Padma Lakshmi Pounds Ilan Hall, Defends Marcel Vigneron's Cherry

In an unusually cogent entry on her Bravo blog, our Padma jumps into the fray to separate the virgins from the boys. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, er, Rushdie:

And now for the desserts. I know many may have wanted to taste Ilan's dessert over Marcel's when the viewer polling was done when it aired -- but I was there. And leaving the played-out foam aside, Marcel's dessert beat Ilan's to a pulpy mess. Ilan's ill conceived Gluttony platter was too sickly, wet, and limp to win anything, especially as a last course. There was a what looked like a brick of brownie, with a macadamia nut brittle with creme anglais sauce and a funnel cake drenched in simple syrup and powdered sugar. A case of too many weak flavors fighting on the same plate against each other. Now Ilan is a good cook, and he's capable of some excellent and delicious food, and I'm sure that funnel cake was tasty and the right consistency when he originally prepared it. But funnel cake, like many fried sweet foods, does not travel well and doesn't need paring with other desserts. If he wanted to make a gluttonous dessert, what about going the way of simpicity as Elia did and making a big banana split with some clever flavor twist if he wanted to be creative? Marcel didn't do a lustful dessert but his conept of using cherries was a good one, and it did taste like cherries, my mouth was bursting with cherry flavor, he used fresh cherries in the height of summer in California, and it tasted like it. His portion and presentaion were anything but lustful but he is young. I'd still order that on a menu any day over the toothache soggy surprise that Ilan served us.

Let's see: "taste Ilan's dessert," "played-out foam" (is that like the Dan Savage-coined "santorum"?), "pulpy mess," "sickly, wet and limp," "brick of brownie," "creme anglais [sic]," "drenched in simple syrup," "weak flavors," "big banana split," "my mouth was bursting with cherry flavor," "soggy surprise." Nah, it must just be us and our gutter minds.

First Reaction: Irony is the Eighth Deadly Sin

Well, irony in the Alanis Morrissette sense, not in the true sense, but we'll get to that.

So, after two weeks without a new episode, Bravo treated us to a "supersized" episode packed to the gills with sin. We encountered all manner of deadly sins, and learned that fuglitude is the ninth of these, as Padma Lakshmi made our new year by returning in an outfit so whorendous that it really must have required the full two-week hiatus to come up with it. It was a fuck-you to viewers' corneas, and we almost had to admire Bravo's brazen disregard in showing it without a warning stating, "Some Viewers May Find the Fugly Outfits Disturbing. Viewer Discretion Advised." Raggaydy Andy is lucky the FCC levies fines for swearing and not for fugly clothes.

The Quickfire Challenge was to create a dish based on a color. As Miss XaXa pointed out, it was the gayest of challenges, as it involved recreating the rainbow (well, with the exception of blue and the addition of brown). Beer Bong, enervated by the Vicodin in his system following an emergency tooth extraction, won the Quickfire Challenge, but, alas, no immunity.

The Elimination Challenge was to create a meal for yet another busty B-list celebrity with a gay following and a group of sketchy friends. Instead of Jennifer Coolidge, we got former Madonna BFF Debi Mazar hosting a seven-course dinner based on the seven deadly sins. The top three dishes were created by Sam, Elia, and Beer Bong, and wouldn't ya know it, the result was a tie, a win to be split equally between Beer Bong and Vicodin. The bottom three were Marcel, Betty "Spice Rack" Fraser, and Ilan Hall. And just like that, Spice Rack was in the soup and undone by the nitty gritty of the thing. She packed up her knives and readied herself for the ten-minute drive home to her restaurant in Hollywood. As we pointed out this morning, Spice Rack, honey, we named ya but we hardly knew ya.

So what did we learn?

We learned that getting a good performance out of Michael "Beer Bong" Midgley really is like pulling teeth. As Tom Colicchio put it, he should cook on Vicodin more often.

We learned about Alanis Morrissette irony (AMI), with the "brown girl" (Elia Aboumrad) being assigned white, the African-American (Cliff Crooks) being color blind and seeing black, and the chef who drew the sin of wrath waxing very wroth indeed. (We also learned, together with Sam Talbot, just how handy it is to have Sicilian blood to blame one's anger on; we wonder whether Frank "El Bully" Terzoli left behind little Sicilian heritage cards to pull out whenever the holder throws a hissy fit in the direction of Marcel. No doubt we'll find out next week that Ilan Hall yells at Marcel because he's a Sicilian Jew.)

A propos, we learned that Ilan Hall is unnaturally fixated on Marcel's cherry, all the while insisting that cherries lower libido. Of course, AMI struck back when Padma described Ilan's effort as "limp and flaccid."

And we learned that Marcel Vigneron still can't pronounce "gelee" to save his life or his virginity.