Breaking News: Josie Smith-Malave Attacked, Gaybashed, Spat On

For once, possums, we don't have a snarky thing to say.

Josie Smith-Malave, the cooking world's most affable lesbian (sorry, Sandee Birdsong, you're a close second; and Tiffani Faison, you're a brilliant cook, but affable, not so much), was reportedly attacked over the weekend on Ilan Hall's native soil, Long Island.

According to a report, Josie "was among a small group of women asked to leave a Sea Cliff, Long Island[,] bar over Labor Day weekend," after which "about 10 young people followed the women out and began screaming anti-gay slurs, spitting on them and beating them....[T]he women, who were on Long Island to attend a friend's birthday party, suffered bruises, and one received injuries to her head. One of them had a camera taken in the attack."

Our best wishes go out to Josie and her friends, and we hope authorities (or lesbian avenger Jodie Foster in The Brave One) get the fuckers.

Mia Gaines-Alt: Is Hindsight Really 20/20?

That's what we wondered when we read these excerpts from a December 16, 2006, article in the Modesto Bee by Christopher Caskey about cheftestant Mia "Josette Eber" Gaines-Alt:

Mia Gaines-Alt got a belated birthday surprise Wednesday, though it wasn't a good one. Two days after she turned 33, she watched while she kicked herself off the Bravo network reality cooking show "Top Chef."

She knew what was going to happen because most of the season was filmed over the summer. She just wasn't expecting the world -- or at least a small slice of it -- to see her get kicked off the week of her birthday.

"(My family and I) all cried and watched it together," Gaines-Alt said. "I knew it was coming, but we figured it was not going to air until Christmas week."

In this week's show, Gaines-Alt was on the losing side of a two-team challenge in which each team attempted to outcater the other at a cocktail party. Just as it looked as if the judges were going to give her team leader, Elia Aboumrad, the boot, Gaines-Alt stepped in and offered to go home instead.

Even after watching herself give up a chance for $100,000 and a feature in Food & Wine magazine, she still believes it was the right call.

"I always have to be satisfied with the decisions I make," said Gaines-Alt, who owns Feed the People, a barbecue restaurant in Oakdale. "I realized that there was no way they were going to give (Elia) a second chance. I understand it is a competition, but I'm only human. … She may not have even had a job to go back to after the competition. I already have something to go back to."

One bit of good news for Miss Josette Eber is that "the exposure from the show has improved business at Feed the People. 'Even before the show actually aired, the buzz went out and the place was packed,' Gaines-Alt said. "A lot of that has died away, but we are consistent now. … If anything, I might need a bigger location. It's kind of frustrating for people who come out here from Modesto but can't get in right away because there is a line."

As Miss XaXa found out in person, those Modestans are in for some good beans and 'cue.

Miss XaXa v. Mia Gaines-Alt: Battle of the Fag Hags

Well, Miss XaXa prefers "fruit fly" as an appellation (not for nothing is her middle name "Drosophila"), but you get the drift.

It is no secret that Miss XaXa has had a crush on former cheftestant Carlos Fernandez from the very beginning. It didn't matter that Carlos is gay and is married to a lovely chap named Chuck (she even found it vaguely endearing that they both have the same name, albeit in different languages).

Indeed, despite Carlos' married gayhood, it had always been one of Miss XaXa's wine-soaked fantasies--visions of sin stoked by Zin--to tuck her chulo chef into bed and read him excerpts from Diana Vreeland's D.V. as a bedtime story while the strains of Grace Jones doing her take on "La vie en rose" played soothingly in the background.

After Carlos was eliminated on the Thanksgiving episode, Miss XaXa was disconsolate and inconsolable. Now that a month has elapsed, she finally brought herself to read her chulo chef's blog, only to encounter this statement by Carlos about Mia Gaines-Alt:

And I will always remember the time you tucked me into bed!

We have rarely seen Miss XaXa in such a state. The outraged arias of "How could he?" gave way to a kind of understanding. Her fruit fly qualifications are second to none, but, she wailed to us, "I never stood a chance!"

