Headline : Top Chef: Wisconsin Recap: Under Pressure

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No. of Paragraph 31

I sympathized with Michelle this week. I’ve seen The Bear, I love The Bear, and I have and will continue to watch Matty Matheson and Ebon Moss-Bachrach heckle each other in the show and celebratorily kiss each other in real life for many, many minutes of my life. But what the hell is Matty talking about in “Chaos Cuisine”? What is it??? My beloved Neil Fak used a lot of words to basically tell the cheftestants, “Cook something weird and make it look fucked up,” but that kind of oblique freedom can be more constrictive than liberating if it’s not precisely communicated, and I don’t think it was. Michelle’s confusion is my confusion, and I really believe that she didn’t get sent home (despite being in the bottom two for serving Kristen raw pork and Tom burnt pita) because she pinpointed the episode’s inherent vagaries and reflected how her uncertainty was really a larger flaw of the Elimination’s structure.

Of course, the judges can do whatever they want. I am old enough to remember when Nicholas Elmi won season 11 for some reason! But I’m not a fan of Top Chef unleashing an Elimination challenge on the cheftestants that host Kristen can’t even really explain. Nor am I a fan of the challenge being so broad that it allows for the judges to seemingly criticize at random whatever they want about the dishes when I don’t think it was clear that the judges expected many different kinds of chaos all in one dish, from conception to execution to plating. Recall that “The Wright Way” Elimination challenge was also this amorphous, and the judging in that episode felt wacky, too. So do I think Michelle probably should have gone home for her dish, which looked like a sad you-pick-two duo from a Panera in a Vietnamese airport and which Tom described as “meh”? Yes, probably. But this season of Top Chef is really trying to swerve us, and sending home early front-runner Rasika is a swerve.

Let’s back up to talk about how the episode starts, which is Kaleena and Soo showing up at the cheftestants’ hotel to oppositional responses. People seem happy to see Kaleena again (Savannah especially; I did not realize they were tight?) but immediately suspicious of Soo (particularly Danny, who the editors keep cutting to for his obvious stank face). Dan recognizes Soo from the Chicago restaurant scene, and he’s friendly and welcoming, but overall, the response to the “secret surprise 16th chef” is understandably muted! Here’s another person they all have to beat, and in the Top Chef kitchen for the Quickfire challenge, Kristen explains that the stakes are actually higher now because Soo and Kaleena both being back in the competition means that the judges can in the future decide to send two chefs home at the same time to balance the numbers out.

Everyone’s freaked out, and it’s a jarring transition from that anxiety to Christina Tosi of Milk Bar showing up in a baby-pink jumpsuit and wheeling out a tray of dairy-based desserts popular in the Midwest, like cream puffs, Kringle pastry, and frozen custard. (My personal thoughts on Milk Bar: It’s fine. I, too, love sprinkles, but I don’t enjoy that its mass-produced grocery-store items heavily use palm oil, an ingredient which for years was pretty crummy for the environment.) The Quickfire challenge from Christina and Kristen is to make a dessert featuring dairy, and the cheftestants can use it for flavor or texture; the winner gets $7,500. It’s long been a Top Chef trope that the contestants struggle when it comes to dessert. We get some of that through Manny, who admits that desserts are a personal challenge for him, but he’s been practicing churros, and Dan, who has a go-to chocolate pudding recipe, but it’s vegan and doesn’t use dairy. More optimistic are Danny, whose wife is a pastry chef and who he’s using as an inspiration, and Amanda, who’s working on a cheddar-biscuit-and-bananas-Foster mash-up. But after 45 minutes of cooking and Christina and Kristen’s judging, on the bottom are Danny’s cream puff with black sesame pastry cream (his choux pastry needed more time in the oven), Dan’s dark chocolate pudding with macerated plums and fried baguette (pudding texture too thick, like peanut butter), and Manny’s fried churros with orange blossom and lemon whipped cream (churro dough was too moist and didn’t fry crispy enough). On the top are Kaleena’s salted caramel and rum custard with mascarpone and crème fraîche, Michelle’s corn cake with mascarpone cheese and basil cream (Christina was impressed by Michelle pulling off a cake in 45 minutes), and Amanda’s cheddar biscuit shortcake with banana pastry cream and vanilla chantilly. Kévin, who owns a pastry shop in Austin, is open-mouth surprised not to make it into the top three for his shortbread cookie with strawberry and basil jam and cream cheese, but he gives Michelle a hug when she wins the challenge, which is gracious enough.

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