Top Chef Recap: The Vile-High Club

First off, my apologies that this Recap is a few days late and on the short side. I was off celebrating the Jewish New Year, praying my hardest that Bravo wouldn't air any more surprise "Do-Overs" or "Watch Nothing Happen" specials to prolong this already interminable season.

This episode is called "Snacks on a Plane," and while that's a cutesy enough pun, I question the wisdom of referencing a notorious example of a massively over-hyped piece of schlock entertainment that failed miserably in terms of actual execution and performance. Do you really want us to start connecting those dots, Bravo? What's it going to be next week, "Fishtar"?

Most weeks begin with a few of the cheffersons fondly recalling the most recent bootee and talking about how much they'll be missed. But now they just skip right past that part; they can do that because this week it didn't happen in the first place. Really, what could any of them have said positively about Howie, short of, "I'll really miss the guy, because he made me look so talented/sane/skinny by comparison."

But to my great surprise, by the end of this episode, I found myself missing him. A lot. As I alluded to last week, the fun of reality shows isn't so much having an underdog to root for but a bulldog like Howie to root against. While I'd be crushed if anyone but Dale ultimately wins, I don't find any of the remaining cheffersons all that hateful or, to be totally honest, all that interesting to watch.

Now I'm venting all of my indignation at the people I think most deserving of elimination the judges. As many forums and blog posts have addressed, judging criteria on this show is spotty at best, and a complete desecration of the concept of logic at worst. But this week exhibits the judging to be not only ridiculously arbitrary but downright nasty in a way I found decidedly unappetizing. You'll see what I mean.

Anyway, we open with this weird kind of "monster's POV" sequence where we follow some seemingly demonic entity scurrying and giggling from room to room and studying the helpless, sleeping cheffersons, just like that little devil doll that terrorizes Karen Black in her apartment in Trilogy of Terror. Except in this case it's something much more frightening. EEK! It's Padma! And she's cheerful!

As someone for whom waking up in the morning is a drawn out, painful process involving large amounts of denial, procrastination, and caffeine, I reserve a special kind of ire for those "morning person" people who seem to awaken like Snow White, all sunshine and bluebirds and (shudder) energy. So the sight of Padma here, running through Chez Chefferson and crowing, "Wake up! Wake up!" is a pretty appalling one, and I found myself seriously questioning the violation of basic human rights going on here.

I understand that reality show contestants have pretty much become our national court jesters, and believe me, I enjoy seeing people tortured and humiliated on TV as much as the next guy. I've seen reality contestants eat giant beetles and unfertilized eggs just for reassurance their loved ones haven't left them during their absence from civilization. But I think as a society we really have gone too far when it comes to people being tickled awake by Padma, don't you? Does Amnesty International know about this? Does Bono?

Of course, the chefs react like any normal human being would to this treatment, groaning and trying desperately to smother themselves with their pillows. When she gets to CJ, he says, "Oh, look, it's Padma in my bedroom, like a dream coming true," but you can tell that he doesn't really feel this way and is only saying it because she so clearly expects someone to. And just how low is her self-esteem, that it's not enough to flaunt her super-model looks against the cheffersons on a normal day but now she's go to do it when they're barely conscious and she's already been through wardrobe, hair, and makeup.

She tells them to go into the other room for a "surprise," which I'm sure was a surprise to no one, unless you believe they were able to set up an entire Quickfire Challenge, including 6 mini-cooking stations, right in their living room without waking anyone up. Maybe they've got the tooth fairy and those shoe-making elves on retainer?

There's something highly suspicious about the way this whole challenge is just thrown together (they couldn't even get a guest judge, and the chefs are told to cook with whatever food's still left in their fridge), particularly when we later find out they'll be vacating the apartment and hightailing it out of dodge on the same day. It's like that River Phoenix movie where his parents are communist/hippies wanted by the government, so they have to keep moving states and he can't ever make friends. Is it possible that Bravo, always looking for ways to add extra income through unique partnership opportunities, has secretly been renting out the Top Chef kitchen as a meth lab and now the police are on to them? It sure feels that way.

