‘Top Chef’ Recap, Season 22 Episode 13: ‘Viva Milano!’
Top Chef
Viva Milan!
Season 22
Episode 13
Editor’s Rating
Photo: David Moir/Bravo
If you watch Top Chef long enough, you’ll get used to its occasional nonsense. You’ll shrug off the product placement, letting the car logos and airline-sponsors and “brought to you by our friends at Glad Trash Bags” intros roll right off your back. You’ll sometimes even grow fond of the sweaty challenges designed around celebrity guests, blockbuster movies, or a local ingredient that even the locals might tire of after trying 13 courses designed around it. Because in between all that there are dozens of experts with a palpable passion for food and their craft, and if you share even an ounce of that passion, learning more about it is always going to be a pleasure.
I’ve really liked this season! It’s been far more comfortable in the slightly new groove required after Padma’s exit, both for Kristen as a host and the show as an evolution of itself. Even something as silly as that hockey idiom challenge couldn’t dampen my enthusiasm for long. But a penultimate episode featuring seemingly endless Olympics plugs and a tournament-style elimination to decide the final three? Yeah, I think I’m allowed to get cranky now.
Let’s get into it, shall we?
Two weeks after saying good-bye to Massimo in Calgary, our final four arrived in Milan. As Tristen says, his “time off” didn’t exactly give him a chance to reset as it might have for Bailey, César, and Shuai. Instead, Tristen had to bury his stepfather, whose presence and influence on his life clearly cannot be overstated. I’m pleased to hear he could be home for a final goodbye, and also so sorry he has to go to Milan with so much pressure on his shoulders.
As is pre-final tradition, they’re quickly thrown straight into the Quickfire. The brief is simple and terrifying: Make risotto. That’s it! But neither Top Chef fan knows, “make good risotto” is apparently much easier said than done for even some of the best chefs in the world. Luckily, our final four knew they were headed to Milan — a city famous for and extremely proud of its risotto — so surely they saw this coming and prepared accordingly, right?
Wrong! While Bailey does a happy dance, the men do a bad job hiding their nerves. “I thought I could manifest (risotto) out of this competition,” Tristen groans. Shuai, bless his heart, straight-up admits he didn’t practice making risotto at all. “It’s something that has failed so many times with risotto on Top Chef that i thought There’s no way they’re gonna make us make risotto. Silly me,” he says. Y’know what, Shuai? I gotta agree with you there. So many chefs failing at risotto is exactly why they’re gonna make you do it, babe!
Immediately in their heads, two out of the four chefs decide to just … not make risotto at all? César, our gentle prince of innovation, doubles down on the (incorrect) idea that risotto is “a technique” rather than a dish. As someone who used to pride herself on developing creative new reasons not to write college essays as assigned, I know a botched loophole attempt when I see one. The result is a celery-root “risotto” that makes Tom’s face screw up like he just sucked on a Warhead. (Somewhere, Massimo’s wineglass spontaneously shattered in his hand in solidarity.)
In his slight defense, César at least has the excuse of panicking after having to start cooking immediately; the others start 5, 10, and 15 minutes later, given Tom’s insistence that the risotto be eaten immediately after it’s done. In that respect, Shuai — who starts last — has no excuse for spending 15 minutes staring at a wall of rice options before deciding to cook cubed butternut squash in rice stock instead. Tom could not be less impressed at his and César’s workarounds. “Risotto literally means ‘of rice’,‘” he sputters. Neither he nor I can believe that half of the top four just fully abdicated the main responsibility of this challenge.
Bailey, wanting to redeem her mediocre risotto from the first week of the competition, embraces northern Italian tradition with a red-wine risotto with a hazelnut gremolata. It seems fine enough, but also extremely safe. So it’s almost a disservice to Tristen that he wins the Quickfire (and $15,000!) almost by default because his dish sounds genuinely innovative and delicious. His mission to “bring melanin to Milan” — an excellent catchphrase — translates here into a Jollof-rice-inspired risotto with charred butter greens that I need to eat immediately or else I might perish. Tristen was dreading cooking risotto as much as Shuai, and yet he once again made his own gorgeous version. I’d started to root for Shuai to challenge Tristen for the ultimate win, but this moment convinced me once and for all that Tristen has richly earned the title of Top Chef.
Before then, though, the final four has to become a final three — and this is where things are really go haywire.
You’d think that a risotto challenge where half the chefs didn’t make risotto would be my biggest gripe of the week, but no. Not when Kristen reveals that the final hurdle before the final will be a three-course head-to-head tournament, with nine panelists voting to send one chef on each round until the last. This style can work for something like Top Chef: Portland‘s tofu tournament, which whittled six chefs down to five. But making chefs compete for a final spot by preparing dishes they may not ever serve feels ridiculous.
