‘Top Chef’ Recap, S23 Episode 9: ‘The Ultimate Dinner Party’

Top Chef

The Ultimate Dinner Party

Season 23

Episode 9

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

Back-to-back Quickfire and Elimination challenges test the eight remaining contestants, including the Last Chance Kitchen winner.
Photo: Paul Cheney/Bravo

Jonathan! So close this episode yet so far. He was clearly missing his brother, Brandon, who went home for good last week. I felt for Jonathan as he did one-sided banter, the kind of chummy joshing the twins used to engage in together, while cooking at Soby’s. I know the twins had some detractors, and I also understand the argument that they gave each other a level of emotional support that the other contestants might not have had. But even as Jonathan was very gracious when Rhoda came back instead of Brandon, he seemed lonely, right? I’m happy he did well by the end of the episode — he was a runner-up in both the Quickfire and the Elimination challenges — and I could see him getting to the semifinals. It’ll be hard to get past Laurence, Anthony, and Sherry, who seem as though they’re gaining more momentum each week, but I’m also rooting for Jonathan at this point. (I think I’m rooting for everyone, actually. There’s not an unlikable person in this mix right now!)

“The Ultimate Dinner Party” is exactly as described. The chefs travel to Greenville, South Carolina, and when they get there, they have to cook dishes for a dinner party with prominent industry locals. I really like how this episode structured its challenges: with the chefs cooking back-to-back between the Quickfire and the Elimination as well as having to work together to plan a menu that would work as a staggered progressive meal. Was there too much Duke’s product placement? Absolutely. We are primarily a Duke’s household, and I am now considering buying more Kewpie Mayo, just on principle. Primarily pushing the chefs with timing and budget, though, felt way less gimmicky than some of this season’s previous challenges and was a legitimate hardship given that the chefs were just coming off Restaurant Wars. This whole episode felt like Top Chef asking its competitors “How hard can you grind?,” and the chefs really varied in their reactions. Some did well during the Quickfire and poorly during the Elimination, some did the opposite, and some were a little mid all the way through.

The chefs are hanging out in the stew room when Kristen, Gail, and season-22 finalist Shuai Wang (a South Carolina local and one of this week’s guest judges) arrive to explain that they’re going to Greenville. For the Quickfire, they’re each responsible for one appetizer to be served at the predinner cocktail party. Each appetizer needs to prominently feature Duke’s mayonnaise; the winner gets $10,000. They all need to sign up for appetizers right then and there, with Duyen, as the winner of Restaurant Wars, going first. There’s then a schoolyard pick with each chef picking the person who will go after them. Here’s what they all pick:

Kristen then reverses the chefs’ order so they can sign up for courses for the Elimination Challenge. There will be eight courses, organized into four rounds. The raw and salad dishes will be served at 5 p.m.; soup and seafood at 5:30 p.m.; grain, poultry, and red meat at 6 p.m.; and dessert at 6:30 p.m. So each grouping gains 30 minutes of cooking time, meaning the raw and salad dishes get the least time and the dessert the most. And finally, the group budget is $1,200 for all eight chefs, for both the Quickfire and Elimination dishes. Here’s how they choose:

And that winner of Last Chance Kitchen: Rhoda! Duyen gives her a big hug, Sherry notes that Rhoda is going to be tough competition, and Rhoda says to her fellow chefs that having to do dessert is “fucked. Thank you.” But the chefs have a theme for their dinner — Sunday supper — that guides their choices as they shop at Whole Foods, each with $150 to spend. Dividing up the $1,200 equally was the most fair approach, and I loved seeing both the chefs do math as they shopped (something very familiar to me, a person always trying to stack coupons at the grocery store) and how Laurence kept everyone on budget during checkout. They spent $1,199.98! Incredible.

At Soby’s (owned by second guest judge and restaurateur Carl Sobocinski), the chefs all get an hour for their appetizers, and they all hope to use some of that time for their entrées, too. First, though, how much mayo to use in their apps? Duyen is really going for it with two mayo-based sauces and mayo as a binder for her croquette. Jonathan and Sieger are both doing deviled eggs with Jonathan using southern flavors and Sieger going more French with his gribiche. And Anthony and Jonathan both run into a little trouble: Anthony’s hand-wrapped crab dumplings are taking a lot of time, and Jonathan burns part of his bacon jam and has to pick through it. They both course-correct, though, and deliver dishes the judges love. Here are the appetizers and the judges’ reactions:

The chefs don’t get any feedback in the moment. They pass out their apps and then hustle back to the kitchen, where they’re again on the clock. As they cook, we see a lot of family photos (including some wonderful pics of young Laurence and his father) because many of their “Sunday supper” dishes are inspired by homey favorites. That’s really cute! Not so cute is that a couple of chefs run into irreversible issues. Oscar starts second-guessing himself, dumps turmeric onto his short ribs, then decides on a whim to cook rice and add it to his dish as a side. But I have some sympathy toward Oscar for panicking, whereas I’m still confused by the actions of our beloved Rhoda. Rhoda, what were you doing with all your time? Cooking janky meringues and cutting fruit? That’s not enough!

