Top Chef Power Rankings, Week 13

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Buongiorno! Buona sera, come stai, and a hearty crotch grab from across the street to all my fellow vicarious Italians. We go now to the penultimate episode of this season’s Top Chef, joining this show on its a-molto vacazione inna Milano. This season’s official title was “Destination Canada,” and this episode paid homage to the grand American tradition of pretending to be Canadian on our Europe trips to avoid getting spit in our food.

By the way, to anyone who thinks I don’t have enough Sopranos gifs to last us another two episodes, boy, do I have bad news for you. I am the founder of a Jeopardy-recognized Sopranos podcast, I will never run out of Sopranos gifs! …And if I do?

Like I said, in this episode, the Top Chef top four were finally off to Italy. But not just any Italy! Oh no ho ho, we’re talking the north of Italy.

Okay, that was fun, but now I tire of myself.

One of the first things we learned about Milano is that while broader Italy is generally known for their pizza and pasta, these bougie ones up here in the heights are bigger on risotto and polenta. You know what they say about these northerners, they’ve got grit(s).

First up, a risotto quickfire. Which immediately evoked Top Chef’s famous “Risotto Curse.” (*portentous music*) Quick, bite your index finger and throw some parmigiano over your right shoulder, or else it’s seven years of mushy rice!

The risotto curse probably exists because it’s hard to do, and most of the time, no one’s forcing you to cook risotto. This time, it actually was a requirement. Even so, most of the chefs were so damn spooked that two of the four didn’t even use rice.

That of course left Tom Colicchio, the Guardian of Nomenclature, sputtering mad. B-b-but “riso” is Italian for “rice!” he fumed. It literally means “little rice!”

This turned out to be merely the first course in an absolute feast of unimpressed Colicchio reaction shots.

After that, it was time for the elimination challenge, which would pay tribute to another famous aspect of Milan: that they’ll be hosting the 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games! On an unrelated note, did you know that NBC owns the television rights to the Olympics and Paralympics? And also Bravo, the channel that airs Top Chef? What a crazy coincidence!

For this challenge, the show introduced Olympic and Paralympic athletes Elana Meyers Taylor, Red Gerard, Declan Farmer, and Oksana Masters. These athletes were to each team up with a contestant to… uh… stand around while the contestant shopped for food, I guess? In a season of mostly really well-thought-out challenges, this one was a little lacking. I get not wanting some single-episode guest stars to influence the show’s finale, but they still probably could’ve incorporated these folks better than as moral support.

In fairness, the athletes did get to help judge a three-round elimination challenge — alongside two Michelin-star winning Andrea Aprea, and our favorite Top Chef World All-Stars heartthrob, Ali Ghzawi. We love Ali Ghzawi, both for being very handsome and having a name that sounds like a weed strain, but I think he and Andrea Aprea got maybe three lines between the two of them. The guest judges all seemed hilariously inconsequential this episode.

But back to the challenge: Round 1 was for polenta. Round 2 was for the beet, a nod to the casunziei, a beet-filled, half-moon-shaped ravioli that’s a local delicacy in northeastern Italy. The winner of each round would go onto the finale, leading to a head-to-head elimination contest in round 3, which was dedicated to that most famous of the blue cheeses, gorgonzola.

Of the guest judges, undoubtedly the most telegenic was Oksana Masters, a 19-time (!!) Paralympics gold medalist who, it also turned out, was a bubbly little spitfire. While Red Gerard and Declan Farmer (a sled hockey captain and a snowboarder, respectively) were just happy to be there and possibly stoned, Oksana Masters was there to compete, even if her only avenue for doing so was trying to distract her partner’s competition by being annoying. Her partner ended up being the one who got eliminated, but you still have to respect the effort.

I was curious about Oksana’s whole deal and so I did some research, which led me to a backstory so wild that I can’t believe the show didn’t even touch on it. Turns out, she’s an amputee on account of multiple birth defects from the Chernobyl disaster who was adopted by an American professor when she was seven. Before that she grew up in an orphanage.

Oksana Alexandrovna Bondarchuk was born in Khmelnitsky, Ukraine, on June 19, 1989, with six toes on each foot, five webbed fingers on each hand and no thumbs. She also had a condition called tibial hemimelia, in which one limb—in this case, her left leg—was six inches shorter than the other. Both of Oksana's legs were missing weight-bearing bones, and the knee floated in her C-shaped left leg.

Her parents took one look at her and checked out of her life. They put her in an orphanage. She was transferred to another orphanage, and then to a third, where she was frequently beaten.

Men at the orphanage raped her regularly, sometimes more than once a day, while the women who worked there pretended not to notice. [-a Sports Illustrated profile from 2012]

Okay maybe it’s not so crazy that the show couldn’t get into Oksana’s backstory. Pretty hard to hear a story like that and then carry on with trying to critique a subpar polenta. Another anecdote from the same profile is about how when Oksana first came to the US, she named all of her dolls Lainey — which turned out to be the name of her best friend from the orphanage.

One night Lainey and Oksana sneaked out to get food, and Oksana slipped and hit a chair. Men heard the noise and found Lainey. Oksana hid and heard them hit Lainey six times. They murdered her."It was my fault," Oksana says. "I never forgave myself and probably never will forgive myself."

Holy hell. I know most disabled people hate being reduced to inspirational stories, but this one is a doozy. Again, this person went on to win 19 gold medals. Can you imagine trying to talk to someone who has been through that about your televised cooking competition? Wow, that orphanage story is crazy. Anyway, do you have any tips for choosing beets?