What’s more, the clunky attempts to tie this challenge to Milan’s upcoming Winter Olympics aren’t just clunky but pretty distracting, too. However cool it is to meet the athletes, I can’t imagine the chefs were too pumped about basically having to chaperone their own personal Olympian(?) during such a crucial grocery shop. Given the widespread confusion in the supermarket, they frankly would have been better off getting their own personal Italian assistant. (The ghost of Massimo is screaming right now; I’m so sorry, buddy!) What’s more, when their new athlete friends join the judges’ table, they all chicken out of the first round of judging by simply voting for the chef they shopped with. None of this would bug me half as much if it were for a much earlier challenge, but this is to get into the final. Why are we doing paddle votes?!
Anyway. I should probably get into the actual dishes, whether or not they ended up getting served. With three courses and the local ingredients of polenta, beets, and gorgonzola to consider, there’s a lot at play and at stake. What becomes clear over the course of the episode is that most of the chefs thought hardest about coming out the gate strong with their first polenta dish (in hopes that they’d win and just be done), closely followed by the final Gorgonzola round (to make sure they wouldn’t be totally screwed if it came down to that). The beet dish, set to be served second, definitely feels the most like an afterthought.
Bailey makes some safer choices in her earlier rounds, between a straight-up parm polenta and roasted beets with “ricotta schmear.” César, for better and for worse, never plays anything safe. He goes for a polenta cake with black walnut ice cream and a beet tostada that has him frantically pressing homemade tortillas with only minutes to go. Their respectively basic and scattershot approaches are reflected in the judges’ scores. Neither get enough votes from the nine-person panel of Tom, Kristen, Gail, athletes, star chef Andrea Aprea, and my Top Chef: World All-Stars husband Ali Ghzawi to save themselves from the dreaded Gorgonzola.
Building on his last couple of Elimination Challenge successes, Shuai ends up taking the first round by pairing well-cooked polenta with a perfectly barbecued duck. (Let it never be said that Tom can’t judge a single dish while weighing an Elimination Challenge; if he did, Shuai would’ve been toast for his butternut squash cubes alone.) I would have loved to see/try his planned beet dumplings with smoked fish, but he’s probably lucky it didn’t come down to what sounded like a truly half-hearted butternut squash Gorgonzola dish. Shuai’s stunned and relieved to be done for the day — at least until he has to sit and watch the others sweat it out, which quickly proves too stressful to be fun.
The second round goes to Tristen. Although his peppery coo coo threatened to blow out the judges’ palettes in round one, his smoked beets with pickles and pork belly earned him a near-unanimous win. Again, I wish I could’ve seen what he’d do with Gorgonzola (allegedly it was going to be sorbet?), but I was just as happy as he was to realize he was through to the finale with minimal stress.
The same cannot be said for Bailey. Visibly stressed, she still issues herself the extra challenge of making the judges love bruléed Gorgonzola — a dish they pretty much hated mere weeks ago. Now, at this point, Bailey was getting so many confessionals and opportunities to explain her thinking that I, a fool, assumed this was goodbye. Nope! Her second brulée is a hit, sending César and his casserole — great on squash, less so on the Gorgonzola — home. After turning out so many unique and challenging dishes all season, it’s rough to watch him go for a recipe that apparently wasn’t even his, but his beloved chef de cuisine’s. César might not be as effusive as some of the other chefs, but I would have appreciated hearing more from him during what was, apparently, his last episode as a competitor. Unfortunately, the Network Synergy Gods demanded a sacrifice, ie, 15 minutes of Olympians asking Italian grocers for puff pastry.
This was just… a very confusing episode. I’ve now seen it twice, and I remain confused! All I can hope for is that the finale has the simplest of briefs — “cook your best food” or bust — and that we end up with a winner worthy of Delta Diamond Medallion Status.
• Kristen Kish Suit Envy Watch: I’m once again deferring to my roommate’s sartorial observations; more specifically, her calling Kristen’s pin-striped cream Quickfire suit “I’m Petra’s father” chic. That, plus the plunging black-and-white Elimination Challenge suit? Kish is crushing it. 8.5/10.
• I don’t have much else to add this week, except to declare my allegiance to #TeamTristen for the win. Although I’ve enjoyed getting to know most everyone this season, no one else has rivaled his consistency and creativity, so I can’t wait to see what he cooks without constraints.
• So what about you? Who are you rooting for? Who wins your award for Most Improved? Best Confessionals? Best Sportsmanship? Let’s get some superlatives going before the finale!