The TV Zone

Rocco DiSpirito? What in the world was he doing on the premier of Top Chef’s fourth season? He isn’t from Chicago, has no connection to pizza (deep-dish or otherwise) and hasn’t got any new products to promote. His appearance on Top Chef last season coincided with the launch of Bertolli Mediterranean-Style Frozen Dinners (remember the tragic “create-your-own-frozen-entrée” tie-in challenge?) but Bertolli products were no where in evidence in the Top Chef kitchen, nor in the commercials that punctuated the show’s segments.

“He’s a rock star in the culinary world,” commented chef Mark Simmons, a Hobbit-coiffed kiwi who was perhaps interred inside some New Zealand mountain while DiSpirito was disgracing himself on the reality show The Restaurant.

Nevertheless, Rocco looked good (not quite so…plumped..as he had last time out) and acquitted himself honorably. I had hoped for some fireworks between him and fellow judge Anthony Bourdain since the latter has been tirelessly slagging off on the former for years, calling him a “‘thatsa speecy, spicy meatball!’ shill-for-hire and ex-reality show personality” and observing that “Rocco DiSpirito has really raised the bar for what I consider grotesque.” But the two sat on opposite ends of the judges’ table and made nice, to one another at least.

The contestants (cheftestants, in Bravo-ese) this time around do look like a talented bunch. Uniondale native Richard Blais, a big-time chef in Atlanta, was actually on Iron Chef last year, competing against—and losing to—Mario Batali in Battle Chickpea. Check out his career path here.

His self-selected rival, the profane and hyperkinetic Andrew D’Ambrosi, is a sous-chef at Manhattan’s Le Cirque. I liked his description of his creative process: “It’s like molten ****ing lava pouring out of you.”

Even though it was poor Nimma who was sent packing, the tragedy of the night was Ryan’s chicken piccata. Desperately dredging up childhood piccata memories—which called to his mind mashed potatoes and rice—he came up with a dish that was neither tasty, nor interesting, nor piccata. Where, I wondered, did this guy spend his childhood?

Los Banos, California, it turns out. Pop: 35,211 and located about two hours from San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. In other words, two hours away from a proper Italian restaurant. The Italian pickings in Los Banos right now include Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar’s, Me-N’-Ed’s Pizzeria, Mountain Mike’s Pizza and Perry’s More Than Pizza.

The restaurant reviewer on the town’s online forum, OurLosBanos.com (“A Positive Community Resource”) practically wet himself a few months ago over the opening of M & M Italian Restaurant where the owner "pointed out several things that they specialized in, one of which was the chicken piccata. I decided to give that a whirl having no idea what it was but it sounded good from his description.”

Apparently, piccata-ignorance is rampant in Los Banos. But that may be coming to an end. “I must tell you," the reviewer continued, "that I have raved about the Chicken Piccata for about 3 days now... it was THAT GOOD.”

Not that M&M is a perfect dining experience. “There are some minor downsides however and a couple of these fall under the 'breaking in' period that restaurants go through that we spoke of at the beginning of this review. First when it came time to pay, our credit card was taken out of the building and down to the Buy & Save market.”

A word from our sponsors: Kenmore is apparently out; GE Monogram ovens were prominently featured. As was Whole Foods.

Hung won; no surprise there. He was the acknowledged leader in technical skills, and the judges wisely stopped harping on his inability “to cook with love” when push came to shove. Two weeks ago, culinary eminence Andre Soltner had identified Hung as the one he’d hire. Enough said.

Dale did himself proud, but Casey seemed to fall apart. She’s had execution problems in the past (remember the raw elk?) but her great strength was her mature, restrained taste. She was always the one contestant you could be counted on not to clutter up her dish with extraneous ingredients, but there she was putting salmon roe on two of her four dishes.

For me, the finale failed to redeem what had become a boring season of Top Chef. The judges often said that the level of cooking this season was higher than it had ever been. Who am I to argue? That is so not the point. The judges get to taste the food that the contestants cook. The viewers can only watch.

Project Runway, on which Top Chef is modeled, is the perfect competition show. What the contestants are creating is essentially visual, and we, the audience, can judge the finished product because we can see the finished product. Ditto with Dancing with the Stars or Extreme Makeover or even Top Hair—or whatever it’s called.

The essential problem with Top Chef is that we can’t legitimately judge the finished results because we can’t taste them. So we must rely on the contestants’ personalities and conflicts for our fun. This round of contestants, talented as they were, just weren’t that much fun to watch.

I’m looking forward to Project Runway.