We gave her our nun-embroidered Irish linen handkerchief. "I suppose I can't blame him. I mean, gay culture wouldn't even exist if it weren't for fierce black women singing in earthshattering tones some combination of the words 'love,' 'pride,' 'party,' 'deep,' and 'show' against a thumpa-thumpa beat, so how could any gay man resist a fierce black woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to celebrity hairstylist José Eber and dresses like the wardrobe mistress on Brokeback Mountain?" she queried rhetorically as she sobbed in the women's shoe department at Neiman-Marcus.

Now it's true that when Miss XaXa visited Mia earlier this month at her restaurant, Feed the People!, she found Mia to be gracious and warm, and her food delicious. But how differently things might have been if Miss XaXa had known about the tucking in. And now she has a message for Mia: "You know what? Your cornbread wasn't very good! So you go ahead and 'feed the people,' but keep your hands off my gays!"

Mia Gaines-Alt: And I Am Telling You I AM Going

Ah, Christmas in July.

Or August, actually, since that is when, according to Lee Anne Wong's Bravo blog, the episode was filmed. But we'll get to that in a second.

Having read so much about the episode before we sank into the Louis XV settee last night, we were expecting A Very Special Episode of Top Chef, something like a cross between an ABC afterschool special and Survivor: Race War or whatever the latest installment was called.

We were also prepared to write a couple of sober little essays on Diversity in the Kitchen and Diversity on Reality TV, quoting Anthony Bourdain to leaven them a bit (and goodness knows you may still see them, as we have a couple of weeks' worth of posting to fill before the next new episode).

But, really, not so much. To the extent race was involved in the episode, it was in a Terry McMillan, Fitty vs. Oprah sort of context.

Of course, we have more than a passing interest in Mia Gaines-Alt, since Miss XaXa visited her Oakdale restaurant, Feed the People!, earlier this month. We had seen hints of her temper on previous episodes (we have never quite forgotten that I'm-gonna-git-ya look she gave Ilan on their first day), but even we were unprepared for when she went all Angela Bassett-in-Waiting to Exhale on Cliff's ass, and we think some of it was justified.

At that point, we were priming ourselves for a martial-arts type of thing, something like Bride with the White Hair, where Mia used her dreads to decapitate Cliff for his effrontery in showing disrespect to a strong Black woman. When, after Mia recounted how she had to sell crack as a child to survive, Cliff rolled his eyes and asked, "Are you done being a martyr yet?" (what an asshole!) we gripped the edge of the Louis XV settee, waiting for the Spirit of Oprah to appear, strike him dumb and accuse him of dating white women (oh wait, isn't Oprah the one being pelted with metaphorical Oreos by 50 Cent and Ludacris?)

Alas, it was not to be. And anyway, it's not as if Mia couldn't have taken care of him single-handedly; she is one fierce woman. And when she fell on her sword and did her version of "And I Am Telling You I Am Going" and left the show, we half-expected, half-wanted her to do the Angela Bassett thing, throwing a lit match behind her and strutting fiercely toward the camera. Alas, that was not to be, either.














Perhaps we should back up a moment, for the benefit of those who, like us yesterday, have not seen the episode. The Quickfire Challenge, to make a drink using Bailey's, won immunity for Cliff. For the Elimination Challenge, the eight cheftestants were divided into two teams and then had to cater a "red carpet" event, a "holiday party" for Los Angeles Magazine. In August.

(Yes, and it was just as phony and bogus as it sounds. We didn't see a single person on the episode even remotely worthy of a red carpet. Not so much as a reality show castoff, 80s sitcom has-been or Hollywood starlet in terms of celebrity. Well, there was a funny chap in an eye-scarring orange shirt who looked awfully like a fat Lance Bass, but since there was no Reichen Lemkuhl, even though there were cameras around, we doubt it was the real Lance.

And we were particularly put off by the fakery of Betty "Spice Rack" Fraser wishing a guest a "Merry Christmas!" No, Bill O'Reilly, don't get worked up; it's not the war on Christmas, it's the war on Christmas in August. Or Mia telling another guest that the strawberries were wonderful, and it's great how California is the only place you can grow strawberries in the winter. Yes, we grow strawberries in the winter, but the ones you were purveying were wonderful precisely because it was the middle of summer. But we digress.)

