Top Chef Recap: Innuendos About ‘Rods’

Though this is the last Top Chef recap of winter break, I will continue to post as the season goes on, or until I run out of ideas for new pictures.

This week’s episode was very different from the normal routine. There was no Quickfire, a double elimination, and new nautical music as the chefs went fishing! Their challenge was to fish in Montauk, and then cater a beach party in the East River. The chefs were broken up into teams of Antonia, Jamie, and Tiffani F.; Richard, Fabio, and Marcel; Angelo, Tiffany D., and Mike; and Dale, Carla, and Tre.

While on the boat, we learned that Dale’s dad was fisherman, Angelo is afraid of water, and (here’s the surprise) that Fabio is Italian. Blais described his team’s fishing technique as “Sitting in Marcel’s lap, holding his rod,” which was one in a series of many double entendres.

Some teams had better luck fishing than others. Dale caught a huge striped bass, as everyone else mostly caught bass. Carla and Tiffani landed some bluefish, and Antonia wound up with a porgy.

At the beach party, the guest judge was Chef Kerry Heffernan, who is apparently Tom’s fishing buddy. Overall, the food was pretty good, but two people still had to go home at judges’ table.

As a side note, this week’s bump was some chefs saying what fish the other chefs would be. Marcel would be a blowfish, Angelo would be a mermaid, and Tre would be some kind of thing that buries itself in the sand. (Also, in the biggest chunk of cheese on Top Chef, Tre called his wife his “sous chef in life.” It rhymed when he said it, too.)

In the top this week were the teams of Angelo, Tiffany D., and Mike as well as Dale, Carla, and Tre. Dale and Carla were really the top two, as Dale made fish tacos (made from his giant striped bass) and Carla did a play on the New York bagel (lettuce wraps with smoked bluefish and pumpernickel bits). Carla won, and along with the glory of being the first woman this season to win two elimination challenges, she got a trip to Amsterdam.

The bottom chefs were the teams of Jamie, Antonia, and Tiffani, and Blais, Fabio, and Marcel. The judges loved Antonia’s dish (an open-faced porgy po-boy) and told her that she would have won if the other dishes on her team weren’t so bad. Jamie’s bass with cucumber water was bland, probably because it had watered down cucumber on it, and Tiffani’s bluefish had too much of the bitter bloodline flavor. Blais, Fabio, and Marcel tried to be sneaky by doing one dish together, but the judges lamented that too many components were competing with each other. Fabio played the role of prep cook, chopping the vegetables for their succotash, Blais made an unnecessary concord grape gastrique, and Marcel made (of course) an esoteric Jamon foam.

Jamie and Tiffani F. were eliminated, causing Jamie to reflect that she didn’t cook in two challenges, and the one dish she felt good about, the judges still didn’t like. Tiffani seemed to have been fine with the decision, although her elimination is a bit sadder knowing that her restaurant, Rocca, recently closed.