Top Chef: Wisconsin Recap: Whole New Show

Does Top Chef: Wisconsin feel desperate? Do we think that Gail and Tom being added to the Quickfire judging is a maybe not-great reflection of Kristen’s job as host, and how we know less about her criteria and opinions than we do her fondness for puns that even corny suburban dads would be embarrassed by? (No shade toward corny suburban dads; we share a love for The Departed.) I’m only asking questions, and maybe I’m tip-toeing toward being mean because, as a viewer, frankly, I’m tired.

Now, is it that shocking that Tom, Gail, and Kristen would consider Quickfire dishes when they’re figuring out who should go home each week? I assumed they already did this! Top Chef was always very clear that chefs were based on their work within each episode, and I’m not sure what explicitly delineating this approach and acting like it’s something new accomplishes now. Aside, of course, aside from letting the judges power trip a little more blatantly. This week, they finally made good on their threats and sent two contestants to Last Chance Kitchen. Overall, though, I’m unimpressed by the persistent need for Top Chef to insist it’s hot and cool and fun now. We’re nine weeks in. Give it a rest!

Also needing rest: The chefs, after Restaurant Week. When they get to the Top Chef kitchen and are greeted by Kristen, Tom, and Gail altogether, the chefs know something is about to change. Kristen informs them that they’re halfway through the competition, an observation that makes me question everything I understand about the linear nature of time. (Have we not been watching this season for 1,000 years? Are we stuck in a wrinkle, Madeleine L’Engle style?) Past this midpoint, their Quickfire challenges will always be rated by the trio judging panel because Top Chef is “raising the stakes even higher,” blah, blah, blah. For this Quickfire, they’ll need to use fresh cranberries, which Wisconsin produces more than any other state.

Does this challenge ring any bells for you? It did for me because this whole episode is almost a beat-for-beat recreation of a Top Chef: Boston episode. Chefs had to gather their own fresh cranberries from a flooded bog and cook with them, and the Quickfire winner won with a cranberry borscht. Their Elimination challenge was to cook a meal evoking the First Thanksgiving, with only ingredients that were available to Indigenous Americans and colonists at the time. Their diners included descendants of the Wampanoag tribe, and the Boston chefs’ dishes included a lot of similar ingredients to the Elimination challenge offerings this week: rabbit, butternut squash, beans, duck, and goose. A little weird, no? Can we get a Top Chef producer on the record to answer for their crimes of repetition?

Back to the Quickfire. Everyone grabs cranberries and gets to work cooking for the trio and their guest judge, cranberry farmer Rochelle Hoffman. The winner gets $10,000, and they’ve got 30 minutes on the clock. Gail specifically says the judges don’t want to just see cranberry sauces, and yet here the chefs are, making cranberry sauce. Soo’s adding blackberries to his, Dan is working on a Thai-inspired chutney, Amanda’s doing a compote, and Savannah’s working on a hot sauce. There’s not a ton of ingenuity here, folks! And of all those saucy offerings, only one (Dan’s) makes it into the chefs’ favorites.

They praise Dan’s salt and pepper scallops with cranberry red curry; Danny’s sea bass poached with cranberry juice and served with fresh cranberry garnish; and Michelle’s cranberry and beet soup with foie gras and maple mascarpone. Meanwhile, on the bottom are Laura’s version of the Persian sweet-and-sour stew fesenjān, served with pork; Amanda’s fried chicken, cranberry hoecake, and cranberry sauce with maple and five spice; and Manny’s pork tenderloin, cranberry, orange, and radicchio salad, and cranberry sabayon sauce. Danny gets the win, bringing his cash winnings so far to more than $43,000, and for a split-second, Dan looks pretty pissed in a way I would be, too, if some kid who kept calling me “Grandpa” also kept beating me in challenges.

