Top Chef Power Rankings, Week 11: You're Tellin' Me a *Jerk* Braised This Rabbit??

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You might think that you don’t need to know what’s happening in the Fresno, California food scene every week, but you know what they say: knowledge is power. You know what to do: learn about Lao gas station food, become more powerful than anyone can imagine.

If you’re going to South Carolina, don’t forget to pay homage to the Swamp Rabbit Trail.

A couple years ago when Buddha Lo was laying waste to his Top Chef competition with a combination of savvy gameplay and food served in elaborate molds, I started to wonder whether the competitors had “solved” Top Chef. Or, if not solved, whether we’d gotten to the part of the life cycle of the competition when it starts to get more about the gameplay itself than about whatever the game was originally meant to test. Would every new Top Chef competitor now come in with encyclopedic knowledge of the competition, and approach each challenge with a theory of risk analysis, weighing all the things the judges have historically liked and what has worked on this show in the past?

This week proved that, nope, they’re still mostly going to wing it, and keep fucking up in basically the same ways Top Chef competitors have for the past 20 years. They’re going to make duos and trios instead of focusing on one thing, and get so caught up in the concept that they try to throw in every idea instead of building around a single one. Kind of comforting when you think about it. TOP CHEF SAME, NEVER GOING TO DIE!!

Let’s call this week dull-ly competent. Nothing too crazy happened and the challenges were mid, but it delivered on the basics of a watchable competition show. It’s why I’m still here!

Quickfire, More Like Shitfire

We’re still in Greensville this week, for one last Quickfire Challenge. This week’s guest judges? Keith Habersberger and Rachel Cole from The Try Guys!

The Try Guys, of course, started as a challenge in which avowedly heterosexual men would spend a month exploring their sexuality for charity. I’m kidding, of course, it’s actually a YouTube troupe started by a group of ex-Buzzfeed staffers. I vaguely remembered them from a few years ago, when they made news for excommunicating and erasing one of the Try Guys: Ned Fulmer who had allegedly had an affair with a staffer (basically the same way I learn about most things that are popular on YouTube). I thought that whole thing was crazy. A man under 70 named “Ned Fulmer?” Inconceivable!

Anyway, the Try Guys are famous for “trying anything” (why does my mind immediately go to gay stuff? that’s normal, right?) and so for this week’s Quickfire, Kristen Kish explained that the contestants would be challenged to “try” something different.

That something? Uhhh… social media polls?

The idea was that the chefs would do challenges suggested by fans, a la the Try Guys. Unfortunately, the show’s producers made all of the fan suggestions multiple choice, and all of the possible choices were just variations on things we’ve already seen on this show 20 times. I guess I can understand having to make the polls multiple choice, if only to keep from having to wade through 15,000 replies screaming “KRISTEN AND GAIL SHUD SSISSCOR!1!!”

The fan choices offered were special ingredient (peaches, boiled peanuts, paw-paws), length of cook (10, 20, or 30 minutes), and the twist (make your dish a sandwich, take over the cooking station to your right, or add a foam element to the dish).

We ended up with:

-Peaches
-30 minute cook time
-Take over the station the right.

Not knowing much about Try Guys beyond the backstory I invented in my head just now, I kind of thought their whole thing was trying caaaraaaazzzy things way outside their comfort zones. Whereas this version of “try some crazy stuff” was more like when you’re posing for group picture at a work meeting, and the photographer says “okay, now let’s do a silly one!” and so Linda from HR sticks her tongue out the side of her mouth and crosses her eyes a little. That Linda! She’s so wacky!

The only vaguely interesting part of this week’s Quickfire was the chefs having to switch stations. But they even did that so late in the challenge that one chef was basically just finishing another chef’s already-prepped-and-conceived dish. And so it was less like a cool twist, and more like “let’s give the winner’s money to someone else as a random draw.”

If that’s going to be the thing, maybe lean into the “capricious emperor” aspect of the challenge? Ha ha ha, now everyone must switch pants! Last person to find the onion gets executed!

Ah, well. At least it wasn’t the improv challenge.

Don’t Forget to Pay Homage to the Swamp Rabbit Trail

If the Quickfire was a bit of a misfire, this week’s elimination challenge was classic Top Chef. By which I mean, the kind where the producers take multiple things a place is famous for and sort of throw them in a blender and add random word associations.

Greenville, South Carolina. Famous for… the Swamp Rabbit trail. And.. for being the headquarters of Michelin North America (applying “famous” extremely loosely here). Michelin is, of course, the French tire company that somehow became the world gold standard in fine dining. Imagine if you chose a heart surgeon because they had been awarded seven Froot Loops by the Kellogg’s corporation.

In any case, for Top Chef purposes, the chefs this week would: “Pay homage to the Swamp Rabbit Trail and the French origins of Michelin, by creating a Michelin-worthy dish with a notoriously tricky item: rabbit!”

It’s like they were listening when I said to lean into the capricious emperor thing.

The result? Well, I won’t say that it was shocking, but some former favorites fell, some dark horses and underdogs thrived, and we all learned what we already should’ve known from Top Chef seasons one through 22: stop trying to make duos and trios of things! Just make one good thing! Even if it’s rabbit.

Results:

Quickfire Bottom: Jonathan. Anthony. Sherry.
Quickfire Top: Laurence. Rhoda*. Sieger.

Elimination Top: Sherry* and Sieger.
Elimination Bottom: Jonathan and Anthony**.

Power Rankings (change from last week)

6. (-4) Anthony

AKA: The Ringer. Beavis.

Ranking History: 6 2 2 2 2 2 1 7 3 4 2.

Anthony Jones took this week’s rabbit challenge as an opportunity to pay homage to his uncle, Chuck Jones (citation needed?) creator of so many brilliant Looney Tunes cartoons. And no, I don’t mean that he dressed up like a sexy lady to distract his opponents like Bugs Bunny, I mean he chose to pair his rabbit with carrots (eh, what’s up, Doc?).

That was… actually not a bad idea. Unfortunately the thing to do with a good idea is to develop it, not just drown us in multiple examples of it.

ANTHONY to Tom: I’m going to be doing two different preparations of rabbit…

ME at the TV: No! No!

ANTHONY: …and a trio of carrots

ME:

No duos! No trios! What are you doing???

Anthony telling Tom about how he didn’t get an A on his final for classic French in culinary school because he overcooked his rabbit turned out to be effective foreshadowing. It actually speaks to Anthony’s misguided approach that he thought he would get some sympathy from Tom by telling him about overcooking a protein. Have you met Tom Colicchio? Telling him you once overcooked a protein is like telling anyone else that you once molested a child.

Anthony’s duos and trios ended up being scattered and fussy, allowing Tom to land his Bitchiest Burn of the Episode™.

“A rabbit dish? I think it’s a dish for rabbits.”

Look at this man’s face. He was practically jumping out of his seat to land that burn:

You heard what I said, Tone? I said I think it’s a dish FOR rabbits!

I actually thought Anthony’s rabbit egg roll sounded like a decent idea, but I guess I was just as rabbit-ignorant as he was, not realizing that rabbit is one of those things that you absolutely can’t cook twice. It was so dry that it had Gail Simmons chugging buttermilk between takes. (Not really, I just typed that for the SEO).

Rough ending for Anthony. I would’ve bet the house that he would end up top five, if not top two.

Elimination Challenge Dish: Braised rabbit leg and thigh, carrot ginger purée, rabbit loin, carrot top salsa verde, rabbit jus and carrot.

Reviews: “I think his dish felt a little precious.” “They just felt so far apart, and strangely plated.” “It felt like a series of canapés.” “The whole egg roll thing just threw me way off.”