Rocco’s Life or Death Dinner Party

Rocco’s Dinner Party: a good old-fashioned reality food competition where three chefs cook a dinner for frequent Top Chef judge Rocco DiSpirito.

Let’s be honest, chefs take themselves way too seriously. Contestant #1, Geoff, thinks cooking is a symphony and he is the conductor. The restaurant is the opera house and there’s always a fat lady.

Contestant #2, Britt, believes she is going to head an empire with her culinary abilities, or maybe just a Chuck-E-Cheese.

Contestant #3, J.J, is convinced that his whole family will hate him if he doesn’t win this competition, because he’s been “cooking since the age 6 and everyone’s watching.”

Rocco: You think it's hard becoming a Navy Seal? That's nothing
compared to cooking a meal I approve of!

Once we know the ridiculously high stakes involved with cooking food, DiSpirito comes in to deliver the challenge: He has 6 guests coming over tomorrow night and they need to have a memorable experience.

This is truly a challenge, I have a hard time remembering what I ate 5 minutes ago, so the meal has to be pretty out of this world for me to recall its contents the next day. The winner receives $20,000, which IMHO is a ridiculously overpriced seven-person meal.

In order to make the meal truly memorable, only two chefs are allowed to cook it. Do I hear a challenge? Not even 5 minutes into the show and Rocco is already pitting people against each other. The world of cooking is so cutthroat. The challenge: the chefs must cook their signature meal in 30 minutes.

Rocco should just scratch the competition and hire Rachael Ray to prepare his meal, and then he can have all the store bought mixes his little chef-heart desires.

All the chefs are in I-have-to-win-this-or-my-whole–family-will-die mode. Rocco is a sassy bitch, walking around the kitchen taunting the contestants as they try desperately to impress him with their remarkably standard dishes, “Oh, pan-seared diver scallops and corned bacon! Never heard of that before.” No doubt the producers figured they had to spice the competition up with a healthy serving of sass since there are about 3 billion food competitions from which they must differentiate themselves.

I'm an embarrassment to my profession. I should just commit Hari-kari now.

Rocco sits like a king at his table for one as he prepares to judge the dishes, all by himself! One Judge! This is unheard of by reality show standards. Britt is first on the chopping block and describes her dish as “interesting,” to which Rocco balks. Apparently, describing something as interesting is saying that you basically cooked a pile of shit that confuses even you and now you’re praying that the person consuming it doesn’t realize how confusing the flavors of your dish are.

Rocco is ruthless! He finds something wrong with every single dish and like a dog that defecates on your hall rug, he rubs the contestants noses in it. These must be some important guests for him to be such an unyielding judge to professional chefs.

Britt is sent packing because she should NOT have put avocado in a blender. EVERYONE knows that avocados lose their texture when you blend them! After Britt embarrasses chefs everywhere, Rocco crowns J.J as the winner of the challenge, even though he ripped the dish a new one earlier. Rocco is a fickle lover.

Geoff and J.J are commissioned with the theme of this ever-important dinner: a Speakeasy. But this dinner is SO important that Rocco can’t trust the two chefs to pull it off alone, he pairs them with event planner Jes to make sure the night is “memorable”. You know what’s not memorable? Watching countless minutes of footage where the 2 challenge winners shop for their ingredients. 

 Finally the shopping is over and Rocco meets the two in the kitchen with an additional twist to the meal plan: one guest is a vegetarian and cannot have alcohol in the meal. First of all, what a horrible guest, and second of all, Geoff’s entire meal plan for which he spent hours shopping is ruined due to the fact that his two main ingredients are pork and alcohol.

Geoff looks defeated and the cooking hasn’t even begun. Someone hide the knives.

But the cooking isn’t the important part of the show anyway. Now we have to meet all the random guests that are desperately requiring a memorable night; Boardwalk Empire actor Michael Kenneth Williams, Bryan Batt of Mad Men, Forbes.com media critic Bill McCuddy, Broadway actress Christine Ebersole, Eat Out New York writer Kelly Choi, and recent Top Chef Masters winner Marcus Samuelsson.

We're celebrities! Everything we experience should be memorable!

This night is definitely going to be memorable because there are two dinner parties back to back. They start off with Geoff’s dinner and provide few insightful comments. Rocco is back to his ball-busting antics as he keeps the chefs in a state of perma-fear with his snarky comments and his “I hope you’re not planning on serving dry meat”.

The guests are full and ready for dinner party number two. They walk into J.J’s room and are incredibly impressed with the decorations and the harmonicas; looks like Jes the event planner did her job. Even though everything looks amazing, Rocco is not pleased with the speed with which the dishes are flying out of the kitchen.

He needs to just hold onto his shorts; he can’t be THAT hungry, he just ate a full meal 5 minutes ago. As J.J frantically prepares his meal, Geoff becomes the kitchen bully, needling J.J, asking him a million questions and highlighting his insecurities. Just leave the poor boy alone, Geoff! 

Rocco stands up at the end of the dinner as if struck by divine insight, announces that he knows which dinner pleased his guests more and leaves the room with purpose to break the news to the anxiety-ridden chefs. In true reality competition style, Rocco spends an hour describing the missteps in the meals. Geoff has brought shame to the cooking community by not knowing the difference between Atlantic Cod and Black Cod, and J.J did not comfort the guests with his grits.

Before he can reveal the winner, Rocco must pour the champagne for the winner with dramatic music playing in the background to inform the audience that this is a life or death decision. J.J joins Rocco in the toast to himself and says that he’s going to go tell his mom about his win. Looks like he will live to cook another day.

Conclusion: When does Top Chef: Just Desserts come back again?

Rocco's Dinner Party airs Wednesday night on Bravo.