The guest judge was Chef Lee Hefter of Spago Beverly Hills. The Orange Team--Spice Rack, Ilan, Marcel, and Sam--won the challenge, and as leader, Sam was the individual winner. The Black Team--Cliff, Mike, Elia, and Mia--was on the chopping block (well, not Cliff, since he had immunity), and Elia as the leader was about to be kicked off, but at the last minute, as Padma was opening her mouth to deliver the fateful, affectless words, Mia took herself out of the competition in order to save Elia.

We had actually been impressed with Miss Elia Aboumrad's maturity in accepting responsibility for her team's failure and the consequent dismissal from the competition. But we were even more impressed with Mia's decision In retrospect it makes sense on some level, as the groundwork was laid in the beach episode, when it was the three women who made the top dishes, and had discussions about what it was like to be a woman in professional kitchens, and how they hoped a woman would make it to the finals.














As Tom Colicchio pointed out to her, she didn't seem like a quitter. So just why did Mia quit?

We suspect it was a debilitating bout of homesickness, pangs of self-doubt, a moment of lucid self-awareness, a large dose of altruism, a spoonful of sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves. That's quite a cocktail, even without the Bailey's.

Of course, the biggest question of all is why this debate had to take place at all. Of the three people up for elimination, Michael "Beer Bong" Midgley is clearly the least talented (and we're being charitable). We were especially delighted when he informed the judges that his task during the catering challenge was to run back and forth between the mobile kitchen and the food station, because not once did we see him run. At most, he shuffled.

At any rate, shouldn't he have been the one to go? Everyone, himself included, recognizes that he is not chef material, much less Top Chef material. (Although, a perverse sentiment would suggest he might do well on a channel like Spike, or Food Network for NASCAR viewers, where he could cook without intimidating the viewers. After all, isn't that the secret to Rachael Ray's success? Well, that, and the perkiness pact she entered into with Satan; they spat in their hands and shook on the deal. Oh wait, that was her loogie-loving lawyer-cum-consort.)

So how has Beer Bong done it? How has he escaped the Padma-wielded guillotine so many times? It may be that, as one reader suggested, it's not Sam, but Beer Bong, who is the real Keyser Söze. After what happened Wednesday night, and the way he has managed to hold on all this time, we are more than willing to believe it.

Splenda in the Ass: Mia Gaines-Alt to Sleep with Loaded Double Hockey Sticks Under Her Bed

Well, it's h-e-double hockey sticks time in Oakdale, California.

Josette Eber always looked as if she could sleep with one eye open, and now we fear that she may indeed have to.

We also now understand why her mother was so cagey and nervous after Miss XaXa showed up at the Feed the People! restaurant with her camera, her pricey grin, and her molasses-thinned-with-Karo-syrup Southern accent.

If you are a loyal "Top Chef" viewer, as you must be if you are reading these frivolous musings, you will no doubt remember the "Camp Glucose" episode, where the chefs were to prepare a 500-calorie meal for overweight kids at a Christian university in Malibu that is paradoxically known as a party school.

Once approved by guest nutritionists, the recipes were not to be deviated from. However, in contravention of the rules, Betty "Spice Rack" Fraser replaced the Splenda in her meringue cookies with sugar, and her team went on to win the Elimination Challenge.

When the judges were deciding whom to send home, accusations and innuendo about cheating flew fast and furious. Sam made wild statements about hands wielding squeeze bottles of olive oil. (Frankly, it looks to us like he was the culprit, and that all the olive oil went into his hair; seriously, we itch to introduce this man to a good shampoo, or at the very least a couple of squirts of Dawn). However, when pressed to name names, Sam refused, saying, "I won't go there."

At this point, Miss Josette Eber herself jumped in: "Oh, I'll go there" and pointed the finger at Spice Rack's Splenda deception. Spice Rack, not being in the room, was never the wiser, and in a subsequent episode, the two women worked together, hugged, cried, and were proud of their overcooked duck breast, all the while ignoring the shiv sticking out from between Spice Rack's shoulder blades.

Until recently.

