The Cherce Bits: Marcel Vigneron Goes Pinkie a Pinkie with Raggaydy Andy, Throws Elia Aboumrad Under the Bus

Our beloved, button-eyed, busily Blackberrying Bravo VP, Raggaydy Andy Cohen, is threatening to become the Barbara Walters of gay network exec bloggers. We hereby rifle through his hard-won booty and pilfer the choicest bits of his interview with Marcel Vigneron.

Marcel on his good friend and only ally, Elia Aboumrad:

If anyone was going to go it should've been the leader. Sam got a bunch of knives for winning and so it seems like the loser should be Elia....Also at the same time Elia was the leader so she should've gone home. I am not gonna say Sam didn't deserve it.

Marcel on his mother:

My mom is actually hearing impaired....

Marcel on why he thinks his fellow cheftestants seem genuinely to dislike him:

Million dollar question right there! I honestly don't know. I could try and come up with a couple theories but I don't really know because I think I am a likeable person and fairly social. I have friends and people like me who meet me....The whole arrogance thing comes through, too, apparently. I don't really think I was entirely too arrogant. Granted, I am confident. I have dedicated the last decade to gastronomy so that comes through in my interviews and then my interactions with the other chefs. I think that could've been a huge factor. I am not exactly sure why. I think they saw me as a threat and decided if they all gang up against me they could get me eliminated. Everyone has pacts on "Survivor" and they turn against people. Top Chef is different, it's about the food.

Marcel on friendships with fellow cheftestants:

Elia and I were friends and would talk. I went out to NYC and hung out with Sam a few times after the show. Josie and I are friends and still talk. All toothbrushes aside, I think Frank likes me but you don't see a lot of that.

Marcel on viewer response:

People like me on the street! I haven't received hate mail.. fans come up to me and like what I'm doing on the show and say I am the only one with a backbone. There was one lady who said "You're that prick on the TV show..."

Marcel on his hair:

I've been rockin' this style for five or six years now. It's heavily trained. It has a mind of it's [sic] own, Andy. I have a unique personality and try to do things differently and it comes through in my food, personality, character traits, and I guess hair. If someone combs their hair down I will comb mine up.

Marcel on whether he has a girlfriend:

Not so much! There are friendly ladies in my life but I don't have a girlfriend, per se.

Marcel Vigneron: Bizarre Love Triangle

Like herpes, the folie à deux that is the relationship between Marcel Vigneron and Ilan Hall is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Though we are faithfully delving into our Freud, Jung and Lacan, and will concoct a cherry jubilee of an armchair psychologist's explanation for the seething, simmering, scintillating tsuris, here is a snippet from Raggaydy Andy's interview with Marcel that may go a long way toward explaining things:

Another thing is that a lot of them are two-faced to me. In the first episode, Ilan and I were showing each other our knives, he was interested in my knives and asking me questions about my knives and how to keep them from rusting. I got home and watch the first episode and he's calling me out! I couldn't believe it. Does that answer your question in a roundabout way? I can't totally put my finger on it because I think I am a likeable guy.

In parting, Mia Gaines-Alt told Cliff to "put [his] dick away," but it looks like she was aiming her comments in the wrong direction. Wasn't this a whole subplot in Heathers? Hell truly hath no fury....

Betty Fraser: The 'Rack' is Stacked and Packed

Or, as Siskel & Ebert used to say, perhaps in reference to Betty "Spice Rack" Fraser's battery of keyhole tops and decollete blouses, the balcony is closed.

As happy as we were to be 'name-checked,' albeit indirectly, in her Sirius interview with Larry Flick yesterday (and we thought that the fact she was going to be interviewed at all was an indication that she would be sent packing that very night), we were quite dissatisfied with one aspect of the interview. Larry Flick never asked, and we never found out the answer to, the question we have been brooding on for ages: Does she crunch or does she munch? With her combination of stevedore and 'bar wench' (her words, ladies), we thought she would make a wonderful addition to the cast of The L Word, but, aLas, we wiLL never know.

Though she is gone, her influence will live on, as was evident last night. When, at the fixtures store and with the largest crowd possible (for purposes of maximum impact), Sam Talbot went all Sicilian on Marcel's ass (see? we told you he was Keyser Soze), the one thing that struck us and had us a-cackle was his use of the word "gnat" to describe Marcel.