Filling the guest seat at tonight's Judges' Table was André Soltner, one of this country’s most acclaimed French chefs. Soltner, a native of Alsace, was the chef who opened the classic New York restaurant Lutèce in 1961. In 1972 he bought the restaurant and, with his wife Simone, presided over it until 1994, when he sold it to Ark Restaurants. (Ten years later, the restaurant closed.) Soltner now serves as Dean of Classic Studies at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.

I spoke to him on Wednesday morning about his life in the kitchen.

How did you become a Top Chef?

A lot of training, hard work and experience. I started my apprenticeship in 1948 when I was 14 and I did that for three years. After that I earned a certificate and was made a commis [the lowest position in a French kitchen]. You had to be a commis for two or three years. Then you became a chef de partie [head of a cooking station]. After a little while—two, three, five years, depending on the man—if you were lucky you became a sous chef and, eventually, the chef. I was considered very young when I became a chef at 26, but that was after 12 years of training.

Do your students at FCI expect that it’s going to take them 12 years to become a chef?

Here it is different. For us we were learning and working. We learned a lot, but at the same time we paid the restaurant back by working—cleaning the stoves, starting the fires.

When I started at FCI, I said “it’s impossible to train people in six months.” But I really was wrong. After six months or two years, they learn the basics and they can cook.

But without a lengthy traditional apprenticeship, are they missing something?

Yes and no. On the one hand, they spend all their time cooking—no working—and I know that after six months of purely cooking, they know more than we learned after three years. But after an apprenticeship, when you have been working, you have a different attitude, more disciplined. When it’s just school, the discipline is a little lacking.

Do chefs graduating from culinary school these days have unrealistic expectations?

Some of them do. I try to explain this to my students: “You’re not Paul Bocuse. Maybe some day you will be.”

What role does creativity play in cooking?

It is very important, but it means nothing if you don’t know how to cook. In this country, creativity is overdone. I remember years ago when this thing started. Everyone wanted to create new dishes. I have cooked now for 59 years. If you asked me what dishes did I create, I am speechless. I changed recipes—I discovered little things to improve them—but create is a big word. I like to cook the recipes we have.

What do you make of explosion of cooking shows on television?

There’s good and bad. On the good side, people learn that the most important thing is to cook with good ingredients. That is a big advance. The bad thing is that there are chefs on television with two or three years experience. They are put on pedestal like stars and then they think they are stars. But we are not stars, we are craftspeople.

Craftspeople, as opposed to artists?

In my life, I was always fighting that. We are not artists, we are craftspeople. Here is the difference: An artist like a painter doesn’t do great paintings all through his life. One week he does a beautiful painting and another week it is not beautiful. So he puts the not-beautiful painting away.

Chefs have to produce every day. The customer who has a beautiful meal on Monday also has to have a beautiful meal on Tuesday. To do it every day we have to be craftsmen, we have to be consistent.

People always ask me, what is the secret? There is no secret. You need absolutely the best ingredients. The next thing is to be consistent, to cook as well on Tuesday as you did on Monday. Creativity comes after that.

Do you watch Top Chef?

I have not watched it.

How about tonight?

My whole life as a chef I went to bed at one, two o’clock in the morning. Now [since he sold Lutèce] I go to bed at nine. But tonight I’ll stay up late to watch it.

Mascarpone. Mas-car-ponay. This creamy fresh Italian cheese is not pronounced, pace Sara and C.J., MaRs-ca-pone.

What can I say? It was a boring episode. Anthony Bourdain’s blog is, again, far more entertaining and informative than the show was.

I was initially confused as to Jimmy Canora’s membership in the Continental Congress of Chefs. Were there chefs at that convocation in Philadelphia that gave us the Declaration of Independence? If so, that would make Canora, what, 250 years old at the youngest?

A little research revealed that Canora’s group is, according to Continental’s web site, “a carefully chosen group of culinary experts who continually evaluate the ever-changing trends and popular flavors of food.” Though it turns out that six of the Congress’ chefs are employed by Continental, and eight represent the airline’s vendors, such as that gourmet powerhouse, Gate Gourmet.

Hung’s decision to cook Chilean sea bass proves once again that this fish’s chief attribute is its near indestructibility. Its appearance on a restaurant menu is usually an indication that the chef has no particular interest in nor talent for fish.

Nor was I surprised that Casey’s cauliflower gratin helped her win the elimination challenge. Something magical happens to cauliflower when combined with béchamel (i.e. white) sauce and lots of cheese. I have made the following recipe, from James Peterson’s “Vegetables” (Morrow, $25), many times. It is always a big hit, even among the cruciferous-averse.