As described in the L.A. Independent's profile of Spice Rack,

In scripted television, however, there are fewer surprises for the actors — like the one Fraser got a few weeks ago when she saw a that fellow competitor, Mia, ratted her out to the judges’ table after Fraser altered a pre-approved cookie recipe during a challenge, unintentionally breaking a rule.“I was surprised and disappointed,” Fraser says. “I didn’t know up until I saw it [on T.V.].”

So now she knows. And you know what else she knows? That Oakdale is a straight shot, as it were, up Interstate 5 from Los Angeles.

And so, given Spice Rack's demonstrated ability to nurse loud, abusive, and virulent grudges, and her propensity for statements such as, "Anything that'll fuck you up is fair," perhaps Mama Mia thought Miss XaXa was a hired assassin when she showed up.

She wasn't, of course, but watch out, Mia. You might just get a packet of cookies in the mail, not realizing that the Splenda has been replaced with polonium-210.

Just the Tri-Tip, We Promise (Now, That's More Like It)

A salacious headline having restored our sense of self-respect, we now present to you the tri-tip dinner that Miss XaXa purchased at Josette Eber's restaurant, Feed the People!

Now, Miss XaXa, being a flower of the South (though not a rose; she's more like the Yellow Venus-Flytrap of Texas), knows from barbecue, and she found the tri-tip superb, flavorful and juicy. She positively raved about the beans, with their complements of herbs and cheese, declaring them possibly the best she has had at a barbecue joint. However, the cornbread was merely average, which was rather surprising, as we have seen Josette Eber making cornbread on the show several times.

And so, whatever one may say about the woman's resemblance to celebrity hairstylist Jose Eber, her propensity for throwing people under buses, off buses, from buses, and against buses, her murderous stares at judges and cheftestants who thwart her, her quaint argot, and her way with the backstabbing girl-hug (et tu, Josette?), the woman can cook.

Feeding People Inside and Out (God, Did We Really Write Such a Cheesy Headline?)

This is the sight that greeted Miss XaXa when she went a-calling, the pale yellow and ocher front of Feed the People! , with the smoker right out in front, like a family pet; come to think of it, a lot like George Clooney's potbellied pig, the one that just made its way to the great Niman Ranch in the sky.

Mia cooks for cowboys, Oakdale is a cowboy kind of town, and the restaurant certainly has that look about it, Edward Hopper meets "Deadwood." The interior is very simple, to say the least. The walls are decorated with family portraits and memorabilia, and the chairs and tables covered with Southwestern-colored chintz (in fact, we found the slip covers on the back of the chairs inexplicably poignant). The point of the restaurant, then, is not ambiance, but food.

XaXa, Mia: Here We Go Again

As promised, here is the second installment of our little tale, Miss XaXa Pays a Call in Cali.

After a leisurely drive through the almond orchards of California's Central Valley in the conveyance hired from Avis Rent-A-Barouche, Miss XaXa arrived in the hamlet of Oakdale, and thence to Ms. Josette Eber's restaurant, Feed the People! (Previously, we were remiss, as was Bravo, in not including the "!" in the restaurant's name. It's like writing "Oliver" or "Star" or "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down"--it's just not the same. As Mia has it, the name of the restaurant isn't just a statement; it's an exhortation.)

Miss XaXa found Mia to be warm and friendly and welcoming (drat!). Mama Mia was a bit of a different story; no "Maman with a gleaming gloat" was she. But, as Miss XaXa put it, "If a grinning white girl with a camera and a hankering for 'cue came in off the street asking to take my daughter's picture, I might be a little wary, too." Consequently, Miss XaXa, ever the lady, refrained from asking Mia to do a little Patsy Cline duet with her.

Mia graciously consented to have her picture taken (Mama Mia ended up doing the honors), and offered to pose in front of her grandparents' portrait (a bit of which is visible to Mia's right). She also autographed a menu for us, and Miss XaXa left with a tri-tip dinner, pictures, description, and review of which will follow shortly. (Yes, yes, you'd better believe we're gonna milk this for all it's worth, so go ahead and harrumph.)

Josette Eber Forgives Us for Calling Her Josette Eber

Thanks to the intrepid Miss XaXa, who traipsed from Georgia to Oakdale, California, for a take-out tri-tip dinner this very afternoon, we are now in possession of a take-out menu from Feed the People, autographed by Josette Eber herself, Mia Gaines-Alt (click on the photo to view it in all its engorged pink glory).

