Top Chef: Ur Doin' It Wrong (Week 7)

This week picked up pretty much exactly where last week left off, with almost everyone a paranoid mess. Kenny's still convinced that he was on the bottom because of sabotage. Angelo mourns the loss of his puppet Tamesha, while Tiffany continues her (deserved) skepticism of all things Angelo. But hey, there's a high stakes Quickfire, so maybe the prospect of $20,000 will perk the chefs up.

For the Quickfire, the cheftestants are asked to make food that caters to the strict rules of congressional ethics: pack the flavor of a whole dish onto a teeny-tiny toothpick. The chefs work (and in some cases overwork) on their tiny creations and serve them up to Padma and guest judge Congressman Aaron Schock (R-Ill.). Angelo ends up winning with his (hardly) surprising Asian flavors. Alex, Kelly, and Ed are on the bottom, and Kelly vows to bring bigger, bolder flavors to play in the elimination challenge.

And if there's going to be an elimination challenge where you want boldness, it's in the power lunch challenge. The chefs will take over the kitchen at the Palm, and cook one of the five signature proteins provided by the restaurant. As the knives are drawn, a few people seem excited about their choices -- especially the ones who draw lobster. After all, who doesn't love working with lobster? It's so delicious and decadent on it's own that your dish is already starting in a great place.

Or so the chefs think.

Angelo and Ed walk into the Top Chef kitchen and are greeted by lobsters the size of small dogs. The other proteins are largely already prepped for the chefs, and so this puts Angelo and Ed at a bit of a disadvantage, because they have to break down all these lobsters. Ed's station starts to look like someone chose to re-enact the final fight scene from Kill Bill: Vol 1 with shellfish: so much lobster carnage.

A few other chefs appeared to be having issues of a different sort. Alex got salmon and immediately listed for the camera about 10 different ways to cook salmon. Thank you, Captain Obvious, there are, in fact, many ways to cook this fish; the point of being on this show is picking one and doing it well. Amanda, on the other hand, has never cooked a porterhouse steak before and begins taking it off the bone. Kelly rightly points out that this technically means it is no longer a porterhouse, which is something that could potentially hurt Amanda depending on how picky the judges want to be.

After the chefs finish prep, they head to the house, where Alex reveals that he still doesn't know what he's doing with his salmon. He mentions something about peas he bought and others point out that Ed also got peas and made a puree with them. This small revelation sets off a chain of events that will lead to us hearing the words "pea puree" more times in 20 minutes than we ever thought possible. The pea puree, oh my god, the pea puree.

To sum up about 15 minutes of wasted television for you: Ed made a pea puree during the prep day at the Top Chef kitchen. Alex heard about it that evening at the house. They get to the Palm the next day and Ed can't find his puree, while Alex now magically has some. Someone supposedly saw Alex making puree, but no one specifically is sticking up for him, and everyone thinks he stole Ed's puree. Hey, Bravo: instead of milking this for some of the lamest drama ever, you've got hours and hours of footage of these people cooking. Methinks you probably would have some footage that would be useful in sorting this out. Let's do this like NFL replay and go to the tapes. And give us all the angles.

That drama aside, the chefs serve their power lunch dishes to a collection of powerful Washingtonians and Art Smith of Art and Soul. Tiffany, Ed and Alex get high marks, with Alex ultimately winning. We're proud of Ed for totally not flipping out when Alex gets praised for the infamous pea puree. The bottom three are Kevin, Andrea, and Kelly. Andrea ends up going home for her overly sweet swordfish with mustard and vanilla beurre blanc (something that sounded a bit unpleasant to us when she described it).

But this week Andrea wasn't the one doin' it wrongest. Nope, this week that distinction goes to Kelly. Which is sad, because last week we were really happy that she (along with Tiffany, who is still riding the awesome train) seemed to not be a total brat like the rest of the chefs. We may have spoken too soon. After playing it largely cool in previous weeks and staying above the game, Kelly got into it this week with her refusal to share salt with her fellow chefs. She started talking about how the show is a game (something we hate, because it's not Survivor, it's Top Chef) and how she was going to play to win. Oh, and then she just horribly over-salted her food. Kels, we liked you. But when you talk about bringing big bold flavors to the elimination challenge, you may want to bring one or two other than salt.

Here's hoping the gamesmanship of Top Chef doesn't take Tiffany down next week.