CAULIFLOWER GRATIN

2 tablespoons salt (for pre-cooking cauliflower)
1 head cauliflower (about 1½ pounds)
2 cups béchamel sauce (recipe follows)
1 cup (about 3 ounces) finely grated Swiss Gruyere cheese
Salt and freshly ground pepper
½ cup (about 1 ounce) finely grated Parmesan cheese, or addition Gruyere
2 tablespoons bread crumbs

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bring 3 quarts of water to a rapid boil with the 2 tablespoons of salt. Cut the cauliflower into 1-inch wide florets. Boil the florets for 4 minutes, drain without rinsing, and spread the cauliflower in a buttered, medium (about 8-cup) oval gratin dish or baking dish just large enough to hold it in a single layer.

2. If the béchamel sauce is cold, bring it to a simmer on the stove while whisking. Stir in the Gruyere cheese into the hot béchamel and adjust the salt and pepper.

3. Spoon the sauce over the cauliflower and sprinkle everything with the Parmesan cheese and bread crumbs. Bake until the gratin is bubbling and lightly browned on top, about 30 minutes. Serve immediately. Makes 4 to 6 side-dish servings.

BECHAMEL SAUCE

2 tablespoons butter
2½ tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1 bay leaf, broken in two
Salt and pepper
1 very small pinch of ground nutmeg

1. Place the butter in a heavy-bottomed 2-quart saucepan over medium heat. As soon as it has melted, add the flour and continue to cook, while stirring with a wooden spoon, until the flour smells toasty, about 5minutes.

2. Pour in half the milk and bring to a simmer while whisking. When the milk has reached a boil and the sauce is smooth, add the rest of the milk, the nutmeg and the bay leaf, and bring to a gentle simmer. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and strain. Makes 2 cups.

Last night, Howie’s worst fear came true: his cooking skills were publicly scorned. And rightly so. You could tell by the shot of his phyllo “cigars” frying that the oil wasn’t hot enough and that the resultant cigars would be greasy. The duxelles (finely chopped mushrooms) on his tartlets did indeed, per Hung, look like dog diarrhea.

Howie knew it was looking bad for him at the judges’ table, and so with his new-found team spirit, he offered to resign so that Brian could stay. No dice, said Padma. The judges saw right through Howie’s craven gesture. They wanted him off, and they wanted to fire him.

With his distinctive blend of arrogance and thick-headedness, Howie declared during his exit interview, “I stand by my decision,” even though his decision had been pointedly ignored and the one he was standing by had been made by the judges.

In fact Howie’s dismal performance did save Brian, who failed at both of the tasks he essayed: preparing his ahi poke (which Tom Colicchio unmasked as yet another tuna tartare) and leadership of the catering team. Brian’s supervisory missteps were numerous and grave. He presided over a selection of hors d’oeuvres that was formless and repetitive. The only thing he could take credit for was that the groceries came in 25 cents under budget.

For the quick-fire challenge, Hung made an interpretive breakfast moonscape of eggs, leeks, potatoes, cereal, chocolate-drink mix and whipped cream. I thought he was just having fun but he seemed to actually think it was edible. “I didn’t expect to win,” he said after not winning, “because I had a judge that was so closed-minded.”

Chastened, for the elimination challenge he put out two comically prosaic dishes, curried chicken salad on crostini and salmon mousse piped onto cucumber slices, “a classic dish that people with average palates would appreciate.”

Hung’s arrogance is only exceeded by his contempt for every palate that is not his own. “You don’t like my leek-Fruit-Loop diorama?” he seemed to be saying, “well then you must love salmon mousse on cucumber slices.”

It’s been a pretty boring season of Top Chef, and last night’s episode was no exception—until it ended with a genuine shocker: Tre was booted.

I cannot imagine what the judges were thinking. Yes Tre was the executive chef of Restaurant April, the losing team in round two of the restaurant wars. As he said in his parting speech, “If an executive chef can’t lead a team to success, then the executive chef is a flop.”

But I can remember other instances where the judges have spared the leader of a losing team because another member was more to blame.

Tre was having an off night, no question. He presided over a lackluster meal and two of the dishes he prepared, the marinated salmon and the bread pudding, were deemed duds. (Ted called the former “a catastrophe,” “disgusting”) But, in his defense, he cooked twice as many dishes as anyone else. And the dishes he didn’t cook were as bad as the ones he didn’t.

