Photo: David Moir/Bravo
A couple of weeks ago, with “Living the High Life,” I thought Top Chef: Wisconsin was settling into a familiar groove, and I assumed we’d run through all of this season’s production changes. Silly me! I was speaking as boldly — and, it turns out, as incorrectly — as Kaleena proclaiming her cheesecakes would be properly set or Charly boasting that he and Michelle weren’t going to coast on immunity when they definitely did. “The Wright Stuff” is packed with changes to how Top Chef normally works both for the contestants and us as viewers, and like Savannah tasting wild pistachio for the first time, I just don’t get it. The format already works! Stop tweaking the format!
The first change: “The Wright Stuff” starts immediately after “Take It Cheesy,” with the cheftestants and the judges still assembled outside Cupola Barn in Oconomowoc, where they held the first Top Chef Cheese Festival. (Yes, Tom is still wearing the hat. It’s basically the I Think You Should Leave “Brian’s hat” sketch in real life.) Kristen announces that in this week’s episode, there’s again, like in the premiere, no Quickfire challenge. Instead, everyone will be traveling to Madison alongside the Frank Lloyd Wright Trail, and the cheftestants will be visiting some of Wright’s designed buildings for inspiration. Tom and Gail provide a little HGTV lesson in which they talk about Wright’s design style and how the legendary American architect paired somewhat oppositional concepts together (the only real example they give is his low-ceilinged entryways leading into high-ceilinged, wide-open living spaces), and then they lay out a highly conceptual Elimination challenge.
In pairs, the chefs need to tackle Wright’s work and the concept of “duality.” They can take inspiration from Wright’s compression/release idea or from other duality ideas like light/dark or large/small, and they’ll work as a team to deliver two dishes. The chefs get to pick their partners, which leads to people who were already friendly teaming up (Michelle and Charly; Dan and Amanda; Rasika and Danny) and others joining up because of necessity (Savannah and Laura; Kaleena and Alisha; Manny and Kévin, who delightfully call themselves the “power bottoms” because of their low rankings at the cheese festival). And then Kristen drops a bombshell: Michelle’s immunity for her coconut curry and collard green saag will extend to Charly, too, so the entire team will be safe from elimination this week — which, by the way, is a double elimination. So essentially Charly jumps in front of not just one person, but two people, because an entire team will be out.
Yeah, I hate this. I’m assuming the idea here was that it’s unfair when someone has immunity in a team and others don’t, because if the person who has immunity made the worst dish, they get to stay, and someone else is unjustly sent home. (This is why Jamie Lynch giving up his immunity on Top Chef: Charleston was so shocking because no one does that.) But it’s not exactly fair for someone to get immunity gifted to them by the series, either, because that’s also an arbitrary advantage. I think the better option would have been to still hold a Quickfire challenge (but the person who already has immunity from the previous Elimination challenge can’t get it again), give the person who won the Quickfire immunity, pair them with the Elimination-immunity winner, and then randomly pair up the other chefs. That approach would be slightly more merit-based than this one, where someone greatly benefits from pure luck.
Anyway, no one shares their thoughts on this immunity tweak (although I’m sure some of them had to be seething internally, because that would be normal and warranted!), and the next morning they hit the road to Burnham Block, six affordable, small-scale homes Wright designed that are still in use now; the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, which overlooks Lake Monona and bridges urban and water environments; and Taliesin, Wright’s sprawling home, studio, and property that’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and houses Riverview Terrace Restaurant, where the chefs will cook and present their dishes. Watching these segments is like being at an open house occupied purely by first-year psych students; everyone’s trying really hard to make thoughtful (but mostly facile) observations about how Wright’s design makes them feel and how chefs are just like architects. It’s making me want to crawl under my couch, especially when Amanda says that Wright was a Gemini and sparks off another astrology talk. It’s useful footage, though, because it shows us how the chefs are all interacting together on this team challenge.
