Bruni-lleschi Breaks "Dome" of Silence Over "Top Chef" Finale

The New York Times' chief restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, is not one to leave his fans salivating for more of his purple prose stylings. And so, after yesterday's eyebrow-raising take on Top Chef (it's really about the food! ha!), he chimes in with his thoughts on last night's finale. As always, the cherce bits:

Could the phrase “Kenmore Pro Kitchen” have been used more frequently during the course of this season? Talk about a fruitful sponsorship deal! I think the whole situation plummeted to its nadir when the chef Tom Colicchio, addressing the final two contestants, worked the phrase into his comments.

...

Ilan’s selection of braised short ribs as one of the five courses in his big meal was disappointing. I love braised short ribs, but at last count, they were on 109,451 menus. And that’s in Manhattan alone.

I have to wonder how hard Marcel’s comrades worked on his behalf. It was clear that Betty and Elia were much more invested in Ilan, whom they were helping, than Sam and Michael were invested in Marcel, who chose them to stand and work at his side. Sam’s comments to the camera about the things that went wrong as Marcel prepared his last supper (for now) had a bit too much glee in them.

The arithmetic I did as the judges assessed each of the final two contenders’ five courses didn’t add up clearly to an Ilan victory. The way I heard the judges, Marcel’s first course trumped Ilan’s. Ilan’s second course trumped Marcel’s. Their third courses were a tie. Marcel won the fourth round, and the fifth — well, the diners who ate the meals didn’t make their preferences immediately clear.

That’s two for Marcel, one for Ilan and two in doubt, though, at the end, the judges seemed to tip that fifth course, dessert, in Ilan’s favor.

So why did Ilan come out on top?

From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of West Chelsea

Go have a gander at PINK NAVY and see what the sailors have been doing with their fo'c'sle.

NBC Universal Family Turns On Itself Like Jim Carrey Hitting Himself in "Liar, Liar"

In a a surprising move reminiscent of Jim Carrey hitting himself in Liar, Liar (a Universal Pictures production), MSNBC, a subsidiary of NBC Universal, the parent company of Bravo, published a scathing online article today about Top Chef. You can read the article here, but we include some cherce bits for your delectation:

A hairy situation
The defining moment of the season came a few weeks ago when some of the remaining five competitors decided, after a night of drinking, to shave their own heads, and then shave Marcel's. At least, that's what viewers saw. After Ilan and Elia shaved their heads, Cliff woke Marcel, and as Ilan cheered him on, wrestled Marcel to the ground and held him in a headlock. As a result, Cliff was sent home for violating the show's rules.

That wasn't quite what happened, however. Careful viewers noticed that, in one of those scenes, Elia still had all of her hair, and was on the floor laughing as Marcel angrily stormed off. In other words, she and Ilan shaved their heads only after their attempted hazing of Marcel went awry. Editing the scene out of order seemed designed to protect the show's integrity, which was waning episode by episode as interpersonal conflict took over.

After the incident, the producers refused to allow head judge Colicchio to dismiss all four participants, like he wanted to do, and thus let Marcel win the competition by default. On his BravoTV.com blog, Tom wrote that "[p]roducers stepped in with a veto. Sending all of the chefs but Marcel home wasn't going to happen."

Of course, the departure of those four contestants would have prematurely ended the series on a low note. But it would have also been a fitting note, as the competition and cooking often fell away in favor of "Real World"-style immaturity and unnecessary drama packed with deceptive editing.

Less about food, more about drama
In its second season, "Top Chef" became more of a soap opera set on a reality show than a competition about cooking. Otto quit the competition after admitting to have taken food from a store that his team didn't pay for, although he did return it. Mia quit to save Elia from elimination. Michael used his budget for one challenge to buy beer for himself. All the chefs were spared elimination but put on probation after accusations of cheating during a challenge. Cliff was sent home for his part in hazing Marcel. Betty fought with Marcel. Frank fought with Marcel. Ilan screamed at Marcel. Elia accused Marcel of cheating but offered no evidence.

