Friday, 17 February 2012

• Top Chef Recap: Culinary Games

  

  We’re finally down to the final four in this long, uneventful, Dallas season of Top Chef. If you have kept up with the season as I have, it only proves how bad everything else on television is. If you haven’t, you probably have a life.

  These chef’s have jumped through so many hoops this season that you would hope that by now they have earned their right to simply cook and have a platform to show the audience who they are as chefs. However, the producers are trying to turn Top Chef into a Japanese game show,  so this episode puts them through the worst hell yet. The insurance must have been through the roof for this episode because there were multiple occasions when someone could have died. I wonder how many releases had to be signed.

  For some reason the chef’s are in British Columbia, at Whistler Olympic Park, performing the Top Chef version of a three-leg Olympic event. The winner of each event gets $10,000, which is a nice way to ensure that everyone in the finale leaves with some cash. 

  

  For the first event the competitors must cook in a moving gondola, picking up a mysterious ingredient midway.  Somehow in this swaying death trap at stomach curdling heights and below freezing temps, they have to make a dish. Even with the gondola twist, the editors managed to not only make this challenge mind-meltingly boring, but also barely focused on any of the dishes. Lindsey won, but I don’t even know what she made.

  

  I’m surprised no one was shanked in the second challenge. The chef’s had to hack away at giant ice blocks with picks to free their ingredients. This is just mean. Paul broke through first and proved that chivalry is not dead by helping Sarah and Bev break the ice cubes and shared his own ingredients with them as well. Helping them didn’t hinder him because his mango and crab dish won.

  

  The final leg of the event takes the show to a new level of absurd. The last two, Beverly and Sarah, must cross-country ski then shoot at targets to pick the ingredients they will cook. I thought the competition was to find the best chef not the best Mountie. I have been cheering for Beverly this entire season. She was eliminated and returned by beating out the other eliminated chefs in Top Chef’s webisodes of Last Chance Kitchen. Part of my affinity for Bev is that I too am small and have a high pitched voice, and therefore also had a hard time earning the respect of my tall, baritone, culinary coworkers. Beverly had a strong start, nailing all her targets and getting to the kitchen first, but ultimately Sarah won and the comeback kid went home.

  

  Hopefully next week’s finale will treat the chef’s with some respect, but I doubt it. I would not be surprised if they had to cook underwater in a frozen lake or using only tools they can whittle out of moose antlers.

  What kind of torture do you think they will come up with next week?

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