I’m surprised by all of Rhoda’s choices for her Elimination dish. First, she decided to make Eton mess, which would feature meringue — and we’ve already seen someone fail at making meringue this season. Brandon tried to make meringue back in “Cut and Dry” (the episode in which Rhoda was eliminated), and even with a full day in a dehydrator, his meringues were too soft and we saw him pivot and bake a cupcake instead. Why did Rhoda think she could pull off meringues in a fraction of that time? And when the meringues failed, why not try something else? It wasn’t entirely clear how much time was on the clock when Rhoda realized her meringues resembled undercooked pancakes, and I understand she was out of certain ingredients by that point. But she could have blitzed the meringues into smaller pieces, sweetened the crème fraîche, and instead made a trifle; she could have spoken up and asked if other chefs had leftover ingredients and tried to brainstorm. We saw Sherry give her leftover bread to Brandon to make a second round of crostinis after his first batch failed, and we later learned that she had leftover eggs, too. I think Rhoda could have rallied by asking other chefs what they had left over, and because all the other chefs were done by the time she had a final 30 minutes, I really believe they would have helped her out. Instead, she froze.

Here are the dinner dishes:

At Judges’ Table, only the three top Quickfires are discussed — Anthony, Oscar, and Jonathan — and although Kristen says to Jonathan that his deviled egg was “perfectly mayonnaised,” he doesn’t win. That glory goes to Anthony, who pockets $10,000. (I was a little surprised that Duyen didn’t get singled out for making a dish that seemed to actively disgust some diners.) Then it’s time to talk about the Elimination dishes, and it’s pretty clear to us as viewers who did well and who did poorly since the chefs got immediate feedback after they served their dishes. That’s why my heart cracked open a little bit when Jonathan — called forward with Laurence, Rhoda, and Oscar — launches into a defense of himself. He plated the dish in the walk-in to keep the tartare cold! He loved the flavors! Soon enough, Kristen puts him out of his misery by saying that his and Laurence’s were their favorite dishes. Yet where Jonathan’s dish had the great cornichon chimichurri, Laurence’s dish had everything going for it, and he unanimously wins and gains an unspecified challenge in next week’s episode.

Then it’s time to talk to Oscar and Rhoda. Technical mistakes dragged both down. Oscar’s short rib was poorly seasoned, and his rice was bland, overcooked, and unnecessary. Rhoda’s meringue was limp, and the other things she served with it were incredibly simplistic. If I were Rhoda, Kristen asking me, “You had four hours, no?” would have made me collapse. Given the intensity of Kristen’s reaction to Rhoda’s dessert and the fact that Oscar succeeded in the Quickfire while Rhoda’s dish was criticized for being overly salty, I thought Rhoda would go home. But instead, it’s Oscar, and, yes, I think Tom threw this elimination a little bit. He was offended by Oscar’s rice from the moment that dish came out, criticizing it as somehow deviating from Oscar’s red-meat directive, and I think he couldn’t let it go (like he couldn’t get over Oscar’s broken whipped cream back in “Desserts Fit for a Queen”). It’s sort of funny because you would think, based on Tom’s critique of the rice not being needed for a red-meat dish, that he would also say Sherry’s chicken thighs, peppers, and corn deviated from her seafood dish, but … I guess not! Anyway, Oscar goes home for good, and Rhoda survives Last Chance Kitchen and her first week back in Top Chef proper. Next week, we finally get the mise en place race we’ve all been waiting for, and it looks like a spin on the Top Chef: Charleston episode in which the chefs went shrimping with Tom and then had to cook him a dish on the docks with that freshly caught shrimp. This time, the chefs seem to be heading out in boats to catch the fish they’ll be butchering for the mise en place. I hope Kristen gives them some boating tips from her time on The Traitors.

• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: all of the apps except for Duyen’s, Sieger’s, and Rhoda’s; from the dinner dishes, Laurence’s soup and Duyen’s rice.

• I gave this episode four out of five stars because I think the challenges were well conceived, but I seriously thought about taking off a star because of how egregious and incessant the Duke’s product placement was. Shuai having a Duke’s tattoo and showing it off for the camera, fine. Contestants asking one another about how much they like Duke’s, coupled with numerous stand-alone shots of the tub of mayo? We get it! They gave Top Chef money! We’re not going to forget about Duke’s!

• I can’t get over how aghast Kristen’s tone was when describing Rhoda’s work in the Elimination Challenge: “I still can’t figure out what she did for four hours. Four hours!” Brutal.

• Maybe it’s because we have been spending so much time in the Top Chef kitchen, but my sense of timing for this season is skewed. Is anyone else surprised we still have seven contestants left?

• Shout-out to the Whole Foods fishmonger who reminded Anthony that he was on a budget when he was tempted by the king crab for his salad. Forty-three dollars a pound is madness.