Top Chef: Wisconsin Recap: Story Tasters

And there I was, double-wielding jerk wings in my fists, ready to engage in one of my favorite challenges of the series: the blindfolded taste test. Hoo boy! I love chaos! The blindfolded taste test where Top Chef competitors come together to do the most American thing of all time: say the wrong thing with the utmost confidence.

I won’t lie. I walked into this episode with a bouquet of false hopes. I looked at the remaining contestants and was like, You know, all of them have really great palates. They’re going to burn through this Quickfire like acid reflux after a mac-and-cheese plate. When Savannah said, “I’m fucking ready for this,” I enthusiastically screamed, “Yes, Savannah!” Then when she said, “I have not actually practiced this,” “Oh no, Savannah!” This is where my hopes should have rolled downhill, but I still prayed at the top of the mountain. With 26 morsels to munch through and $5,000 on the line for the winner of the taste-test portion of the Quickfire challenge, each mistake rounds out to about $192. Those are some expensive mistakes! Alas, I still believed, and I was impressed at first. Everyone was killing it!

Savannah: Anchovy. Ding!
Manny: Lemon. Ding!
Danny: Cannellini beans. EHHHN!

Danny, Danny, Danny, why must you break my heart, Danny? That was edamame. Cannellini beans and edamame don’t even have the same texture.

Everyone: Jalapeño. Ding!
Dan: Hearts of palm. EHHHN!

Dan, please! Hearts of palm isn’t even spicy!

Everyone: Rosemary. Ding!
Dan: Oregano. EHHHN!

Oh-ray-gan-oh?! I raise my hands to the heavens.

You know what? It’s okay! Forget it! Dan didn’t need $5,000 anyway. There’s a $10,000 prize for the best-dish section of the Quickfire challenge anyway. Double it up! Yes, yes, Manny was on fire with 23 out of 26 food samples correct. Yes, I understand his God-sent palate earned him an ingredient list as long as a CVS receipt. You know, sometimes a small amount of ingredients can be helpful. It challenges the chef by pushing them to be resourceful. Small boxes allow the chef to really focus on elevating what they have, and … did Dan just put kalamata olives, soy sauce, and watermelon in a blender to make a sauce?!?!?!?!?!?!

That combination sounds like something you serve to your enemies on a bright sunny day when the grass is an exuberant green but you have nothing abhorrence wading in your soul.

In order to be successful in this challenge with limited ingredients, you have to find a through line by finding interesting flavor pairings with sauces and vegetables while hitting classic and easy preparations for the protein. But if your ingredient list looks like an eccentric start-up company’s salad bar, you will have to do three times the amount of work.

But lo and behold, Savannah, who was tied at the bottom in the tasting portion with Dan (getting nine out of 26 ingredients correct), won the best-dish section of the challenge with her fried pork loin with faux Caesar dressing and horseradish-Kalamata-olive sauce! She proved that focusing on what you can control and elevating those standards into something delicious is a winning strategy. Utilizing the cheddar for a Caesar dressing only showcases Savannah’s element of surprise and her tenacity throughout this competition. She’s willing to take the risks to make something extraordinary that you won’t normally see paired together. That’s completely opposite to Manny, who had the most ingredients but landed in the bottom two because he was very one-dimensional in his execution and the vision fell apart.

Resourcefulness is why the elimination challenge was perfect for Savannah. We’re in the part of Top Chef where we are inching close to the finale. The show aims to give the contestants a time of reflection. “What is your story?” Your greatest successes, your failures, your epiphanies … what has your time on Top Chef taught you? The judges want to see a dish that speaks to your Wisconsin story. There are so many ways one can play on this. You can touch on consistent forms of feedback you got from the judges throughout the season. You can redo a dish you fumbled on. You can accentuate a style you shied away from because you earned a new form of confidence after being pushed out of your comfort zone. So many aspects of the competition you can focus on, and I promise the worst thing one can possibly do is make the dish tell your story instead of telling your story through the dish. Ironically, this is what all of the contestants except Laura and Savannah struggled with.

Laura returned to the competition with a vengeance, ready to redeem herself since returning from Last Chance Kitchen. Her focus on intentional restraint, recalling earlier points in the competition when she had over 15 ingredients in a dish versus now, doing a lamb manti with a barbacoa sauce showcases her range. Last week we saw an exuberant dessert display, and here we saw a minimalist yet impactful plate still full of flavor. Laura knows she loses nothing by concentrating on the flavors on her plate. Also, Savannah comes out with her potato pavé, a dish that normally has to be done overnight to be perfectly executed, and she’s like, “I did it within three hours,” proclaiming that this dish is a reflection of her journey in Top Chef because of all the “heat and pressure.” Excuse me, Savannah “Flex on ’Em” Miller? That’s what I’m talking about: Live for the challenge. Go in Poet.

So you can imagine how disappointed I was seeing Dan, Danny, and Manny when they could not reach that energy bar for bar. When Danny pulled out with the bougie soba-cha mushroom broth and proclaimed he made this subtle dish because he believes subtle dishes get lost in the competition, everyone on the table had a collective blink. “You think this is subtle?” Listen, if you’re going to be bougie, be bougie. Just say you wanted to improve this dish because you felt like you could do a better job executing it this time. Don’t lie and say it’s subtle. That dish looks like it would pop up in a mink to the cookout.

But truly, I think Manny’s dish saddened me the most. Once Manny said he was making his red snapper à la veracruzana as a reflection of himself as a chef when he felt most comfortable honoring his people, I knew he did not understand the assignment. Manny is steadfast in his flavors and culture more than anyone left in the competition, and that’s his greatest strength, but his unwillingness to take the steps and growth he made in this competition and incorporate them into the dish became his downfall. Manny’s journey with risotto! He could have easily done a recall to the sausage challenge where his risotto was too cheesy, and it cost him the round. Gail said she loves his risotto! If you wanted to do something you know you had the ability to execute and elevate, that was a great option. Make it a tale of risotto. But no, he gave the judges table inconsistent fish! When Paul Bartolotta proclaimed his snapper was perfect, but then Tom gave that signature “two blinks and a stare?” I. Knew. That. Fish. Was. Raw.

Manny has been in the bottom two dishes for the last few episodes, and exhaustion might have caught up with him. I hope his elimination wakes Dan and Danny up. With Laura’s invigorated stride and Savannah’s streak, these women are a force, and I don’t think they are stopping now. It would be surprising to see them not in the final two, and with that in mind it’s going to be that much heartbreaking for anyone of these top four finalists’ journey to seize in the middle of the Caribbean sea.