Padma tells them the challenge is to make her breakfast, using a Brenville Blender, and then gives one of the show's more shamelessly effusive sponsor spiels, saying, "It's the blender you can make anything with!" Wow, that is some blender. Hey, here's something I'll bet you can't make with it ... solids.

You've got 20 minutes, ready, set, GO!

Running around ... grabbing ingredients ... lighting burners .... blending blending blending, and CRASH! Hung drops a bottle of truffle oil, and he doesn't clean it up, which has happened a few times before with him, although it does seem worse when it's right in their home. I mean, I love the smell and taste of truffle oil, but I wouldn't want to wax my floors with it. The cheffersons are justifiably annoyed about this, but it gets taken to a ridiculous extreme, promoted to this serious "Incident," as if he'd turned his back on Cuba and let the Russians point a bunch of missiles right at their penthouse.

It becomes clear that, without a Micah, Joey, or Howie around, it's fallen on Hung to play the Richard Hatch role, and the show does its best with the editing to set him up that way. They cut immediately to a quote of him talking about how he's only looking out for himself that was clearly taken out of context and was dropped in there just to make him look like an evil mastermind, like he's hoping he can become the next Top Chef by planning a series of diabolically arranged "accidents" that will take care of the competition. Later on, they also make a big deal about him cleaning his knives instead of helping CJ, and, which one is it cheffersons? Do you want him cleaning up after himself or not?

Anyway, I'm just not feeling the same kind of hate. For me, Hung is like The Brain from "Pinky and the." He talks a good game, grandly articulating all these brilliant schemes and major plans for triumph and domination but they tend to blow up in his face cartoonishly. Narf said.

Sara talks about how they weren't dressed properly (in fairness, kind of an issue with broken glass on the floor), with some of them wearing PJs, and bathrobes, and slippers (and how much was I wishing Dale slept in the buff or at least boxer briefs). This has come up a few times with certain challenges this season, these comments that imply it's harder to cook if you're not dressed the right way, and they just mystify me. I mean, it's not like they're being asked to scale Mount Everest in flip flops. But I guess fashion is a sensitive topic with chefs, because how else do you explain an entire profession that, despite spending all their time surrounded by the easily-spilled and highly-stainable, agree the smartest mode of dress is wearing all white? Except, of course, for Colicchio, who always wears black to illustrate how he's gone over to the Chef Dark Side.

Dale, being a good gay boy, knows how to elevate the mundane into the magical, simply rolling up his T-shirt sleeves to bring us voila! instant man candy. He's feeling pretty good about this challenge because, again as you'd only expect of a gay man, he says he's an expert on brunch. I guess that means he'll be making Padma wait outside for a table for over an hour and then overcharge her by at least 10 dollars.

He also says the one thing you should never say on this show, other than, "Padma, is that a pimple?" Yes, he actually says he thinks his dish is a "slam dunk," but just when you think he's learned absolutely nothing this season about courting disaster, he explains that's what he normally would have thought but, given the tough conditions of the challenge, he's actually very worried. So we know he'll be fine.

Sara makes a dish that when I was a kid we called a "Bird's Nest" or "Rocky Mountain Toast." She refers to it as, "an egg in a hole." Note to rising chefs everywhere: please don't ever refer to a food, or anything else, really, as being "in a hole." It just sounds nasty.

Casey uses her blender to make salsa, which she thinks is the perfect accompaniment for her breakfast, and when it comes to the eggs I sort of buy it, but when it comes to the French toast portion I start to gag, although who knows, maybe it's one of those sweet/savory combos that miraculously works, like M&Ms and movie popcorn (trust me it's awesome). What's clear is that she's onto that whole "everything at breakfast is even better if it's Mexican" scam where normal breakfast foods are crammed into burritos or sprinkled with tortilla chips to make them seem exotic and justify even higher prices/longer waits.

CJ says he's making crepes because Padma is a girl, and girls love crepes. "I don't know what it is with you guys and the crepes," he says, and I'm still getting my head around the linguistic mangling that manages to transform all women into "guys" to even care about yet another of his annoying culinary Mars/Venus observations. But I guess this shows why so many tough-guy Americans hate the French so much, what with being effeminate crepe-eaters and all.

