Last Chance Kitchen: Shouldn't have picked the feet

"Kiki, no!"

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, “Last Chance Chicken.” Read my recap of last week’s LCK here and of this week’s Top Chef episode here. You can watch the latest LCK here. 

And we’re back! After she brrrrppppp’d her way through a rubber chicken, Tom wants to know if Jamie can “fight her way back on more than a wing and a prayer.”

Jamie is such a delight. It’s like there’s a Roman candle firing inside her at all times. She is positively volcanic in her weirdness. Her chaotic energy is matched by today’s chicken challenge, which finds Uncut Colicchio pushing the chefs to cook the most amount of chicken parts in the least amount of time.

Kiki, however, pulls a real Joker move by throwing chicken feet into their pot of livers, thighs, skin, and oysters. And this, rather hilariously, dampens the second part of the setup, in which Uncut Colicchio urges the chefs to one-up each other by opting for less time. In an ideal challenge, they’d be chopping off minutes left and right, hoping to trip up their competition. But both Jamie and Kiki know that chicken feet need time, so Tom’s only able to get them to drop from 30 to 25 minutes. His deflated delivery of “You’re chicken already?” at 4:10 is amazing, as is Kiki’s horrified realization that “I shouldn’t have picked the feet.”

The peanut gallery of Roscoe, Sasha, and Brittanny watch in amused horror as Jamie and Kiki try to butcher their chickens, excise the parts, and cram them into a coherent dish in 25 minutes. Kiki calls the challenge “crazy” and “otherworldly,” while Brittanny cracks that “it’s like Tom wants to eat raw chicken.” This, I imagine, got in the head of Kiki—who went home for serving raw chicken—leading her to space out and fry the drumstick instead of the thigh. Not a massive mistake, but one that doesn’t highlight the key ingredients as well. The thigh ends up in her stock with the rest of the weirdo ingredients. This comes back to bite her later.

Jamie, meanwhile…

…and…

She gets it together by making a curry with a baguette, a dish she says reminds her of her dad and childhood. She smears the baguette with a mousse that offers a variation in her incorporation of the ingredients. This comes back to help her later.

Kiki ends up with a fried chicken drumstick with fennel, Napa cabbage, and radicchio slaw with a hearty stock.

Jamie’s got her chicken curry in a chili chicken stock.

And that’s what wins, with Tom citing Jamie’s more varied and creative use of the key ingredients. It might’ve been different if Kiki fried the thigh instead of the drumstick, but Tom also dings her underseasoned coating. He does, however, praise the actual frying, which is a relief since that’s what sent her home previously.

Big news: Whoever wins next week is coming back to the competition! That’s huge!

And now I leave you with a truly Uncut Colicchio:

Tom gettin’ fucked up.