Of course, the headline is a little misleading. Mia doesn't actually know that we call her Josette Eber, so she can't really forgive us. But what do you expect from us?

A full report from Miss XaXa on the experience, and whether the tri-tip is any good (plus photos!) will follow.

You'll have to forgive us. We're not used to being gushy, and we may well have burst a blood vessel or two. We must go take a little laudanum and lie down in a cork-lined, darkened room, and ponder whether this means that we'll have to stop calling her Josette Eber....

Episode Six, Part 2: Catching "Flies" with Veenegar

When we last saw our cheftestants, five had won the Quickfire Challenge, namely, Sam, Cliff, Ilan, Frankie the Bull and Josette Eber. The five losers were in state of shock, Miss Elia Aboumrad foremost among them. Chef Colicchio liked her beef hash and her fruit salad, and yet she had ended up with the losers. She was especially puzzled and incensed because she tasted the dish by winner Cliff, and, as she says, “I speet out Cleef’s food.” Miss XaXa emits a low, throaty growl and says, “If it was Cliff, I wouldn’t…”

“Miss XaXa!” we protest, interrupting her. Clearly, the measuring cup got the better of us when we made the evening’s first round of sidecars.

The Elimination Challenge is to create a cutting-edge Thanksgiving dinner, which, as Carlos tells us, is both “oxymoronic” and “diametrically opposed.” Miss XaXa breathlessly whispers, “Can’t you just see him in wire-rimmed glasses and a thick, uh, volume?” We take Miss XaXa’s sidecar away and down it ourselves.

The losers will cook Thanksgiving dinner for Padma, Tom, and Gail, and guest judge Anthony Bourdain, and for the five winners. The idea behind this was clearly to amp up the Lord of the Flies atmosphere, and it worked splendidly. Trying to come up with a game plan for dinner in a cheftestant tribal council was as successful as those meetings in Lord of the Flies. Spice Rack revealed herself once again as a sort of Napoleonic terrier (we giggled during the Quickfire Challenge as the diminutive would-be dictator battled her lack of height and the gravitational pull of her breasts as she leapt up to reach cans of food in classic terrier fashion). She hijacked the meeting like Fidelia Castrata until Carlos defied her, grabbed a pepper mill and said, “I make a rule that nobody talks unless they have the pepper mill.”

“You know why they refer to the pepper mill as a Rubirosa, don’t you?” asks Miss XaXa. We blush and feign ignorance.

Carlos’ Rules of Order were damned. We thought of one of our guilty pleasures, cheerleader magnum opus Bring It On, where Kirsten Dunst says, “It’s not a democracy, it’s a cheerocracy.” Curse of the spirit stick and all, that’s how the situation played out. Generalissima Spice Rack shot down all the good ideas by arch-nemesis Marcel and everyone else. In the end, Beer Bong was assigned appetizers, Carlos a salad, Elia a soup, Marcel the turkey, and Spice Rack herself would do the dessert.

Elia tells us how deemoralized and deemoteevated she ees. She slinks away, sighing bitterly and dramatically about how instead of soup she would simply serve the judges “a shot of veenegar.” This concerns her pal Marcel, who warns her against “kamikaze action,” and confesses his fear that she will do something “suicidal.” Miss XaXa’s Carlos tells us his game plan for staying in the competition: “Middle, safe, is fine with me.” Oh dear. There’s that Bravo Foreshadowing™ again.

Elia goes shopping for plates and sauceboats, and gets to perform a few Hamlet-like soliloquies, with “To be or not to be” transformed into, “Ees there any point for mee too cook?” The others have gone shopping at the supermarket, and we get to see Beer Bong ask a question we thought would never come out of his mouth: “Do you have any fresh honeycomb?”

Carlos can’t find the queso fresco or the chipotle, and calls Elia. We wince a little, for, much as we love him, it’s clear that he is the one Cuban out of a hundred who doesn’t speak Spanish. Elia adorably refers to him as, “Carlitos,” and Miss XaXa sighs, then mutters something about “cutting that bitch.”

