Top Chef: Ur Doin' It Wrong (Week 1)
For this season's Top Chef DCist will be bringing you our "woulda, coulda, shoulda" take on how the cheftestants are faring. Every week we will highlight one individual who was doin' it wrong.
It's always exciting when a new season of Top Chef starts. There are new faces we'll grow to love (and hate), new dishes, and a whole lot of Tom and Padma. (And seriously, there was some more of Padma for the men to drool over. Motherhood suits her body quite nicely.) The D.C.-based location lets us watch the show while combining two of our favorite activities: judging contestants on Top Chef and judging outsiders for totally misunderstanding D.C. And, fear not, you'll hear plenty of both.
We all know that half the fun of Top Chef is sitting back and mocking the contestants' terrible ideas (phallic Cheeto dipped in Snickers, anyone?) and remarking that you could make a better dish. So without further ado, let's get down to discussing this week's winner in the "you have got to be kidding me" category. (Spoilers after the jump.)
The easy call for this week would be to pick on John Somerville because, well, he lost. And he did so by making several glaring errors in judgment, including sporting one of the least hygienic hairstyles we can remember seeing on Top Chef. The grizzled, gray, foot-long dreadlocks make it look like some animal crawled on his head and died. So when he professed his desire to give the judges a piece of himself with his food, we were just hoping it didn't involve someone finding a lock in her maple mousse.
But let's talk about his food-related failings: chief among them was choosing to make a dessert. Few cheftestants have ever pulled off desserts well. D.C.'s own Carla Hall and Bryan Voltaggio were two standouts who routinely made desserts that went beyond "doesn't suck" to actually helping them win challenges and earn favor from the judges. But the vast majority of Top Chef history indicates that making a dessert is really only something the cheftestants do when forced to by a challenge.
So when Somerville announced his intention to make a dessert, it was pretty much the same as if he'd put a giant target on his back. This guy was probably going to be up for elimination. Step two in his self-destruction: He then decided to use frozen puff pastry from Whole Foods as one of the three components of his dish. This was another face-palm moment. Even the most amateur of Top Chef viewers could probably determine that a three-component dessert where one of the items is purchased from the freezer section is probably headed for an unpleasant time at judges' table.
But as we said above, picking Somerville as this week's bigger winner for incompetence would be the easy choice and a bit too obvious for our taste. Nope, the person who best personified doin' it wrong this week was Jacqueline Lombard, a caterer from Brooklyn who said early in the show that her goal was to show that a self-taught chef can "beat the pants off" all those high-falutin' chefs who have culinary degrees. While we applauded her plucky sentiments -- who doesn't love an underdog? -- that comment smacked of foreshadowing. And, sure enough, she showed us that maybe a bit of book-learnin' might have been to her advantage.
First, Lombard declared her intention to make a chicken liver mousse but, you know, with hardly any fat. So it's good for you. And who doesn't enjoy the thought of pureed chicken liver without the benefit of any delicious, tasty butter to smooth out the texture and soften the taste? As if leaving out all of the fat weren't enough to make us question how Lombard's meat-mousse was going to turn out, she then declared that she wasn't going to push it through a tamis to smooth it out before putting it in the refrigerator to set. So to recap: her plan was basically to take chicken livers, puree them up, throw them into the fridge, and then serve that to Eric Ripert. The one chef who can probably make perfect mousse in his sleep. No way any of that backfires, right?
Her mousse, of course, came out terribly, but that's not even the worst of it. The real reason she's this week's winner is that, when questioned about her unpalatable mousse at the judges' table, she told head judge Tom Colicchio that she's not sure what happened because she's served that dish hundreds of times. Tom, ever-willing to stick it to a defensive cheftestant who's playing dumb, asked Lombard if she'd actually cooked the dish hundreds of times or merely served it. Zing! Fully committed to digging herself into a giant hole, Lombard said that the real problem with why the dish didn't turn out was that she didn't have her recipes with her.
Oops. Perhaps when you're on a show called "Top Chef" that is a cooking competition, you should avoid making a dish you can't pull off without a recipe. Especially for the first challenge. Finally, don't try and tell Tom Colicchio that you've made something "hundreds of times" but that it didn't work today because your cookbooks are at home. She might not have gone home, but the failure to understand the basic premise of the show makes Jacqueline Lombard this week's winner of the losers.