'Top Chef: Chicago' serves and protects

Welcome to another episode of Chefs Behaving Badly, formerly known a Top Chef: Chicago. This week: Spite! Malice! Cutthroat competition! Screw your neighbor! Push your rival under the bus! Oh, and if there's time, why not try cooking a meal, too?

We're making spoilers sexy again.

In the quickfire challenge, the chefs are ordered to "bring salad's sexy back." Some of the chefs take that far too literally - "I'm planning on making something that just screams let's have sex after this salad," says Spike. I'm all for mega-yummy salads, but I'm not sure anyone is advocating for a leafy green aphrodisiac.

The chefs have full 45 minutes to create their salads, which is why it's so surprising that Stephanie can't quite manage to get all of her elements on the plate. That bobble puts her in the bottom three. She's joined by Richard, who did a play on ceviche but didn't include the acidic elements, and Lisa, who used expensive ingredients (squid, lobster) but made something that just tasted like banana.

Guest judge Sam Talbot (season 2 semifinalist, well-known hottie) picks Spike, Antonia and Dale as the top salad tossers. Spike's "sensual" beef salad, which uses the sweetness of pineapple to balance some of the heartier elements, takes the challenge.

For the elimination challenge, the cheftestants have to make a healthy, hearty, tasty box lunch for the folks at Chicago's police training academy. The meal must incorporate a whole grain, a lean protein, a vegetable and a fruit - and be something that a Chicago cop would choose to eat. The city's finest aren't exactly knows as health freaks - when you're pounding the beat in the middle of winter, you damn well want some serious stick-to-your-ribs food in your belly.

Spike gets an extra 10 minutes to shop, and he can choose an ingredient from each category that will then be off-limits to the rest of the chefs. Spike being Spike, he decides to mess with people. He genuinely seems to want to use chicken in his dish, but the other choices - tomatoes, lettuce and bread - just go into the basket to frustrate his rivals. What an ass. He confirms his assitude when he tells Tom he initially wasn't even going to use the tomatoes - "I was just going to put them on display so everybody else could look at them." He eventually decides to incorporate them into his chicken salad.

While other chefs are pissed at Spike for his shop-blocking maneuver, Andrew is sanguine - I'm all about cooking healthy! I'm going to push the envelope! No one will be as creative as I am! He decides to create a complete raw-food meal with a salmon sushi roll. He replaces the rice in the rolls with a combination of ground parsnips and pine nuts, which sounds kind of nasty to me. Also, last I checked, parsnips didn't count as a grain, whole or otherwise.

Lisa goes with shrimp for her stir-fry. She is briefly wigged that the crustaceans might be too high in cholesterol, thus falling outside the scope of the rules, but that's the least of her problem - her brown rice is both burned and undercooked, and Lisa cries sabotage. Someone turned up the burner! The other chefs aren't buying it: "I don't think there's any sabotage going on," says Stephanie. "I think people make a mistake or let a mistake happen and they blame it on somebody else." What? Lisa refusing to acknowledge her own failing and putting the responsibility on someone else? Surely you jest!

At the academy, Spike and Richard both turn huckster. Richard tries to entice people with the cry of "Do you like burritos?", while Spike creates the aura of scarcity by holding most of his food back, putting only two plates on the table as a time. Both are annoying.

Dale and Stephanie get the highest praise: Stephanie's mushroom and meatball soup with barley is proclaimed hearty and delicious, a great cold-weather dish. But it's Dale's lemongrass bison in cabbage cups (since he can't use lettuce, thanks to Spike) that is declared the winner.

Now the losers - and every single one of the folks called before the judge's table on the low end turned into a bitchy child. Andrew gets called out for making something that tastes nasty, doesn't use a whole grain, and wouldn't fill anyone up. But it's healthy! He protests. Sure, but who cares, if no one is going to eat it?

Spike is there because he had all these advantages, and still he produced a fairly pedestrian dish. That's you're opinion! Says Spike. Dude - we're the judges. That's all that counts! Counters Tom. All of the judges are disappointed that three of the special ingredients seem to be an afterthought, and that main part of the dish just ain't that great.

Lisa is dinged for her undercooked rice, but that's not the only problem - the shrimp is nearly raw, the veggies taste funny, and the dish hardly qualified as a stir fry. Lisa plays the sabotage card, and then turns nasty. Hey, at least I followed the rules!  Not everyone up here can say that.... Andrew is shocked that Lisa would push him under the bus. Me? Not so much.

All three of the dishes were pretty lousy - and all three of the cheftestants were arrogant, snippy and incapable of taking criticism. In the end, however, Andrew's grainless, tasteless, just-plain-icky sushi gets him sent home. 

Highlights, thoughts and odds and ends:

• Lisa, at the beginning of the quickfire: "Obviously, there are people here who don't deserve to be here. They're not good chefs and their personalities suck ass." That's true, Lisa - and yet you remain.
• I love how Lisa is suddenly hung up on rules. I guess her experience substituting chorizo for Polish sausage finally sunk in. I STILL think she should have gone home for that...
• When Dale wins the challenge, he says "I don't want to brag..." There was more to that sentence, but I passed out from amazement - when has Dale EVER not wanted to brag?
• Andrew got snippy when his sushi was criticized: "When you want healthy, I can give you the most healthiest dish you could find," he protests. "How about serving us something that's good?: says Tom. Andrew protests - people came back for seconds! "They went back for it because it wasn't enough and they had to eat more," responds Tom. Ouch.
• Spike begins the bus-pushing parade by explicitly contrasting his dish with Andrew's - it's hearty! It's tasty! It won't scare Chicago cops away! Then, when Tom says the combination of grapes and olives didn't work for him, Spike snarks "What don't you understand about salty and sweet?" I commend the judges for not leaping across the tables an smacking him.
• Lisa's sabotage sob-story didn't sway the judges: "I don't even need to factor in the possibility that Lisa was sabotaged because there were enough other factors in that dish that were really bad," says Ted. "The shrimp were nasty. There was no explanation for that, and it's not that hard to cook shrimp."
• Lisa and Andrew start fighting the moment they get away from the judges table. Andrew tries to bore a hole through Lisa with his eyes, while Lisa protests that she's just playing the game. I want both of them gone. They can take Spike, too.

E-mail

• Digg
• Facebook
• Fark
• Yahoo Buzz
• Stumbleupon