I don't remember what Brian made, but if I had to guess, I'd say something disgusting with shellfish and eggs, maybe without the eggs.

But the big winner, shockingly, is Hung. Hung makes steak and eggs, which he describes as a "classic" American dish, and while it is in fact on pretty much any diner menu, I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually order or eat it. Hung's pulled this a few times, this defensive claiming that certain dishes are "classics," almost as if he's learned to cook from an ESL textbook written by someone who hasn't actually been to America: "Lesson 15: Classic Dishes Beloved By All American!: 1) oysters rockefeller; 2) whopper mac jr. happy meal; 3) thanksgiving stuffing; 4) steak and eggs; 5) baked alaska."

You might be wondering, here and with these other dishes, where the fabulous Brenville blender comes in, and the answer is barely at all and only tangentially. Along with his coronary special, Hung serves a liquored up smoothie created just for that well-known lush Padma, but Dale says he thinks Hung won the challenge more because she found herself liking steak and eggs for the first time than because of some happy hour breakfast drink. I hope he's right about that because it would be just crazy for a judge to make a decision based solely on a side dish, right? Right?!

Hung's prize is a copy of Padma's new cookbook, Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet, and you can tell she came up with this herself and thinks it's a brilliant little play on her TV persona, or at least how she'd like to think she's perceived. I'd suggest to her publishers that her next book be more appropriately called Frosty, Dense, Haughty and Humorless.

After the challenge, Padma announces that the cheffersons should pack their bags because Top Chef is ditching Miami! I guess after so many weeks of challenges promising Miami's beautiful, sophisticated elite and not having anybody remotely fitting that description actually show up, the producers have finally figured out this whole Miami location is a total bust. Because no one is crazy enough to be in Miami in summer, and I say that as someone who was once crazy enough to be in Miami in summer. It was much like visiting the surface of the sun, only more humid.

The cheffersons open their plane tickets and see they're going to New York and they get all giddy and jump up and down, and then the interviews become these kind of Chorus Line-like monologues where they reveal their innermost Big City Dreams.

CJ talks about how he thinks New York really is the place for him and his approaching-genius-level cooking abilities (Ottoman falling!). He also says the first thing he's going to do when he gets there is eat a slice of pizza, and good for him, because as someone who's lived in New York City for almost 20 years, I can tell you the pizza is truly the best thing about the place. That and not having to be friendly to anyone ever.

But Fate has another cruel prank for our poor cheffersons, in the form of the sickening, soul crushing sight of Padma waiting for them at the gate of Newark International Airport. Padma tells them before they can get into the Emerald City, they have to complete a task, and it's not anything as easy as strutting down the yellow brick New Jersey Turnpike in a pair of slutty-looking ruby slippers, which is too bad for Casey. Instead, their Elimination Challenge involves preparing decent airline food for Continental's fancy, shmancy Business First Class of service.

I guess my Jewish New Year prayers really did pay off, because one week has given me both New Jersey and airplane food for material. It's a funnyman's dream, if this was 1960 and my name was Buddy Hackett. But I actually think it's just too easy, and not really fair, to make fun of New Jersey or airline food today. For one thing, the Newark Airport is no better than any of the other New York area airports none of them are an O'Hare, let me tell you. And for another, do airlines still serve food? I can't remember the last time I actually had anything to eat on a plane other than a packet of pretzels and tiny bagel chips generously advertised as "premium" snacks. I guess maybe things are different in First Class, although I wouldn't know it, having only flown First Class once and been served and I'm still really pissed about this corn flakes. Seriously, corn flakes, and thanks a lot American for that special level of luxury service.

So they're all taken into this enormous hanger, and it's like they've walked into the movie of Norma Rae, with all these weary-looking workers plugging away assembly-like, watching the clock until the whistle blows and it's quitting time and they can slide down the brontosaurus tail and punch out. The cheffersons are dressed like lunch ladies, with shower caps, aprons, and gloves, and I know this is supposed to make us think it's extra sanitary, but it has the opposite effect and pretty much skeeves me out, like what are they going to be coming in contact with in there that requires so much protective gear?

