Top Chef: Masters and Margaritaville

Possums, it is with the sanity of bloggers as with Roquefort cheese—it’s a goodly spell in a nice, dark cave that does the trick.

In our case, you have only to imagine the salutary effects of 90-odd (and 90 odd) days with nary a thought about His Bearness or, um, Her Highness. Week upon glorious week neither knowing nor caring about Padma’s apartment, her burger commercial, or her wearing of silk charmeuse without a bra on noticeably cold nights at public events.

Day upon day unfolding without ever having to hear the phrase “throw under the bus,” or ponder the ominous portent of scallops, or come up with ursine metaphors, or decipher the semiotics of fauxhawks and t-shirts obviously chosen to attract attention.

Night upon night of sleep undisturbed by dark dreams of Bravo conspiracies bearing the suffix “-gate.” Rien de rien, possums.

By the end, we had very nearly returned to our customary, half-human state.

And then it occurred.

Suckling at the teat of cable television one afternoon, we landed on an oh-so-alliterative Food Network show titled Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, hosted by preposterously peroxided putz Guy Fieri. Normally, we are as allergic to him as he is to long trousers and intellectual depth. Indeed, chez Amuse-Biatch the show is referred to as Douchebag, Dipshit, and Dumbass. This time, though, we cocked our head and said aloud to ourselves, “You know, he’s kind of charming.”

The Patsy Stone-like scream from Miss XaXa was blood-curdling. We cannot say whether it was “No, Eddie, nooooo!” or “No, Charlus, nooooo!” we heard before we lost consciousness. It was not sal volatile or booze that brought us round, but, rather, Miss XaXa’s perfectly manicured nails digging into our neck as she dragged us by the scruff to where our laptop lay in desuetude. “That’s it!” she kept saying, “Vacation over! It’s time!”

So, yes, possums, we are back to the venom, vim, and vitriol of the internet, and we will be blogging the bejeezus out of Top Chef: Masters. The show premieres Wednesday, June 10, at 10 p.m.

Hootie Nation Weeps as Carla Hall’s Rise Deflated by “No”-fflé, Voodoo Double Curse

What was meant to be a blue cheese soufflé curdled into a “no”-fflé, and likewise our sense and reason have curdled into a bubbling, grief-studded, superstitious inquiry into why some things fail to rise. (And no, we’re not taking “egg whites and a too-hot oven” as an answer.)

After tossing and turning our voices-filled head on our tinfoil pillow, having nightmares of Hosea Rosenberg and Tom Colicchio holding up cans of Diet Coke and those little gold homunculi from the king cakes, an answer came to us.

It was nothing less than a voodoo double curse (though, of course, the producers tried to throw us off the scent by showing us a voodoo lady so incompetent that she suggested Jamie Lauren might yet be Stefan Richter’s girlfriend; mind you, if voodoo ladies have the power to turn lesbians into straight girls, then Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps are going to be in a sticky bind).

Much as it pains us, since we genuinely like Casey “Beaver Boots” Thompson, we have no choice but to pronounce her the first voodoo curse of this finale. And it isn’t as if this is a new idea. Back in August of 2007, during Season 3, we had already dubbed her the “Typhoid Mary” of Top Chef, since everyone who became friendly with her was immediately eliminated from the competition.

And as for the second voodoo curse, well, we learnt yesterday that Carla once cooked for Dick Cheney. Need we say more?

With this kind of bad magic, Hootie never stood a chance.

Jeff McInnis: “Nobody Would Look Me in the Eye”

Scallopgate Redux: On Behalf of Cheyenne Jackson, a Framed Jamie Lauren, the Gays, and Honest People in General, Amuse-Biatch Cries, “Bullshit!”

Ok, now we’re just angry.

As any faithful viewer of Top Chef (including, and especially, cheftestants) ought to know by now, scallops are the devil’s playground, an ingredient fraught with peril and the sweet but briny foretaste of doom. And so, on some level, our girl Jamie Lauren ought to know, and ought to have known, better.

