Top Chef
Hook, Line, & Dinner
Season 23
Episode 10
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Paul Cheney/Bravo
Where are my Sieger detractors at? This is your time to shine! For what I’d say is the fourth time this competition, Sieger delivered a somewhat lackluster, but properly cooked dish, and ended up squeaking through to next week because another person failed more definitively. This time around, that person was one of our favorites and someone who I thought was getting a clear finalist edit. Sieger, my guy, how much longer are you going to keep getting away with this?
(I’ve rewatched last week’s episode, and am even more convinced that Rhoda also got away with it. She made a good dish this week, and I respect any woman who is like, “Parents, please get off my back about grandkids,” but I’m going to need a while to get over “soft meringue” and the fact that Oscar went home instead.)
We’re finally at the mise-en-place race! Based on the promo, I thought the chefs would be boating around to get fish to use in the race (breaking down a protein is usually part of this), but I was getting ahead of the reality of the episode. Instead, the chefs do the mise-en-place race on the docks at Legendary Green Pond Landing in Anderson, South Carolina. Kristen, Tom, and Gail are waiting for them at Lake Hartwell, and the judges explain the rules. Two randomly selected teams will compete in five rounds, and the first team to win three rounds will get the opportunity to cook a dish, using the mise-en-place ingredients, for $10,000. The other team has to sit on the sidelines. Laurence, as the winner of last week’s episode, doesn’t have to compete on either team and instead gets an immediate entry into the Quickfire cook. Must be nice!
The chefs pull knives and organize into teams: Jonathan, Sherry, and Anthony are one team, and Sieger, Rhoda, and Duyen are the other. And there’s another element of the race this year: Teams can send the same chef in for multiple rounds, so if one member of the team is strongest at a couple of things, the team can rely on them to do more than one round. Kristen, Tom, and Gail spin this as a new bit of strategy, but… it’s just how the math works out. There are five rounds and three chefs per team. I liked in previous seasons when the mise-en-place race was more egalitarian and, frankly, frenetic, and everybody had to really choose and own the round they felt good about. Anyway, all the rounds focus on Carolina ingredients, and honestly, they seem pretty easy? The first round is seeding and hulling one pint of Scuppernong grapes, North Carolina’s state fruit; Jonathan copies Sieger’s method of deep-frying the grapes, shocking them in ice water, and then peeling them, and he beats Sieger. (Duyen needling Jonathan with “Want me to phone a friend? I can call Brandon?” made me gasp. Damn, Dwayne is mean!) Unfortunately for the Blue Team, that’s the only round they win. The Red Team then beats them on peeling and deveining 12 shrimp so there are, per Tom’s request, “no poopies please” (Duyen over Sherry), cracking and picking 1 oz. of pecans (Jonathan impressively cracks the shells by hand, but he should have called for a check earlier; Sieger takes it); and shucking and kerneling five ears of corn (Rhoda over Anthony). The Red Team, plus Laurence, then competes against each other to make a dish with these ingredients in only 20 minutes. It’s a very short amount of time! Here’s what they make:
- Rhoda: Warm corn, pecan, and shrimp salad with Scuppernong and tamarind vinaigrette.
- Laurence: Corn, pecan, and shrimp chow mein with Scuppernong pickles.
- Duyen: Butter-poached shrimp with pecan romesco and charred corn.
- Sieger: Ajo blanco (white gazpacho) with shrimp, corn, Scuppernongs, and toasted pecans.
Once again, Sieger’s dish looks like spa food, and it’s both warm (which ajo blanco shouldn’t be) and too garlicky (the judges can’t taste the Carolina ingredients). Also on the bottom is Laurence, whose chow mein was too sweet. Rhoda and Duyen are praised for their layers of flavor and cohesion, and Rhoda ekes out the win and her first cash prize of the competition. (Does that help her get her groove back? It does; more on that later.) Once the Quickfire is done, we suddenly enter into the world of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (complimentary) as seven boats zoom toward the dock. This is the conceit that was teased in the episode preview: The chefs will each be paired with an expert angler, and they’re going fishing.
The chefs’ challenge is straightforward: catch some fish from Lake Hartwell, which is full of various freshwater fish like bass, catfish, crappie, and walleye, and then make their best fish dish. They’re also competing for advantages tied to the smallest fish caught, the largest fish caught, and the most fish caught. They have an hour to fish, and they all speed away (including Kristen, Gail, and Tom, whose boat seems to circle between where the contestants are to encourage them). I’m not sure how Sieger’s fishing went, because we don’t really see much footage of him. Instead, we mostly see Duyen crushing it, in line with her self-described “very, very competitive” personality, and heckling the nearby Laurence. Anthony, Jonathan, Sieger, and Sherry also catch fish, but Rhoda and Laurence return empty-handed. (I want to know who made the signs that Gail and Kristen used to cheer on the chefs, like the one that said: “Hook It and Cook It.” Do we think Gail really got in there with some markers and posterboard?) Duyen wins for the smallest and most fish caught, and gets an extra $55 to shop with at Whole Foods, while Jonathan wins for the largest fish caught, and gets an extra 30 minutes of cooking time. And Rhoda and Laurence each get three spotted bass from their anglers, so they actually have fish to cook with for the Elimination challenge.