Casey’s carrot soup wasn’t an issue, but the judges criticized her monkfish for being overcooked. CJ’s one contribution, a lobster salad, was over-salted. Meanwhile, Brian didn’t cook a thing. Wouldn’t he have been a better candidate for elimination?

We know that the show’s producers, as well as the judges, are in on the elimination decisions, and from a non-culinary perspective, the decision to send Tre packing makes no sense. He’s done well throughout the competition, and is an absolute charmer with his military work ethic and brilliant smile. As an African-American chef, he is also a welcome presence in a world that is largely devoid of black faces.

If the judges had a good reason to get rid of Tre, they didn’t articulate it. This morning I checked the Bravo web site. Tom Colicchio's blog is back. (Anthony Bourdain was spelling him for the last few weeks.)

Tom's blog entry is really a transcription of a conversation he had with Bravo's Andy Cohen. In it, he reveals the judges' reasons for Tre's dismissal:

One of the things we looked at were all the dishes he was responsible for. So we felt the salmon dish was not great universally -- conceptually it was a bad dish. I thought the scallop was good, not great. That beef dish that we'd commented on the day before and said we didn't care for it? He didn't change it! Crusting a filet mignon, as Anthony Bourdain pointed out, is very 80s and not very inventive. He did the same dish exactly the second time around. He was running the kitchen with no intensity, it was very lackadaisical. I never got a sense that they were really pushing it, and they weren't cooking as if their chance of staying in the competition depended on it. I think Tre was responsible for setting that tone.

Well, OK. I guess.

Bourdain, thankfully, is still blogging. He has lots to say about Tre's exit here.

A couple of random thoughts:

Christopher Ciccone? Where did that come from? Did someone at Bravo owe him a favor?

What’s the point of complaining about Dale’s shirt when there’s the matter of his hair?

Will CJ ever stop talking about his lost testicle?

What a relief that Daniel Boulud’s reputation is intact: he liked Hung’s cooking. Hung didn’t win anything, but Boulud called his quick-fire burger “very good,” and Mr. Hubris' tuna tartare was probably the most successful of all the elimination-challenge dishes.

What was Daniel Boulud doing there? It wasn’t to promote his book “Letters to a Young Chef,” a hardcover copy of which he awarded to each of the contestants; the book was published in 2003.

And it wasn’t to deodorize his image after he agreed, two weeks ago, to settle a discrimination lawsuit brought against him by Latino and Asian workers at his flagship restaurant Daniel in New York who claimed that they were denied opportunities to advance to higher-paying positions within the organization; the episode was shot months ago.

In any event, he inspired the quick-fire challenge—create a knock-out burger—an homage to the burger served at his DB Bistro Moderne: A sirloin patty filled with boned short ribs braised in red wine, foie gras, black truffle and a mirepoix of root vegetables, served on a homemade bun and topped with toasted parmesan and layered with fresh horseradish mayonnaise, tomato confit, fresh tomato and frisée lettuce. The DB burger goes for a cool $29.

CJ won the challenge with a scallop-mousse-and-shrimp burger topped with tangerine. No immunity was awarded; CJ’s prize was to select his own team for the elimination challenge. He picked Tre, Casey and Brian and in an act of true humility, appointed himself sous chef and asked Tre to command the kitchen of Restaurant Alison. Which turned out to be a mistake. Tre turned out a lackluster menu distinguished by criminally over-smoked potatoes. Brian, out in front, failed to manage the room well, and set the tables with dusty plates.

Meanwhile, over at Garage, Sara M decided that she, a cheese maker if I remember correctly, would run the kitchen. Howie went along, probably thinking that she’d hang herself. In fact everyone on Team Garage except Hung hung himself. Sara presided over a heavy, un-seasonal menu, Howie turned out a leaden risotto (which Tom, correctly, pointed out should not have contained cream), and Dale made perhaps the biggest mistake of the episode—if not the season, program, the network: he festooned the dining room with vanilla-scented candles.

Both teams lost, no one was sent home, and next week they have a chance to open their restaurants a second time.

In a nod to the blogosphere, Andrea Strong of the food blog The Strong Buzz turned out to have been one of the civilian diners. Grub Street's Josh Ozersky wrote on his blog that there "was supposed to be a whole table of bloggers — Daniel Maurer and I for Grub Street, Eater, Restaurant Girl … but they wanted us to not write about Top Chef at all, and that couldn’t happen. Only Andrea took the pledge."

To read Strong's own account of the experience, click here.