Still, what Bravo’s editors have done amounts to prosecutorial misconduct.

In building their case against the scallop dish Jamie made for the Seven Swans A-Swimming component of the skull-numbingly numbskull “12 Days of Christmas” Elimination Challenge, the editors showed 6’4”, blue-eyes-and-calves-of-death gay grointhrob (much better than heartthrob) Cheyenne Jackson saying, “I just tried the Seven Swans A-Swimming. A little too slimy.” Case closed; bring in the guilty verdict.

And yet, on the “bonus footage” on Bravo’s website we get to see Cheyenne’s complete statement, which we are transcribing just in case the video mysteriously disappears (it starts at the 30-seconds-remaining mark): “I just tried the Seven Swans A-Swimming, um, and it was good, surprisingly. I’m not usually a scallops person. A little too slimy.”


See how that works? So Cheyenne Jackson doesn’t usually like scallops because they are a little too slimy, but Jamie’s scallops were good and not slimy (and, let us not forget, Miss Martha Stewart herself raved about Jamie’s earlier-in-the-episode scallop dish).

So, you wanna talk about a little too slimy? Talk about Bravo.

And Then There Were 16: In Irony Worthy of Alanis Morissette, Army Wife Becomes Cannon Fodder

Well, possums, it was bound to happen.

No, not because Army wife Lauren Starling Hope went into enemy territory overconfident, expecting to be greeted with flowers and a chef’s coat with her name embroidered on it. No, she went home because narrative expediency and historical precedent demanded it.

Of late on Top Chef, it seems as if the person with the most Lifetime TV-worthy narrative is the first one to be oh-so-sweetly pykagged. Last season, for example, the first victim was Nimma Osman, a young Muslim woman who worried her family wouldn’t exactly rejoice in her appearance on reality television and who showed up shy and wide-eyed in Chicago only to encounter presumably un-Quranic lesbians (gasp!) in a Pizzeria Uno.

To be sure, the mother (or should we say father?) of these Dickensian eliminations took place on Top Chef: Miami, when Clay Bowen—a sweet, wide-eyed, attendrissant rube of a lad from Mississippi who was determined to win Top Chef because his chef father had committed suicide after a lifetime of failure—was the first to go.

So of course it makes perfect sense that an Army wife (hello, Lifetime!) whose husband is stationed in Iraq—er, Eye-raq—and who went on Top Chef so as to have some respite from tying a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree should be the first to go. You can’t get a better narrative than that.

And yet there were extra fillips and flourishes of coincidence that served to reinforce the pitiless nature of narrative. Beneath the Quickfire Challenge's surface trope of little apple serving as gateway to the Big Apple, there was a darker, more poignant, symbolic undercurrent. After all, what cruel deity uses apples as the cannonballs of fate for an Army wife? For what could be more patriotic, more American (in an episode with overtones of America vs. the world) than apples, whether in a brunoise or made into a pie? (We don’t have the heart to chide Lauren, even gently, on her mispronunciation of “brunoise”; à quoi bon?). Let us not forget that though Lauren announced on the episode that she was from Savannah (which has its own appeal as making a Southerner the first person to be kicked off on each of the last three seasons), she is actually from Ohio, home of—you guessed it—Johnny Appleseed.

And need we mention—our eyes glittering with the mad fire of a homeless conspiracy theorist—that when Clay Bowen was kicked off in Miami, the Quickfire Challenge that proved the beginning of his undoing involved…an apple?! (Give us some time, possums, and we’ll do for apples what others have done for the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians and the Knights Templar.)

To make the elimination more wrenching, of course, of course it had to be a choice between Lauren and little Patrick, her long-lost, well, we were going to say pocketgay or twink, but Miss XaXa suggested we call him a country crock.

To our furrowed, questioning brow, she replied, “Cos don’t you just wanna spread ‘im on toast?”

How could we possibly answer that?