Rochelle leaves, and it’s time for Kristen, Gail, and Tom to explain the Elimination challenge. Evoking Alice Cooper in Wayne’s World, Kristen explains that Milwaukee translates to “the good land” and that the chefs’ Elimination challenge will exclusively focus on the original ingredients used by this region’s Indigenous peoples. The competitors won’t have access to dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, pork, beef, or chicken and will need to make modern dishes using a pantry curated by two of their guest judges, Chefs Elena Terry and Sean Sherman. Elena and Sean invite the contestants and the judges to a family-style feast, including dishes like white bean spread, smoked walleye, masa chips, wild rice patties with rosehip and mushrooms, roasted sweet potatoes, and dandelion greens, braised duck, and cedar-braised bison. None of the chefs has really eaten native food before, and there’s a little bit of conversation about how colonialism has affected the foods we eat for centuries and what cuisine is accepted and flourishes within the high-end culinary world. (It’s a topic Top Chef has covered a few times over the years, but a welcome one because it remains so relevant.)

The next day, the chefs swarm to their available pantry and then negotiate various ingredient swaps with each other. I am interpreting this as the chefs acting out a tiny recreation of the widespread trade routes Chef Elena was talking about. There are some issues in the kitchen: Amanda had planned for venison but settles for elk; Michelle struggles with using the smoker; Soo tries to repurpose wild rice into a gnocchi dough and keeps running into textural issues; Savannah describes her planned dessert as having a “half-cake, half-Jell-O” texture that isn’t immediately appetizing. But everyone gets their dishes out on time to the judging panel, which also includes two more Indigenous chefs: chefs Jessica Walks First and Bryce Stevenson.

A lot of the dishes suffer from too many ingredients that don’t really go together, the judges say. Falling into that “doing too much” camp are Amanda’s elk tataki and duck fat tortilla, Danny’s pheasant crépinette with caul fat, and Laura’s duck tamal wrapped in mustard greens and served with huckleberry sauce. Also receiving mixed results are Michelle’s acorn squash polenta cake with roasted rabbit and smoked onions and mushrooms (the rabbit is dry, the smoke flavor is too minimal) and Manny’s duck breast with braised mustard greens, rice cake, and ancho, guajillo, and plum sauce (the duck is too chewy). Kristen has a larger criticism about how Manny keeps serving dishes that break down into meat, carb, sauce, but like, aren’t those core food groups? I do not see an issue!

Rising to the top are Dan’s sunflower choke with braised goose, chokeberry puree, and goose stock foam; Soo’s roasted butternut squash with huitlacoche puree and wild rice gnocchi; and Savannah’s squash and maple jelly cake with chokeberries, grapes, and plums. The judges love how Dan used the sunchokes in different ways, and Kristen particularly praises his foam as purposeful instead of an accessory. (Somewhere in the world, Marcel Vigneron bristles.) Gail prompts Soo to rename his gnocchi “wild rice dumplings” as a more accurate reflection of what he made, and everyone loves his flavor balance and textures. But only one dish gets a wildly unexpected reaction out of Kristen — she’s so overwhelmed eating Savannah’s pumpkin pie-meets-gingerbread dessert that she stumbles over her words in praising it. Savannah gets the win and an accompanying (untold) advantage in next week’s Elimination. And what the judges have been threatening since Soo and Kaleena both made it back from Last Chance Kitchen comes to pass, with the judges sending both Amanda and Laura home for their disjointed Elimination dishes and subpar Quickfires. Michelle was in the bottom three, too, but her high-marked Quickfire dish kept her from the chopping block, and the judges make a big production of how her earlier success kept her around. Get ready for a lot more of Tom and Gail in the coming weeks!

• Tom hat watch: What if Tom never wears a hat ever again? In his life???

• Mailbag time! I received an email last week from recaps reader and Milwaukee native Tyler John, who wrote me a very informative and fascinating note about his experience as a server for Team Channel during this season’s Restaurant Wars. Everyone say hello to Tyler! I’ve included some excerpts from his account below.

