So how do you follow up by far the worst episode of the season? With by far the best, naturally.
Everything was clicking tonight: Fun challenges, lots of tension and bitchy one-liners, and enough attention on each contestant to where we really got to separate wheat from chaff. This seems odd to say about a cooking show, but the episode excelled even though the food itself, by and large, wasn’t terribly interesting. When you’re catering a wedding with barely over 24 hours notice and are forced to prep and serve without getting a wink of sleep, finesse doesn’t count so much as simple carrying it across the finish line.
After Padma informs the group that the Quickfire winner will no longer be granted immunity, she and Tom reprise the exhilarating four-person team “relay race” from last season. Last year’s race wasn’t much of a contest: Between Hung’s blazing Benihana-on-amphetamines knife skills and Casey’s…um… fastidious onion-cutting style, one team finished well ahead of the other. Not so this time, despite Antonia’s slow start on the orange peel and Nikki’s apparent unfamiliarity with the mayo-making process. (Dale, who was in no mood to suffer foods this episode, didn’t try to hide his frustration with Nikki or the other chefs on his team, whom he branded—accurately if pettily—as not the most skilled of the remaining contestants.) Some exciting showdowns here, with the adrenaline-rush predictably spazzing up Andrew (“And that’s where the fire comes in”), a monkfish filet pitting Richard against Dale, and a stride-for-stride race between the two anchors in the quart ‘o mayo contest. While nobody had Hung’s flair with the knife, the genuine suspense of the outcome more than made up for it. And addressing Dale’s subsequent tantrum, Antonia got to fire off the opening salvo in an evening full of amusing cattiness: “He punched the locker and then he had to have his diaper changed.”
Moving on to the Elimination challenge, the same two teams squared off in “Wedding Wars,” which repeats the toughest challenge from Season One (I remember Harold feeling particularly bitter about it) while also filling in for the expected favorite “Restaurant Wars.” This seemed like a bad idea to me: For one, I’m with Harold in thinking that the one-day-notice wedding catering challenge is unreasonably difficult and doesn’t really play to the contestants’ strengths, since most are more seasoned in restaurant cooking. For two, I always enjoy “Restaurant Wars” and didn’t necessarily want to see it supplanted, though I frankly could care less about the front-of-the-house conceits that go into setting up the fake eateries. And yet, it was tremendous fun to watch a bunch of exhausted, irritable, punch-drunk chefs go at it—not so much a marvel of cooking as an edifying social experiment in sleep deprivation.
In terms of talent, the teams were badly mismatched: All four of the chefs on the Bride’s Team (Richard, Andrew, Antonia, Stephanie) have shown mad skilz, and with the possible exception of Andrew, all of them have a chance to win Top Chef outright. The Groom’s Team (Nikki, Dale, Lisa, Spike), on the other hand, has only one clear talent in Dale, two uneven-at-best performers in Lisa and Spike, and Nikki has been overmatched time and again. Fate cruelly puts the ball in Nikki’s court, as the groom favored an Italian menu, which is supposed to be within her wheelhouse—at least as those endless yards of homemade pasta would seem to attest. And how does she respond? As any future executive chef wouldn’t: She shirks her leadership duties despite her supposed expertise on Italian food, focusing instead on individual dishes that she hopes will give her a leg up on her teammates.