It’s been a pretty boring season of Top Chef, and last night’s episode was no exception—until it ended with a genuine shocker: Tre was booted.
I cannot imagine what the judges were thinking. Yes Tre was the executive chef of Restaurant April, the losing team in round two of the restaurant wars. As he said in his parting speech, “If an executive chef can’t lead a team to success, then the executive chef is a flop.”
But I can remember other instances where the judges have spared the leader of a losing team because another member was more to blame.
Tre was having an off night, no question. He presided over a lackluster meal and two of the dishes he prepared, the marinated salmon and the bread pudding, were deemed duds. (Ted called the former “a catastrophe,” “disgusting”) But, in his defense, he cooked twice as many dishes as anyone else. And the dishes he didn’t cook were as bad as the ones he didn’t.
Casey’s carrot soup wasn’t an issue, but the judges criticized her monkfish for being overcooked. CJ’s one contribution, a lobster salad, was over-salted. Meanwhile, Brian didn’t cook a thing. Wouldn’t he have been a better candidate for elimination?
We know that the show’s producers, as well as the judges, are in on the elimination decisions, and from a non-culinary perspective, the decision to send Tre packing makes no sense. He’s done well throughout the competition, and is an absolute charmer with his military work ethic and brilliant smile. As an African-American chef, he is also a welcome presence in a world that is largely devoid of black faces.
If the judges had a good reason to get rid of Tre, they didn’t articulate it. This morning I checked the Bravo web site. Tom Colicchio's blog is back. (Anthony Bourdain was spelling him for the last few weeks.)
Tom's blog entry is really a transcription of a conversation he had with Bravo's Andy Cohen. In it, he reveals the judges' reasons for Tre's dismissal:
One of the things we looked at were all the dishes he was responsible for. So we felt the salmon dish was not great universally -- conceptually it was a bad dish. I thought the scallop was good, not great. That beef dish that we'd commented on the day before and said we didn't care for it? He didn't change it! Crusting a filet mignon, as Anthony Bourdain pointed out, is very 80s and not very inventive. He did the same dish exactly the second time around. He was running the kitchen with no intensity, it was very lackadaisical. I never got a sense that they were really pushing it, and they weren't cooking as if their chance of staying in the competition depended on it. I think Tre was responsible for setting that tone.
Well, OK. I guess.
Bourdain, thankfully, is still blogging. He has lots to say about Tre's exit here.
A couple of random thoughts:
Christopher Ciccone? Where did that come from? Did someone at Bravo owe him a favor?
What’s the point of complaining about Dale’s shirt when there’s the matter of his hair?
Will CJ ever stop talking about his lost testicle?