The TV Zone

The gang’s all here: Tom, Padma, Gail and 15 Chefs aiming for the Top. But what happened to Kenmore? Tonight, when it was time for the elimination challenge, Padma invited the contestants not into “The Kenmore kitchen” but into the plain-old Top Chef kitchen where a brief close-up revealed that the ovens were GE Monogram.

Maybe someone told her to tone down last season’s incessant sponsor-hawking. During Episode 1, we saw—but did not hear about—contestants cooking with Calphalon pans, struggling with the interlocking lids of Gladware plastic tubs, arriving curbside in shiny new Toyota Rav4s. Evian, another of this year’s sponsors, was nowhere to be seen, but I did notice that when contestants were shown swigging water from plastic bottles, the bottles had been shorn of their labels.

The new crew looks promising, drama-wise if not cooking-wise. Many of them suffer from too-much-information-itis. I’m sorry that Clay’s father took his own life, but I’m glad that CJ’s cancer is in remission (but sorry that he lost a testicle). I’m really sorry about Sandee and Dale’s Mohawks.

Tre and Hung, tonight’s two top scorers, regard one another as the ones to beat. They are probably right. Tonight’s episode, however, belonged to Clay, the self-taught Mississippian who seemed to have wandered over to Bravo from a Tennessee Williams play.

“He was a great chef,” Clay said about his late father. “It got the better of him…He took his own life. It didn’t work out for him but it will for me.”

But things were already looking grim during the quick-fire challenge, when Clay’s amuse bouche took the form of a fruit salad inside a Granny Smith apple. The next day he was searching for okra in the grocery store, and by nightfall he was drinking champagne straight from the bottle.

Guest judge Anthony Bourdain described Clay’s misbegotten scorpion fish-boar chop creation as “home cooking…from a home I wouldn’t want to live in,” something you might get “in economy class on Cambodian Air.”

Exit Clay.

Tonight’s vocabulary lesson

Amuse bouche: a-MOOZ boosh. In French this means “amuse the mouth” and it refers to a little tidbit served, for free, at the very outset of the meal. “The amuse bouche was terrific, but the meal went downhill from there.”

Sous vide: soo veed. From the French “under a vacuum.” A method of cooking where the food, usually meat, is vacuum-packed in plastic and then cooked at a very low temperature. “I would have expected sous-vide chicken from Marcel, but not from Hung.”

Geoduck clam: GOO-y duck clam. A gigantic clam, native to the Pacific Northwest, than can grow to 10 pounds.