After a trip to Whole Foods, where Sieger asks Sherry what his Real Housewives of Greenville tagline would be (whether or not Sieger’s question was a producer-fed line, Sherry’s suggested “Dirtier than a dirty martini” was pretty funny) and “Mama Dwayne” uses some of her extra budget to buy ingredients for Rhoda and Sherry, the chefs have 90 minutes to cook at Abyss. Everyone runs into issues cleaning their fish: There are a ton of pinbones, and we see lots of agonized tweezing. It’s tough to clean, portion, and properly cook the fish in only 90 minutes, especially when all of these chefs are being so ambitious. Laurence is recreating the Cantonese steamed fish dish he cooked for his now-wife on their first date while they were international students in China. Sherry is mimicking the green curry that was the first Thai dish she ate after moving to the U.S. Jonathan, bless him, is making a fried-fish taco with a fresh tortilla. A taco! A single taco! The nerve of this guy. I’m sorry, but I love him. And Duyen … Duyen gets overconfident and puts her fish into her canh chua (Vietnamese sweet and sour soup) very late because she doesn’t think the fish needs that long to cook, and then the fish’s skin doesn’t easily come off when she tugs on it. That’s a bad sign. Here are the dishes served to the judges, including actress Danielle Brooks and chef James London, both from South Carolina:
- Duyen: Canh chua soup with pineapple, tomatoes, and bok choy.
- Rhoda: Pan-seared bass, fennel puree, artichoke barigoule (artichokes braised in white wine), and meunière sauce with mussels and clams.
- Sieger: Baked spotted bass with braised lentils, pepper sofrito, dates, and cardamom vinaigrette.
- Laurence: Cantonese steamed fish with ginger, scallions, fried leeks, rice, and bok choy.
- Anthony: Spotted bass with poblano egusi sauce (egusi seeds are dried melon seeds, and a West African ingredient used to thicken stews and sauces) and yassa.
- Sherry: Spotted bass with green curry and papaya salad, daikon, shiitake mushrooms, and cilantro.
- Jonathan: Beer-battered fish taco with avocado mousse, cabbage slaw, chipotle remoulade, and fresh-made tortilla.
A lot of the dishes are great: Rhoda’s dish is praised as technically perfect and beautifully classic. (Meaning: super French.) Laurence’s “bussin’” dish makes Danielle dance. Tom praises Anthony’s dish as focused and “very, very good.” And Jonathan’s fried-fish taco might seem simple at first, but it’s a huge hit. Jonathan used his extra 30 minutes to test exactly how long to deep fry his fish, and the dish is praised for its confidence and layers of flavor. I would like 15 of them delivered to me, please. In the middle is Sherry, whose fish was cooked well, but she’s pinged for there being too much curry sauce and too many vegetables in her dish. (A criticism I don’t understand at all — she made a curry! An inherently liquid-y and vegetable-y dish!) There are also two clear failures. The still-attached skin on Duyen’s fish was a sign that it didn’t poach correctly in her soup — no one’s fish is done all the way through, and Tom can’t even cut into his. The judges all love the flavor of her broth, but this is a fish challenge, and the fish isn’t good. Similarly unimpressive, if not technically incorrect, is Sieger’s dish. He cooked his fish under the salamander, and his filets don’t have much flavor; in contrast, his lentils have too much. The dish is both sweet and astringent, and the judges think the dish needed a sauce to bring everything together.
At Judges’ Table, Sherry is in neither the high nor the low group, and you can tell she’s frustrated; earlier in the episode, she complained about not understanding what the judges want from her that she’s not giving. Rhoda, Anthony, Jonathan, and Laurence are all in the top, and all receive very nice compliments, but then Laurence’s dish is described as “a big slap in the face of flavor,” and yeah, game over. He wins his second Elimination challenge in a row (and fourth of 10 overall). Then Duyen and Sieger are called forward. After presenting his dish, Sieger had complained that the judges think everything he cooks “is too sweet” (I don’t really remember this being a recurring criticism, but sure), and sure enough, the judges ask about his lentils. He says he wanted to mimic the sweetness of the fish, which the judges sort of shrug at. And then, when the judges ask why he didn’t think of a component to bridge the gap between the fish and the lentils, Sieger says, “I thought the spoon would do that.” Folks, I gasped. “I thought the spoon would do that”? Simultaneously bars, and the most snide a contestant has been to the judges in a while. Gail calls him “sassy” in a very unimpressed voice, and I wish we had seen more of the judges’ reactions. Was Tom seething on the inside? I am assuming so!
Given that questioning, I thought it would be Sieger going home. He’s been mid for a while, and his fish — while cooked — didn’t have much flavor. Kristen says it “got completely lost” on the plate. But Duyen’s mistake is too insurmountable. While the judges loved her broth, which they describe as harmonious, her fish “wasn’t close,” Tom says. Its level of rawness sends her home, and Duyen looks a little bit devastated, a little bit furious when Kristen announces her name. Her “mm-hmm” over and over as she walks out is a real tell, and I feel for her. Two weeks in a row where it felt like the wrong person went home (three, if you think executive chef Sieger, with his two eh dishes and spotty server training, should have gone home over Brandon, with the one failed dessert, for Restaurant Wars). Who’s next?
• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: Laurence, Sherry, and Jonathan’s Elimination dishes. Again, I beg: back up the truck of fried-fish tacos directly into my kitchen.
• Continuing the “Sherry might be over it” theme, in the preview for next week’s episode, it seems like one of Sherry’s dishes is critiqued, and she’s not happy about it. Her “I know it’s fucking good” is pretty declarative.
• I didn’t always love Duyen’s bullying, but I will miss her brusque humor; the moment in this episode when she thinks the chefs are going to get machetes, and is really excited about it, was great.
• Kristen saying of Tom’s laidback fishing pose on the boat during the Quickfire, “Dad’s going fishing.” This is why she’s a reality mastermind.
• Anthony and his little sister being into Dragonball Z is peak nerdy millennial representation, and I adore it. I also liked Anthony and Jonathan’s vibe in the kitchen this episode, with Anthony telling Jonathan that he shouldn’t be worried just because Sherry named her fish “John” before killing it for the Elimination challenge. It seemed like they bonded a bit during last week’s dinner-party challenge, and that’s cute.
