Top Chef: Season 7, Ep. 6: Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Going to Eat Your Food and Rip It Apart

Jesus Christ, this was a depressing episode.  It began with the obligatory “I miss the last eliminated contestant” (in this case, Timothy) interviews.  Then to the Quickfire!, which was exhilarating in basically being a stereotype of Top Chef.  The chefs first had to choose from a smorgasbord of exotic meats, among them wild boar, yak, crocodile, ostrich, duck tongue, duck testicles, rattlesnake, emu eggs, and llama (poor llama).  Between last week’s crab massacre and this week’s zoo pickings, the Top Chef kitchen is turning out to be quite the killing fields.  (But then I guess it always was?)  Fifteen minutes into the Quickfire, Padma tells the chefs they now have to use the protein of their neighbor to the left.  TWIST!  Everyone goes safe at this point, making soups, omelets, and sautes, which I can’t really blame them for.  My only disappointment was in not seeing Angelo’s “testicle marshmallow” come into fruition.  Kelly wins the Quickfire and immunity.

The main challenge, lamely dubbed The Cold War (because D.C. and puns, ugh), is for everyone to make a cold dish but in two teams.  Team A will taste and critique Team B’s dishes, then nominate a winner and a loser, and vice versa.  At this point, everyone, but mostly Kenny, goes batshit insane with paranoia, thinking they will be nominated to go home for strategic, rather than tastesthetic, reasons.  Angelo giving Tamesha and Stephen advice on conceptualizing their dishes doesn’t help the tense atmosphere (nor Tamesha and Stephen, it turns out), because everyone hates Angelo, and so assume he’s sabotaging his friends.  For the record, I don’t think this was it at all — I think Angelo’s obvious self-satisfaction came out in the most benevolent way in this episode, by which I mean Angelo wanted to help his friends by telling them what to do.  But for all the whispers about strategy and the middle-schoolish doubts about their places on the popularity totem pole, the only one who actively played the game was the ever-scuzzy Dov Charney Alex (of course), Mr. Hookers and an Eight-Ball himself.

In the end, Tiffany and Kevin were nominated for the win, with Kevin winning his hero Michelle Bernstein’s approval (aww) and a trip to Hawaii (this season’s trip prizes are much better than last season’s cookbooks), while Tamesha and Kenny were slated for elimination.  Tamesha goes home, which is sad, because I’d liked her, especially after she interviewed that she “could probably strangle [Amanda] in a heartbeat,” because sure, we’d all like to strangle Amanda, but we probably couldn’t do it with the clean efficiency and elegant poise Tamesha would’ve brought to the job.

July 22, 2010. Recaps, Top Chef.