Padma read aloud selections Strong’s musings at the Judges’ Table, relieving Ted of the burden of coming up with all the zingers. For more zingers, check out Anthony Bourdain’s blog.

Who puts ice in a milkshake? Sara N., that’s who. On that basis alone she deserved to be sent packing. And it’s worth noting that control-freak Howie countenanced this crime against ice cream.

Speaking of crimes against ice cream, the scariest moment of last night’s episode was a shot of Hung chopping up cauliflower for the Cold Stone Creamery-sponsored ice-cream mix-in quick-fire challenge. Not satisfied with leaving disgusting enough alone, Hung also saddled his ice cream with candied pistachios, white chocolate, mint, tempura flakes and tamarind-brown butter sauce. The cauliflower wound up in something he called “cauliflower white-chocolate espuma.” (Marcel must have been spinning in his temperature-controlled water bath; “espuma” is Spanish for foam.)

Guest judge Govind Armstrong was being kind when he told Hung that there was too much going on in the ice cream and that it was difficult to decipher the flavors. Well, Hung had as much use for Armstrong’s opinion as he did for Alfred Portale’s. In his own mind, Hung had simply failed to create “something simple, catchy for the common people.”

The elimination challenge, which pitted Brian, Hung, Tre and Sara M. against CJ, Casey, Howie and Sara N. in a late-night bar-food contest, was pretty boring. Tre’s bacon-wrapped shrimp on cheese grits was the big winner, Sara N.’s icy shakes and under-seasoned sliders were the losers.

Yes, Sara N. deserved to go, but I agree with her and with Casey that making the women cook in their going-out finery put them at a distinct disadvantage. If the producers had wanted to level the cooking field, they should have made the men put on heels, skimpy tops and makeup.

In her final moments Sara N. showed herself to be a class act. No blubbering a la Joey, and she made an observation that should be tattooed on the forehead of every Top Chef contestant: There’s a fine line between being competitive and being an a**hole.

By the way, the great Anthony Bourdain, who is an occasional guest judge on Top Chef, is writing a blog on Bravo's web site which is nothing short of brilliant.

What product is Rocco DiSpirito hawking? That’s what I started wondering as soon as I learned he was to be a guest judge on Top Chef.

As it turns out, he was promoting Bertolli Mediterranean-Style Frozen Dinners, a sample of which landed on my desk just a few days ago. Sadly, it had defrosted by the time I got to it so I haven’t taken it for a test drive. Bertolli’s flaks had also, as is the custom with food p.r., sent along some low-level graft—a nonstick skillet, a wooden spoon, a pot holder and a corkscrew.

Bertolli, a once-Italian olive-oil company now owned by food behemoth Unilever, dug deeper into its pockets to run two commercials during the show’s airing and put up four tickets to Italy for the team that won the elimination challenge.

Could there have been a weirder challenge? I was worried that the contestants were going to have to cook something with Bertolli’s frozen dinners, but instead they were instructed to deconstruct Bertolli’s handiwork and then create their own. Creating frozen dinners!

And now the public has been introduced to the great concept of IQF, Individual Quick Freezing. Remember the days when frozen peas came in an icy block? That was pre-IQF. Now blanched fresh peas are placed on a conveyor belt and rolled into an incredibly cold blast freezer that instantly freezes each one—that’s why they rattle around in the package. The quicker you freeze something, the less its texture is affected by being frozen and then defrosted.

The Top Chefs didn’t have access to a commercial blast freezer, but they could still achieve some measure of IQF by freezing each of their dish components separately. Only Tre and CJ got it right—and they were rightfully declared the winners.

Rocco DiSpirito, the Icarus of the culinary world, is best known for having been plucked from his well-regarded Manhattan restaurant Union Pacific to star in a reality series that chronicled his doomed efforts to open an Italian restaurant with Mephistophelean partner Jeffrey Chodorow. A short stint as host of WOR’s Food Talk radio show followed.

Padma, however, introduced him as “James Beard Award winner and author of Rocco’s Real-Life Recipes.” None of the contestants seemed particularly impressed with him, and Tom seemed downright dismissive. At one point Rocco made the staggering pronouncement that “among the great chefs of the world there is a recognition that home-meal-replacement [i.e. frozen dinners] is an important category.”

Yeah, right. Great chefs of the world like Rocco are hawking frozen dinners for Unilever, and pikers like Tom Colicchio are creating ground-breaking restaurants (Craft, Craftbar, ‘wichcraft, Craftsteak), writing excellent cookbooks and actually bringing some class to reality TV.