Let's see, where had we heard that before? Oh yes, from Spice Rack herself during the TGIFriday's challenge in the fire station. Let's face it, whatever his virtues, Sammy the Sicilian isn't nearly clever enough to come up with "gnat." If we remember aright, during his last attempt at shit-stirring, trying to get fellow Sicilian Frankie the Bull to beat Marcel so badly his own mother wouldn't recognize him, the best ole Sammy could come up with was "kid," i.e., "if that kid was my room mate, etc." So next time you hear the word "gnat" being thrown at Marcel, remember the Spice Rack.

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.

Last-Ever Anthony Bourdain Post

Certainly the last in a very long while.

It's just that today, when we have a new and slightly expanded (that SuperSize business is false advertising; someone alert the Federal Trade Commission) episode of Top Chef, we were more than ever struck by Bravo's reasoning in inviting Anthony Bourdain to be a guest judge, when the piece we're about to quote makes clear his utter contempt for the entire project and mission of Top Chef itself.

So, once again from The Nasty Bits, heeeeeere's Tony:

First of all, what is a ‘celebrity chef’? Well, it’s a celebrity—meaning well known, bordering on famous—who is, or was at one time, a chef. This definition would exclude amateurs, neophyte cooks, and sous-chefs plucked off the chorus line by TV producers and elevated through the magic of television to ‘chef’ status. If you’re a comely young fry cook with an adorably boyish forelock and you get yanked into a TV studio, given the moniker of, say, the Adenoidal Chef, and suddenly housewives in seventeen countries are squirming in their caftans while you make green curry, that doesn’t make you a chef.

Meow! Where does that leave, for example, sous-chef Elia Aboumrad, line cook Ilan Hall, and line cook Michael Midgley? Well, we suppose Bravo wanted the entertainment value from Bourdain's acid quips, which it got, but what was Bourdain getting out of it? Did his contempt for the whole enterprise manifest itself in the way he handled his guest-judging stint? Or was he just being his usual, self-confessed television whore, principles be damned?

Our Favorite Food-Related Exchange of the Day

From the first season of the Showtime series Weeds. Kevin Nealon (KN) and Mary Louise Parker (MLP) are meeting at an Indian restaurant for lunch.

KN: Why aren't you eating?

MLP: I told you I ate already.

KN: Where?

MLP: The Olive Garden.

KN: I wouldn't take a dump in the Olive Garden.

MLP: I like the hot artichoke-spinach dip.

KN: I can't even look at you.

She Reads Us, She Really Reads Us!: Betty Fraser Hearts Amuse-Biatch for Dubbing Her "Spice Rack"

As promised, possums, we listened this morning to Miss XaXa's OutQ in the Morning Overlord, Larry Flick, as he interviewed our very own Betty "Spice Rack" Fraser on his show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

We had pen and paper at the ready, so we have all the highlights of the brief interview, but first, on a completely egotistical note, this was our absolutely favorite part, an eyes-closed, tummy-kneading, purring start to the day.

Towards the end of the interview, Betty was discussing the reaction she gets from fans of the show, and she mentioned that she has been given all sorts of nicknames, such as Betty "Spice Rack" Fraser.

We froze in our tracks. Dear Lord, that's us!, we muttered with as much dignity as we could muster.

"Honey, we've been calling her that since the show premiered," observed Miss XaXa before letting out a trademark Texas "yee-haw!"

Betty asked Larry Flick if he'd heard that nickname, "Spice Rack," and he said he had and called it "clever." Betty herself called it cute.

Betty, honey, if you're reading this, we know more about spices than about racks, but yours definitely rattles the marjoram and dried oregano in our high school woodshop final project. ("Don't forget the cumin!" adds Miss XaXa.) Alright, then. And the, er, cumin too.













Alright, now on to the interview.

When Larry Flick complimented her by saying, "You stir the shit," Miss Spice Rack took the homage in stride: "If you gotta do it, you gotta do it."

On Marcel Vigneron's hairdo: "I don't think the guy can do anything else with it." She also checks out the bonus material and the Bravo website and approvingly singled out Sam Talbot's comment that Marcel's attempts to hog credit were perhaps due to the fact that he's only five-foot-two.

On how much of what goes on is canned production stuff: They get the instructions for the challenge, but "everything else is really happening, it's really us, and really evil."


On Michael "Beer Bong" Midgley: "Mike is Mike. You wouldn't know it, but he's very talented." Apropos of the vending machine challenge, Beer Bong had told Miss Spice Rack that "Cheetos with Snickers was his favorite dish when watching football," and he was so mad that by the time his turn at the vending machine came up everything was gone that "he chose the Cheeto that looked the most phallic."

The person she was most surprised to see packing her knives and going: "Josie."

