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Bienvenidos a Miami!
Season 3 of Top Chef welcomes a new crop of contestants to Miami. They arrive to meet, greet and size up the competition over a lavish buffet at Casa Casuarina, the mansion home of Gianni Versace turned hotel. As the contestants chow down, judges Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi arrive to surprise them. Tom tends to the first order of business which is to impress upon them that he's not their Tim Gunn. In other words, he makes it clear that he will not be visiting them in the kitchen during their challenges to mentor them but rather to judge them since he is the head judge.
Unsurprisingly to everyone but the contestants, Padma then gave them their first quickfire challenge - they were to create an Amuse Bouche (a tiny pre-hors d'oeuvre designed to introduce you to the chef's cooking style and to tickle and stimulate the taste buds) out of the left over buffet items and using only the plastic utensils - no knives, no kitchen. Padma directs them to make something that "tells us who you are."
After 10 minutes of assemblage vs. cooking and heinous shredding of food with the plastic utensils we have our first winners and losers.
The bottom three are:
*Dale with his beef stuffed with too aggressive cheese
*Clay with his too big to be an Amuse Bouche fruit salad in a hollowed out apple
*Tre with his Hamachi in Champagne and in search of an acid to balance it out
The top three are:
*Micha (who wins immunity) with "Tuscan sushi" made with ham wrapped around fig and Gorgonzola and drizzled with Balsamic vinegar (which was beautifully presented)
*Sara M. with a tasty bite made from an oyster (an ingredient which most shied away from)
*Hung with Hamachi, rice and the vinaigrette Tre's Hamachi so desperately needed
The contestants are then whisked away to their new home (this season their product placement rides are again Toyota RAV4's) in the penthouse at the (no doubt product placed) Fountainbleau Resort. After the contestants drop off their bags, learn they have a hot tub on their balcony, drool over the view and get a bit of rest, it's off to the elimination challenge.
Their first challenge is to create a surf and turf dish using exotic proteins like rattlesnake, alligator, the oh-so-attractive geoduck clam, kangaroo, sea urchin and black chicken. The popular, conservative first choices were buffalo rib eye steaks and whole scorpion fish.
Dale intriguingly chose snake and eel and Dale, who by luck of the draw chose last, picked alligator tail and monkfish liver - neither of which he had any clue how to cook.
They were given 30 minutes and $30 to buy ingredients to supplement the Top Chef pantry and then had 2 hours to prep and cook.
I really appreciated that despite the large initial group this was an individual challenge and split into two groups to manage the kitchen space.
As the contestants cook we learn a bit of their back stories. Joey is rude, unpleasant and incapable of speaking a sentence without dropping an F bomb. Hung whom we know is a friend of Marcel's is trying hard to play Jeffrey to Marcel's Santino and declares himself a "CPA" - certified professional a**hole. Clay who declared at the resort that he couldn't go home first otherwise who would make them all laugh and bring the desperately missing so far from Top Chef southern-style cuisine he specializes in. Also his father despondent over his failure as a restaurateur, killed himself and he hopes to gain some confidence in his own skills after that tragedy.
As time runs out, Howie fails to plate his frogs legs and feels certain he is going home.
The judges, Tom, Padma, Gail Simmons from Food & Wine and guest judge (hey, where's Ted Allen?) Anthony Bourdain are disappointed by by Howie's poor time management and found Clay's boar and scorpion fish cornbread dressing inedible.
In group 2, Brian of snake and eel fame also is unable to finish plating his dish but he only misses a topping not an entire protein. Sara N. and Hung both chose black chicken - notorious for being very tough and difficult to cook - and geoduck.
Tre, who confessed after the quickfire that he was depressed because he was unaccustomed to failing, pulls it together after Tom looked deep into his big, brown eyes and saw the disappointment and told Tre that he knew Tre was not a loser.
At the