The head lunch lady guy takes them on a tour, and explains that they've got a serious issue with height. CJ is like, "Watch it, buddy. You're no Herve Villechaize yourself." Actually, this is in reference to the narrow-sized ovens on the planes, which can only handle dishes no taller than 2 inches. So I'm thinking the ideal foods are pancakes, French bread pizza, and those weird egg bricks you get with sushi.

The cheffersons get to pick out ingredients, and Brian is surprised by the quality of it all, as am I, given I was expecting a mad rush to the microwave to defrost items frozen since Pan Am was in business. Since Hung won the Quickfire, he picks first, and he chooses sea bass.

Chef Tom says, and I totally agree with this, that he's surprised by how many of the chefs picked fish, which is about the last thing he'd order on a plane. When he says this, I have this epiphany where I realize my feelings about fish on planes, in fact my longtime refusal to eat fish in general, all goes back to the movie Airplane ("Jim never vomits at home" still one of the all-time great movie lines), the same movie that gave me my phobia of old ladies who speak jive.

After they've all prepared their dishes, we switch to Top Gun, with a hanger door opening and these silhouettes of our brave cheffersons entering to face this enormous plane where they'll be serving.

And as long as we're talking old, pathetic pop culture references involving planes, one of my favorite TV shows as a kid was the very short-lived Flying High, which was sort of like Charlie's Angels with stewardesses, and starred the great Connie Selleca as this spoiled heiress who needs to get a job. As part of "stew school," she needs to take this flight of horror that actually simulates crash conditions. I don't know if that's really a part of a flight attendant training if it is, that is freaking cool and also kind of insane but it was the conditions I was hoping the cheffersons would have when serving their dishes. Instead, they make the pretty lame move of just keeping the plane on the ground the whole time, which makes the whole thing about as exciting as visiting an exhibit at a transportation museum.

Padma tells them they'll be serving a group of "travel experts," and it's about to be Dale's lucky day because it's a group of flight attendants; if he plays his cards right with some of these guys, maybe his night at the Newark Airport Hilton will be more interesting than pizza and porn-per-view.

You'd think given the endless hours of pacifying obnoxious, impatient, occasionally panicked passengers would lead this group to have the time of their lives now that the situation has been reversed -- I'm thinking cracks along the lines of "Stuff that in your overhead!" but they're all remarkably well behaved.

On the other hand, we have our judges. I'm sure the recently divorced Padma was hoping her first class companion would be a handsome, powerful, lonely CEO type who would strike up an in-flight flirtation, leading to a "kill time between flights" drink or two and who knows what else. Instead, she's stuck with this corporate drone from Continental who looks like upper management put him up to this when all he wants is to be at home with his family. He's less a chef and more of a "food systems efficiency expert," whose main contribution to the judging is to say things like, "At 1000 feet, that dish would actually become toxic!" So Padma puts on her headset and cranes her neck to see if the pilot's wearing a ring.

Colicchio has dressed for the occasion, showing up in a leather bomber jacket and one of those cockney cabbie caps jauntily perched on his head backwards. He looks like he's auditioning for Newsies, except he's about 38 years too old for the part. As an ensemble, the whole thing could be called "The Midlife Crisis." He's paired with guest judge Anthony Bourdain and the two are like a couple of newly minted bachelors on the way to Vegas to get over their divorces through booze, gambling, and lap dances, realizing they're having much more fun with each other than they ever did with their wives.

The cheffersons proceed to heat up and serve their food from those tiny airplane kitchens that I always find so fascinating, part Easybake Oven (a toy that myself and every gay man I've ever met has been fairly obsessed with), and part mini-morgue. For the most part, the service goes fine, except for Dale who somehow miscounted and is one meal short. The meal-less attendant is kind of cute, and Dale's best bet here might be to tell him that if he keeps his mouth shut, they can play "customs inspector and duty free smuggler" at the back of the plane. Instead, he pretty much admits his mistake and hopes the judges will like the food enough to overlook it. He's made this steak au poivre that they say is really too spicy for most people, but he's lucky the judge is Bourdain who doesn't give a sh*t about other people as long as it satisfies him.