On Mia Gaines-Alt's decision to leave: "Elia was going to get canned. Mia has two lovely children, and I know she was missing those kids. People come to a boiling point."

On the holiday challenge: She worked across from the other team on the Warner Brothers lot, and she felt that even if all of her team's dishes were terrible, they should win just because they had so much food out there.

On her career as an actress: "I sucked."

Her other nickname: Betty "Botox" Fraser.

We still think Spice Rack is better.

Well, possums, that's all we were able to scribble down (we took shorthand at the same school as Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel, so it's not our forte), but we got most of it down.

Just Sayin': Polemic with Anthony Bourdain

From Anthony Bourdain's latest book, The Nasty Bits:

“Let's be honest. Let's be really, painfully honest: Who is
cooking?

Who is the backbone of the American restaurant business? Whose sudden departure could shut down nearly every good restaurant, nightclub, and banquet facility in every major city in the country? Whose sweat and toil allows annoyingly well-known white-boy chefs like me to go around the country flogging books, appearing on TV, writing obnoxious magazine articles, and baiting their peers? Who, pound for pound, are the best French and Italian cooks in New York?

If you're a chef, manager, or owner, you know the answer: Mexicans, Ecuadorans. Salvadoran guys (and women) from south of the border....

There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self-deluding that the industry-approved image of ‘the chef.’ We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who’s making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with sauce vièrge [sic], the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and sauce madère…We know, to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you don’t see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House[….]

Lately, things have changed...a little. The off-the-books, below-minimum-wage illegal has to some extent disappeared from view, at least in the good restaurants I worked in. The strata of Latino labor has enlarged to include sauté, grill, and even sous-chef positions. But you don’t see too many chefs of French or Italian or even ‘New American’ restaurants with a last name like Hernandez or Perez or Garcia. Owners, it seems, still shrink from having a mestizo-looking chef swanning about the dining room of their two- or three-star French eatery—even if the candidate richly deserves the job[….]

I’d go on, more than happy to open the next can of worms—the How come I don’t see many African Americans in good restaurant kitchens? question—but I’ll leave that to another, more reasoned advocate, hopefully one with better answers than I have.”

Let the hate mail begin.

Tom Colicchio with Hair! Lots of Hair!

In the spirit of the new year, when all is youthful vigor and beginnings, we bring you yet another picture of Tom Colicchio, from the time when he was but a mere stripling, as new as the new year itself, and when his follicles produced in wanton abundance. Here, then, is a wee Tom Colicchio with his mother, Beverly. Happy New Year to you all, possums.

Anthony Bourdain: Tom Colicchio May Owe His Celebrity Chefdom to Cocaine, But I Owe Mine to Sexual Repression

Earlier, we noted how Tom Colicchio, in David Kamp's book, The United States of Arugula, theorized that the rise of celebrity chefs was due to a sort of cocaine "hangover" in the eighties. Pungent Top Chef guest judge Anthony Bourdain, self-admittedly no slouch in the hard drugs department, puts forth a different theory in his most recent book, The Nasty Bits:

“Why now, though? What the hell happened? What is wrong (or right) with society that even a son of a bitch like me gets a damn TV show? Why do people even care about chefs? What changed?....Maybe people just aren’t fucking enough. There was a definite upsurge in the fortunes of chefs with the early eighties discover that indiscriminate sexual activity can kill you. Certainly people seem to be eating more—evidence, perhaps, of sublimated desire.”

Well, having been raised in the marble-titted embrace of the Mother Church, we know which explanation we believe.

The Nasty Bits sheds light not only on the rise of "food porn," but also on Chef Colicchio's musical tastes and after-hours habits:

“Tom Colicchio of Craft says that after work he goes out to New York's AlphabetLounge when Toke Squealy, the band of his guitar teacher, Alan Cohen, plays, orto Arlene's Grocery 'to check out [his] friend Becca's band, Thin Wild Mercury.'But, he adds, 'I don't think it has any effect on what or how I cook. But it does provide time away from thinking about food or myrestaurants.'”

No wonder he doesn't let the Top Chef contestants, as he admitted on his Bravo blog, have access to their iPods.

After reading that distinctly unnasty bit about Chef Colicchio in the Bourdain book, we ran across Chef Colicchio's official portrait on the Craft Restaurant website (see above), and had us a good laugh. The thing makes him look like a hybrid of (1) a gay leather-daddy bear, (2) a Meatpacking District club bouncer, (3) a James Bond villain intent on world domination, and (4) a former rugby player turned Cockney hoodlum in a Guy Richie film. That's definitely a man who doesn't know the first thing about sexual repression.