So, as we were saying, it was between Army Wife and TwinkleGay, that eternal, patriotic choice: For Queen or Country?

A dilemma made all the more poignant by their squealing reunion. Awww, we said to ourselves, trying to find hope in a post-Prop 8 world, the Army Wife has a Gay Friend—

“Uh,” Miss XaXa interrupted. “She does not have a gay friend. That little Patty Melt is definitely not her friend. Have you seen her publicity stills?”

We took a moment to do just that, and oh....

Lauren, hon, you may not have asked, but we have to tell.

Eeek! What were you thinking?

Well, at least you got your chef’s jacket, even if it doesn’t have your name on it.

You know, possum, a woman who loves gays and bacon can be forgiven many things, but this is beyond the Palin.

How could you have gone to that from this?

We understand that an Army wife’s duties include not sitting under the apple tree with anyone else but—oops, sorry about the apple mention—but this is not World War II. There is no call to play Betty Grable on the side of a bomber plane, and in camo at that.

And Patrick, possum, we will have stern words for you, young man. Gays don’t let friends dress drunk.

Tom Colicchio Hopes the Chicharrones of Logic Will Leaven Conspiracy Salad

From Tom Colicchio’s latest entry (one his best ever) on his Bravo blog:

Alas, we had to let Antonia go, which of course has brought a wellspring of vitriol from the theorists on our message boards. Therefore, I’m compelled to give my once-a-season response to those cynics out there who insist we make our decisions to manipulate the ratings. If I sound defensive, I think I’m entitled: Let’s just say we were the types of judges that, in exchange for scaling the breathtaking heights of reality TV, yielded to the producers directives, in order to play to audiences. Wouldn’t that mean we would have let Lisa go?

For the uninitiated: the bulk of the Top Chef season is shot over six grueling weeks some months before the show airs….While we’re shooting, I have very little contact with the contestants….We see tape of the chefs' interviews, and clips of them cooking, bonding, or fighting only after they’ve been cut into the final episode. It’s thus impossible for us to draw anything other than the most cursory conclusions about the chefs, much less figure out ratings that don’t yet exist, or who will eventually be "villain" or fan favorite.

If we had been able to somehow able to figure this out ahead of time and thereby act upon it, Tiffani would have been booted early in Season One (or Stephen, take your pick), Marcel would have never made it to the head-shaving incident, Sam would have won Season Two hands down on the female vote alone, and Tre would have stayed, despite screwing up, because he was such a likable and competent guy. In fact, we would have been compelled to ignore all of his subsequent mistakes because he had been such an able contender up to that point.

It seems that the theory-that-just-won’t-die has surfaced yet again because of Lisa, who has enraged people with her defiant, arms-crossed Judges' Table scowl. She’s clearly not as loved as some of the other chefs who have been sent packing, leading to the conspiracy theories: They kept her for the ratings! I can see why some take issue with Lisa -- she’s been called out on the carpet a number of times and somehow seems to hang on. I think Lisa, along with a few chefs from past seasons (Dave Martin and Mike Midgley are two that come to mind,) benefited from a phenomenon I call the "lucky-dog-who-keeps-skating-by-effect," in which a chef of decent, but not stellar, skills gets lucky and doesn’t screw up at precisely the moment that one of their more gifted opponents does. And since we judge each week’s Elimination Challenge on its own merits, we are operating each time under the assumption that everyone still cooking deserves to be there.

Possums, after reading this, we are tempted to believe that Tom shaves his head with Occam’s Razor.

Be sure, then, to read the rest of Tom’s blog, as he goes on to explain the whys and wherefores of Top Chef judging as it stands. If you’re still a cynic, think of the fun you’ll have using his words against the show the next time the judging (or, perhaps, the editing thereof) is inconsistent with the stated principles! (Say, for example, during the Scallopgate episode, where the Magic Voiceover (an editor’s insertion) at Judges’ Table recited how many times Spike and Lisa had been on the bottom, suggesting that cumulative performance does get taken into account.)