Three teams seem connected. Rasika and Danny are vibing on their “seemingly similar but strikingly different” approach and decide to do two dishes that look similar but have totally different color palettes and flavor profiles. Amanda and Dan decide their dish will be a commentary on affordable housing, with one dish featuring peasant ingredients like potatoes and fennel and the other luxury seafood. Manny and Kévin take their contrasting personalities as inspiration and decide to go with a light/dark theme, with Manny serving a stuffed pasta with a light-colored sauce and Kévin a chocolate dessert. Two teams are less focused but are intent on working together. Savannah and Laura decide to feature Laura’s ingredient from home, wild pistachio, in an “uncomfortable” beef dish that will introduce judges to the new flavor, while their “comfortable” dish will be a dessert with the familiar pistachio flavor, raspberry, and phyllo dough. Charly and Melissa go with a chicken/egg theme, with Charly making Haitian djon djon black rice and Melissa a mushroom biscuit. (Note that neither chicken or egg is the primary component in either dish, something Tom will criticize later after eating their offerings.) And then there’s Alisha and Kaleena, who are a flat-out mess.
From the beginning, they just don’t get along. Alisha says to Kaleena that she hates Geminis … and then learns Kaleena is a Gemini. When planning their dishes, Kaleena brusquely tells Alisha she’s taking their agreed-upon land-and-sea theme too literally. Their planned dishes — Kaleena’s mushroom and goat cheesecake, Alisha’s aguachile with shrimp — don’t sound like they’re going to accentuate each other at all. In a talking-head interview with the two of them, Kaleena gets really standoffish when Alisha accidentally touches her foot. In the kitchen, Alisha says something self-deprecating about not cutting her cucumbers well, and Kaleena sarcastically mocks her; Kaleena lists all the stuff she still has to do, and Alisha makes an exasperated face. Later on, as Kaleena struggles to cut her unevenly set cheesecakes, she’s defensive when Alisha points out that they look really imprecise and then doesn’t help Alisha with her plating. They’re just never on the same page at any part of this challenge (the editing really makes it seem like this is mostly Kaleena’s fault), and it’s not surprising when their dishes get torn apart at judging. Kaleena’s cornbread cheesecake crust in her mushroom and goat cheese cheesecake with sesame and nori tuile, candied mushrooms, and spruce syrup is so overdone that Tom compares it with Civil War-era hardtack, but he’s not done! He then compares Alisha’s aguachile with shrimp, cucumber, and lime with a “first-year culinary student trying to make a fancy dish.” Tom really put on his coziest striped cardigan to oversee a bloodbath. That’s duality for you!
Kaleena and Alisha’s dishes are as bad as French Laundry alumni Danny and Rasika’s are good. They’re plated exactly the same, with little quenelles and then stacks of vegetable batons precisely sliced to the same height, but the flavors have little in common. Danny’s quenelle is made of scallop and zucchini mousse and is served with zucchini batons and green chartreuse; Rasika’s quenelle is made of daal and comes with beet and carrot batons and rasam, an Indian soup that Rasika compares to a consomme. The judges love both dishes, but Rasika’s spice level, acidity, and different textures make it the judges’ favorite of the night, and Rasika is overwhelmed to nab immunity again while cooking one of her grandmother’s recipes. She describes what she’s doing with her family’s Tamil flavors as a Ratatouille thing, which is cute, and if you’re keeping track, she’s now won three of Top Chef: Wisconsin’s six challenges.
But do these teams get judged the way you would expect? They do not. Instead of doing the normal Top Chef thing where more than one low-ranking contestant or team is brought in for judging to amp up the tension about who’s going home, Kristen calls Kaleena and Alisha and Danny and Rasika to Judges’ Table at the same time, and with very little preamble, announces that Kaleena and Alisha must pack their knives and go. Tom delivers a rushed list of reasons why their dishes were failures, but there’s no real back-and-forth between the judges and the cheftestants about what went wrong in conception, cooking, or teamwork, and this abbreviated Judges’ Table means that some of the other teams who struggled don’t get any feedback or discussion of their dishes, either. (I personally would have loved more talk from the judges about wild pistachio and whether it actually tastes like cigarettes, as Savannah suggested.) Instead, Kaleena and Alisha are dismissed and say their good-byes to everyone but Danny and Rasika, who remain behind to have praise heaped upon by them the judges.