Meanwhile, the five winners are given the afternoon off, but before they can play, they have to go to the food bank and deliver the leftover cans of food from the Quickfire Challenge. Josette Eber goes for more sympathy by telling us about how she and her mother were homeless, and how important food banks were to them during that time.

All well and good and noble, but completely spoiled as a greasy-haired and self-satisfied Sam hands a turkey to a food bank worker, who obediently thanks him, and says how welcome the turkeys are, since they’re getting ready for the season. Now, the episode was filmed in June, so the notion of stockpiling turkeys for Thanksgiving is just ludicrous. Bravo made the poor man playact in order to get turkeys and canned food. Tsk tsk. As if that weren’t enough, we are subject to Frankie the Bull oozing smarminess about “giving back” to homeless people. We took a swig of eau de vie to get rid of the taste of oily smarm.

Episode Six, Part 1: Uncanny

The episode begins with Spice Rack and Josette Eber lamenting the sudden drop in the show's estrogen level after both Josie and Marisa were eliminated on the previous episode.

Miss XaXa, however, disagrees. In her view, the net levels of estrogen have actually increased or at least remained even, since Josie was so butch that she created a dykerrific testosterone force field around her. As Miss XaXa put it, "She was more man than Marcel will ever be."

She doesn't seem to be the only one who holds this opinion. Several of the manly men cheftestants sit around mocking Marcel's business cards. It even looks like they've gone to the trouble of calling him a big bottom. On the back of one of Marcel's card there is a handwritten indication that seems to read, "Marcel Vigneron, the Non Top Chef." Miss Elia Aboumrad can't seem to understand why they all hate him so much. Sure, she says, he may be, ahem, "cocky," but she likes him. To us, the whole thing gives off the whiff of "Lord of the Flies" as rewritten by Jean Genet.

Marcel himself doesn't help matters by telling us, almost sounding like Sandra Dee in "Gidget," that it's like people got together, threw darts at a board and decided, "Let's hate him." This appears to warm Miss XaXa, who, harking back to her Texas roots, yells at the tv, "Don't worry, Marcel, honey. The higher the hair, the closer to God."

It's time for the Quickfire Challenge, and the cheftestants retire to the kitchen, where they are greeted by Padma in yet another ghastly outfit, and by mountains of tins, and the Tin Man himself, Tom Colicchio (yes, we sometimes think, "If he only had a heart..." but Miss XaXa replies, "Oh, I like him heartless, hard and shiny.")

Padma informs the cheftestants that Tom will be the guest judge, and she strains the joke of the head judge serving as the guest judge, as if it were some little mind bender worthy of Stephen Hawking. The challenge will involve canned goods, and Chef Colicchio tells them the object is to "take an unexciting ingredient and turn it into something fabulous." "Sort of like introducing Padma as the host," hisses Miss XaXa.

They have 15 minutes for the challenge, and the food preparation montage. Josette Eber makes an early play for the sympathy vote by telling us that she was homeless at one point and so is not "scared to cook out of a can." Our favorite part is when Chef Colicchio and Padma stand in front of Carlos to taste his dish, and he announces, with what we swear is a look at Padma, "Pasta puttanesca!" This means "whorish pasta" or "pasta, whore style." Given Padma's wardrobe during most of the season, we wouldn't be surprised if it were a sly reproach. And "Padma Puttanesca!" does sort of have a nice ring (we didn't forget that Padma allegedly speaks Italian and hosted a variety show on Italian television). But then we remembered that Carlos has been a gentleman from the first, and that he would never say anything of the sort, and we feel a little bad for thinking of such an allusion ourselves. Well, not really, but we thought we'd come off better if we wrote that.

In the end, Sam wins the Quickfire Challenge, and Josette Eber is upset because she thought that with her experience in out-of-the-can cooking and the sympathy vote for homelessness, she would be the winner. But then it turns out she is a winner. And Cliff. And Ilan. And Frankie the Bull!

Yes, indeedy, in an effort to up the "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere or replicate that Stanford experiment with the prisoners and guards, there are five winners, and thus five people with immunity, and the five "losers" will cook Thanskgiving dinner for the judges and the five winners. The fun is just beginning.

