On the latest installment of Top Chef Masters:
We viewers got a nice surprise when we found out that Hugh Acheson was back to to compete in the show, but were sad to find out that it was because John Sedlar had to leave the show for personal reasons. I am happy that Hugh’s wit and talent is back on the show though.
For the Quickfire, the master chef’testants had 30 minutes to grind meat with a hand cranked grinder for the meatballs they were to create for singer Kelis — you know, the “Milkshake” gal? Apparently she has “culinary training,” but it looked like no one gave her training on how to critique dishes by chefs of this caliber, as she was serving up quite a lot of criticism and cojones with not much experience or decent reasons to back it up with. Hugh Acheson called it “pointless criticism,” and I think many of us viewers agreed with him. In the end, she preferred John Currance’s Vietnamese-style chicken meatball over all the others.
As for the Elimination Challenge, the chefs had to take classic (as in “classically awful”) dishes from the 1960s, put a modern spin on them and serve them in bite-sized form at a cocktail party where Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks and her husband Geoffry Arend would be critiquing them. They also had to make a miniature version of the original dishes to serve alongside the new creations. So, two apps: one fancy, one old school, one hot redhead thrown into the mix. Got it?
There were some hits, misses and some that were just way out in left field, having been deconstructed to hell. (See the food shots from this episode if you don’t believe me.) The judges loved Mary Sue Milliken’s Asian twist on deviled eggs, John Currence’s bacon and collard-filled take on Oysters Rockefeller, and Floyd Cardoz’s ambrosia salad turned marshmallow fondue. Mary Sue ended up taking the win and the $10k for her charity, Share Our Strength.
As for the bottom three, it came down to Suvir’s tough veal, Sue Zemanick’s unfinished dish and Alessandro Stratta’s less-than-stellar bread pudding.
Want to know what happened? Then tune in to the podcast to find out! (It also helps to have watched the show before listening, but that’s totally optional).
Tune in to Bravo every Wednesday at 10 pm EST/9 pm C, check out our own live Tweets during the show (Jeff: @JeffHouck, Katie: @culinarypirate), and listen to our podcast here every week! (You can even download us on iTunes!)
Check out our fellow Top Chef fanatics’ blogs: All Top Chef gives us their uninhibited reactions and Please Pack Your Knives and Go is just plain hilarious. And check out TalkingTV’s rules for the Top Chef drinking game here.
Culinary Piracy 
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