Hey everybody, my name is Steve and I’m filling in for the lovely and talented Emily Withrow as this week’s Top Chef Masters critic-meister. I feel uniquely qualified to review tonight’s episode “Tailgating” because it involves one of the few areas of cooking where I have a measure of expertise. I’m a life-long Wisconsinite, and if there’s one thing us Wisconsinites do well, it’s consuming mass quantities of food and alcohol in the vicinity of large sports arenas.
Unfortunately, what I saw on Top Chef Masters tonight barely resembles tailgating as I know and love it. First off, what’s with all the tacos? Where I come from, tailgating is built on a rock-solid foundation of sausages, potato salad, and chips. All these wonderful chefs and no one is capable of coming up with a freaking gourmet brat? I know this “tailgating” competition was taking place at USC, a namby-pamby, possibly imaginary place where blonde and bronzed people get chilly when the temperature dips below 80 degrees—maybe overly fancy stuff like Rick’s baba ghanoush pita thing flies there. But for me, only Susan’s predictably delicious-looking tacos appeared to even approach the heart-clogging heartiness that distinguishes true tailgating food as I know it.
Going into the challenge, I figured Tony—a Chicago guy, and someone who clearly has eaten a sausage or 10,000 in his life—would win this in a walk. But his skimpy pizza clearly wasn’t going to cut it, and he was shipped home. Susan ended up winning, but overall the elimination challenge was a disappointment. I like Top Chef Masters more when it places seemingly impossible restrictions on the chefs, and forces them to pull some serious culinary magic out of their highly decorated backsides. Tonight’s challenge just didn’t seem particularly inspired in this regard. The only person at a disadvantage tonight was Susur, who, like last week with The Simpsons, was unfamiliar with this competitive folly you humans call football. But because he’s totally a samurai of the kitchen, he placed among the top scorers anyway.
I might be in the minority on this one, but I’m rooting for Susur. I get a kick out of that loony bastard. To me, Susur is the ideal TCM contestant: incredibly gifted, kind of nuts, and capable of doing mind-bogglingly complex and accomplished work in the same amount of time it takes me to make a grilled cheese sandwich. I think he’s obviously the best chef on the show. Popular opinion seems to be with Waxman, who’s gentler and less abrasive than Susur but seems to have hit a wall in the last two weeks. Susur, on the other hand, is doing dazzling work even when he seems (pardon the pun) completely out to lunch, which is pretty much all the time.