José-ing, Just Saying: José & Josette Eber

Episode Two, Part 1: The Story of the Feesh and Lovs

The episode starts with a perfunctory gathering of the herd after the weakest member has been picked off by the wolves. Following sad-sack Suyai’s sad sacking, one of the women says, “We are one lady down,” which to us has the whiff of a title for a Thai movie about transvestite volleyball players or an Agatha Christie mystery (though the Agatha Christie mystery this most resembles is And Then There Were None). They resolve to be on their game in order to avoid the Suyai send-off.

Otto the patriotic NeckerChef tells us that it’s going to come down to “who can improvise, adapt and overcome.” But Otto, what ever happened to “stay the course”?

Then the contestants are woken up at 4:30 a.m. in the way we would like to be woken up every morning: by a beefy, twinkly-eyed Tom Colicchio. The early bird catches the best fish, he tells them, and they’re off to the fish market. The ladies’ modesty is left undisturbed, but we do get to see Beer Bong’s wriggling chest. When Marcel prances around shirtless, we are so distracted looking for the Siamese cat we are now convinced he is hiding in his pompadour that we almost miss the fact that he has a soul patch on his chest to match the one on his chin.

Mia confesses that the stress and the sleeping in a strange bed has left her feeling queasy. Frankly, this is unworthy of our Josette Eber. No cowgirl worthy of the name would be put off by a strange bed. Calamity Jane and Diana Ross turn over in their grave and Beverly Hills mansioleum, respectively.

It’s now six a.m., and time for the quickfire challenge. Padma greets us at the American Fish and Seafood Co. And this is where things come to a screeching halt.

We now interrupt this regularly scheduled recap for a rant.

Padma is sporting an unflatteringly tight pink polo cum pirate-wench top, nondescript black tights, riding boots, and pigtails. The woman who posed in a silver lamé bikini on top of live lobsters is wearing pigtails and pirate gear to the fish market?!? After last episode’s fashion successes, this is simply unacceptable.

We would, of course, have been in heaven if she had worn marabou, silk jersey, and Louboutin slingbacks to the fish market, but we were expecting at least a repeat of the time, two years ago, when, sporting a “Gucci bag and her goggly Costume Nationale sunglasses,” she went with a reporter from the Observer to “Chinatown, in search of fish (she thinks nothing of swinging a great big bass near her flowery summer frock, but she is a little concerned that her heels - as high as the Empire State itself - will get all fishy).”

Forget for a moment that the British reporter actually meant the Empire State Building. Isn’t “Top Chef,” aren’t we, good enough to get at least a “flowery summer frock” and some bass-swinging? Badly done, Padma, badly done.

Oh, and the pigtails. For a second we thought we were looking at Marisa. (Seriously, Typhoid Marisa’s pernicious influence must be stopped, or next we’ll be seeing Tom Colicchio wearing pigtails; we’ll leave it to bloggers with PhotoShop skills to portray that horror). The cruel morning light reveals Padma’s gauchely done highlights and hair that looked encrusted with hair spray. We expected Oribe; you gave us Raggedy Anne. Raggaydy Andy Cohen, you have some 'splainin' to do.

We can hardly believe we’re saying this, but we are actually starting to miss Katie Lee Joel, even with her nonexistent upper lip and the painted whore of Babylon look befitting a shopgirl made good. Padma has a flat, affectless delivery, and this, too, seems like a betryal and a put-on. Consider this excerpt from the same Observer article:

"I'm getting into making pickles ," she says, super-animated (when the tape recorder is switched on, she swoops straight into voice-over mode; as soon as it is off, she immediately flicks out the light, and you are left feeling all chilly and resentful).

Well, that’s exactly right. We are feeling all chilly and resentful. Where is the woman who played Sylk, diva rival to Mariah Carey, in Glitter? And where is the woman who starred in Boom, “a Bollywood thriller about three supermodels who steal diamonds belonging to Indian Mafiosi”? And, indeed, the woman who posed in a silver lamé bikini on top of live lobsters?

You may be trying to prove you’re intelligent and competent, but this isn’t the way to do it. Anyway, we thought you had resolved this issue for yourself. After all, you told the Observer, apropos of your marriage to world-famous novelist Salman Rushdie, “I'd be lying to you if I said that my new last name didn't resolve the issue of whether I am intelligent or not. I think that people assume that if someone of that calibre ...”