I had a ton of fun working the event! I found the setup of tables, chairs, linens, etc., more stressful than the service itself. Danny’s Ingenious system of pre-writing all the tickets so as not to worry about distinguishing our handwriting also helped make sure that there was no confusion about who ordered what at which tables, something the other team seemed to struggle with. 

There was a hard three or four-hour limit on service that both teams needed to be done by. Our team finished with thirty minutes to spare, while the other team went fifteen minutes over. Another facet not implied and in defense of Team Dos by Deul: They had longer to walk from the kitchen to the restaurant.

I was offered a bowl of the vegan gumbo by Amanda at the end of service, which I found to be quite good but unique and maybe not necessarily something I’d order in a restaurant. Meanwhile, Michelle’s catfish seemed to be by far the most popular dish on the menu. 

• Here’s my mom’s trick for avoiding grainy walnuts in your fesenjān (it’s her favorite Persian stew): She grinds whole walnuts in batches in a spice grinder, not a food processor, until they are incredibly fine and almost a paste, but not quite. You want the walnuts to grind by themselves so their internal oils emulsify; adding other ingredients into the mixture too early can cause that grainy, not-quite-fully-broken-down texture that Laura struggled with in her Quickfire dish. And you definitely want to use the most tart pomegranate molasses you can find.

• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode, Amanda’s fried chicken, hoecake, and cranberry sauce, were deemed too basic for the Quickfire, but I like all those things, so I would eat that. And Savannah’s Elimination cake, although it looked like a hockey puck, was so admired that I’d chomp on that, too.

• I did not understand Danny saying that they don’t use Chilean sea bass in New York? Leave my favorite food craze inspired by Jurassic Park alone!

• Every Top Chef contestant should be required to keep a food diary of everything they eat (outside of the competition) when they’re on the show. I say this because the mole Manny volunteered to make the chefs for dinner looked great and I am now curious how they handle cooking together; is it a round-robin family-meal situation?

• Quote of the week is from Michelle: “I don’t smoke a lot of things … foodwise.”

• I understand that Soo probably still doesn’t feel connected to the other chefs on a personal level and that Top Chef viewers who don’t watch Last Chance Kitchen might feel he’s a stranger because he’s had such little screen time. But his random dinnertime interjection about physical discipline in Korean schools probably wasn’t the best icebreaker? (David Choe once explained these stress positions to Anthony Bourdain; if the former having a skeezy history is something you want to briefly overlook for additional context.)

• LAST CHANCE KITCHEN SPOILERS AHEAD: “A Top Chef Classic” is another two-part LCK episode, with Kévin, Amanda, and Laura facing off in a version of the Top Chef standard mise-en-place relay race. They have a table of ingredients to choose from that need to be cleaned or prepared, and they’ll need to use those ingredients in their final dish. Amanda focuses on the citrus on the table and plans a cake with eggs, lemons, limes, and oranges. Laura willingly seeds a pomegranate, a task that has stained my kitchen walls many a time, while Kévin decides on a mashup of French onion and chicken soup. Amanda’s win ends “Part 1.” “Part 2” is the cook itself, for which Amanda will have 30 minutes and second-place Kévin and third-place Laura 25 and 20 minutes each. Kévin serves a soup with chicken thighs, grilled chicken breast, confit onions, chicken and mushroom bouillon, and grilled and charred corn. Laura offers grilled sea bass with kale, tahini, pine nuts, pomegranate molasses, yellow harissa, and a tapenade with pomegranates, capers, and olives. Amanda also serves a citrus cake with bruleed citrus and a thin cheddar frico. All the dishes are stellar, Tom says, and only the mishandling of one ingredient inspires his decision: Kévin’s chicken breast was slightly overcooked, and he’s going home. Poor Kévin; I was really rooting for him to reunite with fellow Power Bottom Manny. But Amanda and Laura are left, and next week is the finale of Last Chance Kitchen.