So, surprisingly, despite technically not completing the challenge, Dale is picked as one of the best, and I think it really helped his case that he basically owns up to his mistake and doesn't try to make excuses or get all indignant or put some ridiculous cowboy-macho spin on it. I wish he'd run for political office.

They also like Hung, from whom we learn that fish is the most masochistic of proteins because apparently the worse you can say about them, the more they'll thrive. This was the case with his sea bass, which was described as "oily" and "fatty" yet came out perfectly cooked. The big winner, though, is Casey, who made veal medallions, a smart appropriately flat choice, and frankly the only dish out of all these I would have ever ordered myself. And good for her for winning two weeks in a row. She's really grown on me, partly because unlike certain cheffersons fixated on seafood for all eternity, she seems to have grown as a chef during this experience. Other than Dale, she's pretty much the only one left I'd be happy to see win.

The losers come down to Brian, Sara, and CJ, and this is where the judging becomes pretty infuriating. With all three, the judges are completely obsessed with the side dishes. For CJ, it's overcooked broccolini, which sounds like some diet version of broccoli "Hey, it's brocco-lean-ie, with all the flavor and half the fat of a non-bioengineered mutant vegetable!" For Sara, it's flavorless couscous, and I loved her just a little bit when outside the judges' room she said, "They thought mine was an afterthought. That's because it was an afterthought." And for Brian, it was this slaw thing with blue potatoes that looked like the run-off from Hung's Smurf Village.

Sara points out that at this point in the competition, when they're all fairly evenly matched, the judges are just splitting hairs, and the fact they focus so much on side dishes totally supports that. What I don't like is how malicious they are about it, particularly Colicchio and Bourdain, whose various bon mots include "disgusting," "gross," "catfood territory," "like doll's head" (WTF???), and "something found in Bob Marley's basement" (but if I'm not mistaken, wouldn't that be something way more awesome than food could ever be?) and other venomous comments that are the chef equivalent of talking trash. I know many viewers like Bourdain because he's entertaining to watch, but it's so clear that all of his bluster is for the cameras, and Colicchio picks up from his lead. Proof of that, I think, comes when Colicchio starts out saying CJ's side dish was the worst one all season and then changes it to the worst dish ever in the history of the show, as if someone told him during the commercial break they needed a better sound bite to run during promos.

Really? That broccolini was the worst dish ever on this show? I so don't believe that. Appearance wise, it's certainly far from the most offensive sight we've seen on a plate this season.

But even with all this about the side dishes, I'm pretty certain they'll wind up sending Brian home because by all accounts his main dish was bad too. He'd decided to make surf and turn, thinking it appropriate for first class airline luxury, smart thinking if this was when flying was still primarily the sole provenance of well-to-do playboys. But his portions are just monstrously large, literally sagging off the sides of the plates. The result is that some people's food is totally overcooked, so much that Bourdain says he couldn't even tell what the lobster tails actually were.

That seems to me like the kind of serious enough major error to get you sent home, especially when taken in the context of Brian's performance all season; he never moved beyond his seafood safety net and he managed to screw even that up. I mean, it just has to be Brian's surf and turf main course fiasco that's the deciding factor in elimination this episode. The judges couldn't possibly base such a big decision on a side dish, right? Right?!

Long story short, they wind up basing their decision on a side dish and send CJ home, and that just seems so, so wrong to me.

To any of you who now want to point out that a few weeks ago I predicted a CJ vs. Howie finale, I say that by now it should be clear in these recaps I have no idea what I'm talking about. But you'd be right to remind me that, if I was wrong, I had promised to eat Tre's losing salmon. I don't know when I'll get to Dallas and be able to find him, but until then, I feel bad enough about my hugely misguided prediction that I want to make some form of penance.

How's this? Tonight I'm having broccolini.