Aren’t we “Top Chef” viewers entitled to profit from having the issue resolved? We take back everything we said, Padma. Bring back “super-animated” and “flowery summer frocks” and silver lamé bikinis and supermodel hair. We want Sylk and Glitter and Boom in the kitchen. (Whom are we kidding? Silk, glitter and boom describe the entirety of our life’s ambitions.)

Rant over, we now return you to your regularly scheduled recap.

Padma announces to the assembled contestants (who, unlike her, seem to have had enough time to get their hair done), “Today’s challenge is about sushi.”

Priceless expression on Mia’s face, trying to keep the gorge down, an expression which the rewind button, a shaky hand and a digital camera don’t seem to be very good at capturing.

Beer Bong reaches for the top: “How am I going to stay in the middle on this one?”

Not content with her customary and apparently contagious pigtails, Tarte Titass is also wearing a pink baseball cap reading, “koukla.” Forever alert to punning opportunities, we do a little research and hit a gold mine. Koukla is the Greek word for “doll” and the name of a line of women’s clothing sold online and at Greek church fairs (Marisa is part Greek). Well, Marisa, doll, we never expected you to be reading Ms. magazine, so I suppose this doesn’t really come as a shock. Our one question: Bravo blurred your denim-ed derrière in the audition tape, presumably because it sported a label or logo, but didn’t blur the koukla cap. What gives?

After a little dry heaving, Mia tells us her first thought upon hearing about the sushi challenge, “H-E-double hockey sticks.” We find it delightful. Is it retro? Where does it come from? Can we get a linguist on the case?

Elia’s reaction is equally priceless: “I lov kook-eeng weeth feesh. I lov butt-cherrying feesh. I lov sweem-eeng weeth feesh. I lov eat-eeng them. I lov feesh.” What did we tell you? It’s definitely all about the feesh and lovs. Well, Elia, after this episode, we would advise you to be careful around Frankie the Bull, or you may be sweem-eeng weeth the feesh to your heart’s content.

So the challenge is to prepare sushi in 30 minutes for sushi chef Hiroshi Shima, who comes with his own translator (batteries not included). Our favorite part of the food-preparation montage is Mia talking to herself: “Come on, Gaines, get it together, girl.” Even we feel motivated by that. One question, though. According to her Bravo bio, Mia’s last name is Gaines-Alt, so why doesn’t she say, “Come on, Gaines-Alt, girl”? Inquiring minds want to know.

Despite our rant, there is one point during the judging when Padma’s icy demeanor is exquisitely deployed. Beer Bong, who at least is honest enough to declare himself “so out of my league,” has garnished his attempt at sushi with a “cornstarch slurry” (yet another fitting nickname for him). After tasting it, Padma’s only reaction is a straight-to-the-heart, cold-enough-to-keep-vodka-in, worthy-of-Helen-Mirren-playing-Queen-Elizabeth-II, “Thank you.” Brava, Padma, brava!

Then Chef Shima sexually harasses a clearly embarrassed and unprepared Padma by pushing in her mouth one of Mia’s curiously cigar-like handrolls. Verdict: “It wasn’t really appealing.” No shit, Shima. Watch your back. I don’t think Salman Rushdie will appreciate his wife’s being forced to fellate bad sushi. No wonder that “translator” of yours looks so much like a bodyguard.

Of Otto’s sushi, Chef Shima says that he is “very impressed with the way you rolled it.” Pardon us, but isn’t this a compliment that might be better and more accurately given to Beer Bong? Just saying.

Dear, culturally sensitive Otto is truly touched by this compliment. After all, he is but a mere “round-eye from Cleveland, Ohio.” As we will soon discover, Otto’s eyes may be round, but they’re also shifty. Anyway, we thought people from Ohio were called the Buckeyes, not the Round-eyes, but what do we know?

In the end, the winner is Cliff, with his Hubba Hubba, er, Hama Hama oysters with ginger, rice wine, soy, mango and jalapeño. Congratulations, Cliff. And may we say, you look very, very, very good in scrubs. Perhaps you can replace Isaiah Washington on “Grey’s Anatomy”?