In the Depths of Its Dark, Dank Basement, Amuse-Biatch Rests Its Chin on Its Fist and Mutters, "Hmmmmmm."

It so happens, possums, that from time to time, a stray comment will jog our addled, prosecutorial memory, and then we like to play compare and contrast. To wit--

Compare & Contrast No. 1

From the January 17, 2007, blog of Top Chef executive producer Shauna Minoprino, discussing Clippergate:

1. We allowed the chefs to have a camera because one of them had asked for one because it was their last night and they wanted to mess around and have some fun. I think we all expected them to film themselves doing impressions of Tom and Padma and some of the producers (that's what usually happens and it makes for fun extra content for the Bravo website).

From adjudged Top Chef winner Ilan Hall's interview with Epicurious.com:

Epi: Were there any scandalous or funny moments that didn't air?

IH: There was a scene in the house where we all imitated Padma and Tom and created a cook-off at a fake judge's table. And I think Mike was edited too much; he's hilarious on the show but he's a lot funnier in person. I'm sure they had to because his humor is a bit dirty.

Now this is going to be a bit of an "iffy" chain, so bear with us.

If producer Minoprino is to be believed, the cheftestants were given a video camera on the last night of filming before the finals with the expectation that the contestants would do impressions of Tom and Padma. It seems reasonable to assume that the producers were hoping for that kind of footage because it did not exist at that time, i.e., prior to that last night, the night Ilan and Elia shaved their heads. However, there is no indication from Minoprino as to whether such footage was ever obtained.

But, if Ilan is to be believed, that footage does, in fact, exist. So we wonder, was that footage filmed that same night of the long clippers, and if so, why hasn't it turned up as "fun extra content for the Bravo website"?

Because if it's true that the footage exists, and it wasn't filmed the night of Clippergate, then the producer's stated rationale for giving the cheftestants a video camera would seem not to make sense.

Is one of them not telling the truth? That conclusion we leave to you, ladies and gentlemen of the dark-basement jury.

Compare & Contrast No. 2

From the same Epicurious.com interview of Ilan Hall:

Epi: Anything you regret saying on camera?

IH: After the show was aired, Bravo showed me doing an imitation of Harold, who won the year before. They kind of cut it up differently; they made me say something nasty, it was a fragment of a sentence.

Epi: That one-liner generated some nasty blog posts, huh?

IH: It's all positive. Even when people say negative things toward me. It's all good for me. Especially in New York, I'm getting so much positive support. Most of the heat is coming from the same 300 people that blog on every blog site. I can't let it bother me. My girlfriend said, 'Doesn't it bother you? People are saying nasty things about you.' But it doesn't, you can't get upset by that.

From Ilan Hall's suspiciously well-written February 11, 2007, "interview" that he "phoned in" to Newsday's Sunday Opinion editor:

They kept me saying some nasty things and cut away some nice things, because they wanted to make it more compelling to watch. But they never put words in my mouth. What you saw on TV was me, just an edited me.

Compare & Contrast No. 3

From Ilan Hall's February 11, 2007, "interview" with Newsday:

I didn't feel self-conscious during the filming, but you always know the camera is there. Sometimes you can find ways to sneak around it. The other finalist, Marcel, was a master at avoiding saying nasty things on camera. When we saw the show on TV, we thought, "What about all the stuff he said the second the camera turned away?"

From the February 12, 2007, live chat hosted by The Gals, Ms. Place, and Amuse-Biatch:

Carlos Fernandez confirmed that contestants are required by producers to wear their body microphones at all times, even when they go to the bathroom.

And so, if Ilan is to be believed, and Marcel did make comments the second the camera turned away, the body mike would presumably have captured those comments. As we remember from Lycheegate, Bravo has no compunction about using voice-overs, so why wouldn't Bravo similarly use these "nasty things" Marcel said? Again, ladies and gentlemen of the dark basement, it's all up to you.