

Brittanny’s pickled mackerel with allspice fritter, red stew, coconut sauce, and charred cucumber

Kwame: “The flavors were monotone and they were competing against each other.”

Tom: “The red sauce is kinda bland.”

Kwame: “She muted it with the coconut milk.”

Gail: “It doesn’t feel to be any depth to her red sauce.”

Melissa: “I really liked her mackerel.”

Gail: “It didn’t need heat…”

Kwame: “…it needed salt.”

Tom: “It almost seems like you’re not letting yourself cook. What do you love about cooking? Tell us your story.”

Brittanny: “Maybe I’m here and I’m learning I don’t know. I think I cook a lot from my head and not my heart.”

Despite the heavy emphasis on Kiki, who had the strongest story in relation to the challenge, it was obvious that either Brittanny or Chris would be heading home. All three chefs had technical issues, but it was Brittanny and Chris who were lacking a strong POV. Tom essentially asked the same questions of both of them: WHY DO YOU COOK? Alas, Brittanny will only be able to answer that question on Last Chance Kitchen.

Aside from those in the bottom three, the rest of the chefs excelled nearly as well as those who ended up on top. “This is some extraordinary cooking,” Tom said, his belt nearly bursting. Kwame gushed over Byron’s red stew, Tom was giddy for Maria’s “fluffy” black eyed pea crema with oxtail, and Gregory praised Sara’s coconut rice porridge for being “so out of the box.” Still, none of them ended up on top.

As for those who did…

Shota’s black cod and cabbage with turmeric, cloves, allspice, and yuzu sauce

Shota: “I was pretty anxious. I don’t cook with spices a lot.”

Gregory: “It looked Japanese, but when you taste the sauce it was anything but. It had so much dimension.”

Amar: “I was waiting for that spice and I got it.”

Blais: “I can tell ‘cause you’re crying.”

Amar: “I am crying a little bit.”

Jamie’s crispy snapper, turmeric couscous, heirloom tomatoes pickes

Jamie: “The fried fish at Akadi reminded me of my mom’s.”

Gail: “The fish is so light and crispy.”

Kwame: “I love how she used the suya spice and couscous. She took this challenge and owned it.”

Amar: “Every bite is really bright.”

Padma: “You managed to show us how these flavors can be translated in a new, modern way.”

Gail: “It felt like you’d been making this dish for years.”

Dawn’s curried goat, crispy roti and fondant potatoes with green pepper sauce

Dawn: “I can’t feel more in touch with the food that we’re making right now. It’s a long time coming.”

Tom: “Love the fact that it’s on the bone.”

Kwame: “This green puree, I want a jar of it.”

Blais: “She nailed the inspiration when it comes to these flavors. It’s the first dish I want the recipe for.”

Tom: “Everything was just where it needed to be.”

A solid win for Dawn, who struck me in the first two episodes as a chef still finding her footing. Now, she seems to have found it. “You’re making the ancestors proud,” says Kwame.

Scraps

• Keep sharing and commenting! I love hearing from you!

• “This game is evil in a very beautiful way,” Maria says at the top of the episode. Hear hear!

• You can check out the four restaurants featured in the episode here: Akadi, Yaad, Bake On The Run, and Mathilde’s Kitchen.

• Oh, what I would give to pull off either of their coats:

• Credit where it’s due: Blais calling Gabriel’s “too white” seemed pretty on point. Also loved Tom dunking on his “designer mashed potatoes.”

• Next time on Top Chef: Gabriel channels Winnebago Man after getting stung by a bee. Tom wears this hat:

  

  • And, to cap us off, Blais turd pic of the week:

• Stay tuned for an LCK recap on Saturday. You can read last week’s here.