It’s another odd change that doesn’t really accomplish anything. My guess is that this judging reversal was primarily to build in a little gap of time between when Kaleena and Alisha leave and Kristen and two-time Top Chef winner Buddha Lo, who returned to judge the duality challenge, visit the remaining chefs so Kristen can “give insight” about what happened, explaining that “the food just did not come to the level that it needed to come” and encouraging the other contestants to embrace being “pushed to another limit.” This is Top Chef positioning Kristen once again as the wise mentor and host who will give the cheftestants the tough love they need, and sure, fine. But wouldn’t it have been more useful to provide that tough love through a more comprehensive Judges’ Table that more broadly and honestly assessed the other chefs’ mistakes of the night, too, and that didn’t result in the series so unceremoniously shoving Kaleena and Alisha out the door? And honestly, is a merciless environment like Top Chef really the venue for contestants to consistently “bring joy” to their cooking, as Kristen tells them to do? That just feels naive, like Top Chef is positioning itself as a feel-good and do-good series when, in reality, it’s a competition series just like any other — and there’s nothing wrong with that! Top Chef: Wisconsin, please stop changing the rules.
• Tom hat watch: No hat during the duality judging. Let’s hold out hope for next week.
• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: Sort of slim pickings without a quickfire and with a number of dishes that had technical flaws, but I’ll say Amanda’s bougie angel hair pasta with scallops and lobster (hold the roe) and Kévin’s warm chocolate praline mousse. I was surprised that after so many cheftestants commented on Wright’s use of burnt red throughout his designs, no one tried to prominently recreate that shade in their dishes?
• This is probably a me problem, but I was somewhat irritated when chef and judge Dominique Crenn praised Michelle and Charly’s dishes for being made “with love” when they had a lot of execution issues, like Michelle’s biscuit dough being too dry and Charly’s rice being unevenly cooked. It felt like there was an implied bias there from Dominique, like homey or ethnic food could never be as technically precise as, say, French cuisine, so its chefs don’t need to try.
• Related: Was there a reason why Michelle used the silicone baking molds for her biscuits instead of cutting them into individual squares and baking them that way? I’ve seen biscuits portioned with square biscuit cutters before and assume that would provide better texture than the mold, in which the biscuit dough probably couldn’t expand as it needs to? Someone with actual baking knowledge, please sound off in the comments.
• Manny almost hitting his head on Taliesin’s ceilings and then calling himself lighthearted and “round” — feels like the beginning of fan-favorite material to me! Amanda is also up there, of course.
• The BMW spon-con is always so hilariously cheesy that I can’t even be mad at it anymore. The cheftestants having to pretend that they’re shocked by the existence of Google Maps … what year is it?
• If you’re planning a Wisconsin trip, here’s some information about the full Frank Lloyd Wright Trail. And if you’re planning a move to Wisconsin, apparently the state is littered with houses designed by people who apprenticed with Wright through the program described in this episode. They are probably far more expensive now than they were back in 2017, but these homes are fun to stalk on real-estate websites if that’s a thing you are weirdly obsessed with, like, um, me.
• LAST CHANCE KITCHEN SPOILERS AHEAD: My Soo conspiracy theory continues! Tom’s challenge for Soo, Kaleena, and Alisha is to pick a serving vessel from a table of various items (including greenhouse terrariums and wooden trays) and then cook a dish inspired by that vessel. It’s not too dissimilar from the Wright challenge, so I understand Alisha’s impulse to make aguachile again to prove that she can do it. But Alisha’s aguachile with shrimp, jicama, avocado, cucumber, and cilantro is just too simple compared with Kaleena, who does an Asian-inspired beef trio (beef tartare, beef tataki, and charred rib-eye medium rare), and Soo, who chose a square container and on the lid serves lamb loin carpaccio and inside glazed halibut with a spicy strawberry bisque. Top Chef contestants usually fail when they try to serve one ingredient numerous ways, so I was pretty surprised that Kaleena did well. She and Soo get to stick around while Alisha gets the boot, and I hope next week she joins Kenny and Valentine in their very cute (and justified) “Avenge us” chant for the next eliminated cheftestant.