First Reaction: Good Sports, Bad Sports, and Water Sports

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Auntie Amuse-Biatch Wants YOU

As you may have gathered, we have absolutely no compunction about putting our cat in a variety of chapeaux and whoring her out for promotional purposes (as Miss XaXa suggested, it’s beginning to look like that Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd cartoon where the shipment of hats falls out of the sky).

At any rate, this is just a whorish little reminder that, since Top Design is premiering tonight after the Top Chef finale, you should go check our new Top Design blog, Pink Navy, where you will find an account of Top Design host Todd Oldham’s political travails, the latest on the Iran diplomatic crisis, and tips on what to do with monkey fur. Just cue up the Village People’s “In the Navy” and click on the kitty to take you where you know you want to be.

Amuse-Biatch Queery: Does Cooking Make You Gay?

It's yet another of those bedeviling questions, one that we have pondered not only throughout this season of Top Chef, but also after reading a provocative article by Adam Roberts yesterday on the Serious Eats website. Start your Easy-Bake Ovens, possums, and let us know what you think.

Le Chat: In Which All Is Revealed

For a few weeks now, we, along with the Gals and Ms. Place, have been intellectually cockteasing you with riddles drawn from the collected works of Carolyn Keene, but today, we finally put out.

The first riddle involved a picture of a café and a clutch purse. Put them together, and you get "café" + "clutch" = café clutch = Kaffeeklatsch. Yes, a groaner, but that's our specialty.

And the second riddle featured a variety of cats in berets. This was easy, even by our standards. Even noted French-speaker Marcel "Jell-EE" Vigneron knows that the French word for "cat" is "chat." So what does this come down to?

Well, tonight, we, along with the Gals of Top Chef 2: They Cook, We Dish and Ms. Place of Dishin’ Dat (whose jolly clever idea this all was), will be hosting a live chat for our readers. We'd love to hear from you all on this final night of the season. A special link will be provided to access the chat just prior to the beginning of the show. Provided everything goes well on the technical end, we look forward to chatting with you, possums, on this last night of the competition.

New York Times' Frank Bruni Spills Purple-Prosed Foam of Love All Over "Top Chef"

We know, possums, we know.

Our hypocritical hubris in referring to the prose stylings of New York Times food critic Frank Bruni as "purple" has no doubt resulted in a thunderbolt coming from the general direction of Mt. Olympus to strike us dead. Well, "arse" longa, vita brevis.

So, yes, in today's Food Section of the Times, Bruno (it's so unfair to refer to him by the plural, "Bruni," since he lost all that weight) tackles the phenomenon that is Top Chef, in the process making the Bravo execs at 30 Rock very, very happy.

Here, then, the cherce bits:

Marcel Vigneron’s self-love is as garish and repellent as his winged hairdo, which looks like an attempt to evoke “The Flying Nun” without a headdress or a habit.

Only in contrast does Ilan Hall seem humble and winsome. Don’t be duped. In this season’s first episode he flatly declared, “I want to be famous.” And as he inched ever closer to his goal, he sometimes regarded his adversaries with a look of unalloyed contempt.

...

For all its generically hyped-up drama, cheesy gimmickry and abject fealty to the tropes of reality television, “Top Chef” really is about cooking: what goes into it; what comes out of it; what reliably succeeds in the kitchen and on the plate; what predictably doesn’t.

...

“Top Chef” came into its own this season, its second, as it found a kind of traction that many other cooking-related shows — a bloated field at this point — haven’t.

Its contestants and judges wound up in gossip columns. Its twists and turns fueled chatter on the Internet, including the possible disclosure of the victor in tonight’s episode, which was taped a while back. Its ratings rose to an average of nearly two million viewers a week, according to Bravo, and that number put it well ahead of the second season of “Project Runway,” Bravo’s runaway reality hit, which will embark on its fourth season this year.

The reasons are many and varied. “Top Chef” did a deft job assembling a racially and ethnically diverse cast of characters, a shrunken high school in which every clique had a representative. There was the peevish whistleblower (Marisa), the priggish A student (Elia), the good-time blonde (Betty), the disheveled slacker (Michael), the laconic hunk (Sam), the trash-talking spitfire (Mia).

