Last Chance Kitchen: Let's get progressive

Welcome to Top Chef, Not Top Scallop, the world’s greatest Top Chef recap blog. This is a recap of Portland’s Last Chance Kitchen, “Three Perfect Bites.” Read my recap of last week’s LCK here and the latest Top Chef episode here. You can watch the latest LCK here. 

First up: Sorry this is so late. I was on deadline over the weekend and also traveling so LCK got lost in the mix.

Secondly, poor Avishar:

Me pretending I’m part of the conversation:

Sara’s clearly pretty sore about “Restaurant Wars” loss. She laments her fellow chefs “not working together as a team” and when Tom brings up her puzzled performance she abruptly interrupts him to say she “knows her mistakes.” She…does not like being confronted with her failures, does she? No one does, of course, but that’s the price of entry to LCK. Uncut Colicchio wants to help you find redemption, but he will first taunt you. It is the Uncut Colicchio way.

In this spirit, Tom wants Sara to show she knows how to course out a meal. The task is to present a three-course progressive meal in 30 minutes. The twist is that each course can only be served on a soup spoon. (Angelo, soup spoon king, would’ve thrived in this challenge.) To quote Tom: “Let’s get progressive!”

Sasha is confident and knows straightaway the direction she wants to take. Sara has no clue what’s happening and shouts some variation of “I don’t know!” every time Avishar ask what she’s cooking. (“Stop making me ask her!” I imagine Avishar angry-whispering at the producers.) She quickly abandons her initial idea to only do soups, then nixes a Greek trout roe sauce after the tiny portion she’s making fails to emulsify.

Sasha, meanwhile, keeps it cool and collected, serving up:

• Tomatoes with feta and lemon sumac vinaigrette

• Scallop with pesto roso

• Flank steak with creamy caramelized onion puree

Sara’s dishes:

• Roasted red pepper soup with scallions and curry paste

• Scallop with celery root and caviar

• Wagyu steak with butter-braised cabbage and shiitake mushrooms

I knew Sara had this one when Tom decided to judge backwards, beginning with the steak. I think Sasha did, too, as her face appeared to fall after the joy of winning that course faded. Why do it that way unless Sara won the other two? Tom knocks Sara’s cooking of the wagyu, but her use of the feta and pesto proved to be too overwhelming in addition to muddying the progression.

Sara’s clear relief at winning results in a “woop woop!” celebration that feels a little cold alongside Sasha’s clear despondence. Sasha’s teary confessional is sad—“there’s nothing I can do,” she says, a reference to her having exhausted literally all options of getting back into the competition. She was on a streak, lost, got another chance, won again, won again, and finally has to call it quits. “I fought the shit out of it,” she very correctly states. I’d love to see her return in a future season, to be honest. In different circumstances, I think she’d seriously be a rose to reckon with.

As for Sara, it’s her game to lose.

P.S. I still haven’t gotten a screener for tonight’s episode so my recap may drop late.