“Top Chef” offers the reliable, although perhaps not always intentional, hilarity of its blunt product endorsements and of its host, Padma Lakshmi, a k a Mrs. Salman Rushdie, a model-turned-actress whose epicurean musings are less riveting than her sluggish, mouth-full-of-molasses style of speech and strenuously come-hither poses.

As she makes her costume changes you can almost read her thoughts: “Does this skirt go with hamachi?” “Is this too much cleavage for a chicken liver canapé?”

Amuse-Biatch Readers Throw Their Tinfoil Hats in the Hair, Shouting, "Huzzah!" as Marcel Vigneron Vindicates Them

From the Gothamist interview with Marcel Vigneron (which links to us as conspiracy theorists):

There are a lot of theories out there about the hair clipper incident, when the rest of the final five tried to shave your head one night.
Oh- the conspiracy theory about how Bravo decided to flip it and reverse it. There’s no conspiracy theory. They reversed the order of operations- that’s not how everything went down.

Their heads were shaved before they went after you?
It makes more sense that way, but that’s not how it went.

Wait- Did Ilan and Elia shave their heads after Cliff held you down?
They tried to shave my head first. Then they went and shaved theirs. That’s reality television for you.

Exclusive! Amuse-Biatch In-House Paparazzo Uncovers the Truth Behind the "Top Chef" Finale

Reader, aspiring Eve Harrington, and new Amuse-Biatch in-house paparazzo Laz is not, unlike Miss Elia Aboumrad, a man to give up easily.

After witnessing Ilan Hall playing "In Your Eyes" for Marcel Vigneron on a boombox in Las Vegas, he knew something was up. He'd watched Double Indemnity plenty of times, and though he looks nothing like Edward G. Robinson, he had a gut feeling about this one. The weekend of Cointreau and go-go boys could wait. He sat in his convertible, cowboy hat pulled low over his aviator shades, and chewed on a toothpick while pondering the saffron strands of this mystery.

And then the targets were on the move. Laz followed discreetly as they drove north in Ilan Hall's rented convertible. "So they're pulling a Thelma and Louise," Laz gruffly thought to himself, taking swigs of Pepto-Bismol à la Cliff Crooks.

By the time the rental crossed the state line into Montana, Laz had figured it all out. Of course! The signs had been there all along. The attraction between the two had been instantaneous, electric, Kenmore Pro. As Laz was later to hear Ilan huskily whisper to Marcel, "You had me at, 'Do you wanna see my knives?'"

So the two met in the bathroom, unheard by anyone save Frank Terzoli's toothbrush, and planned it all out. They would just pretend to hate each other, displaying such camera-ready animosity and dramatic confrontations that the producers would have no choice but to ensure that they ended up in the finale together.

It was risky, but well worth it. After all, once they were in the finale, it wouldn't matter who won the title and the money. No matter where it came from, $100,000 would buy a sweet little gastropub in Helena, Montana, where they could serve dishes featuring Ilan's chorizo and Marcel's foam.

Laz followed them to the outskirts of Helena, where, using his telephoto lens, he took the photograph you see above. Once they were inside the cottage, Laz approached and peered through the window.

"I wish I knew how to queet you," Ilan said breathily to Marcel.

"Just ask Elia," replied Marcel, as they laughed, and began to kiss.

And what happened next was so ineffably tender that neither we nor Laz have the words for it, and so we turn to former New Jersey governor and "gay American" (Gaymerican?) Jim McGreevey and a charged passage from his memoir, The Confession:

"We undressed and he kissed me. It was the first time in my life that a kiss meant what it was supposed to mean -- it sent me through the roof. I was like a man emerging from...a cave to taste pure air for the first time, feel direct sunlight on pallid skin, warmth where there had only ever been a bone-chilling numbness....I pulled him to the bed and we made love like I'd always dreamed: a boastful, passionate, whispering, masculine kind of love."

How's that for a Wednesday morning? Well, it was just like that, Laz assured us. As for who really earned the title of "top" chef, well, we'll leave that to your imagination.