Top Chef Season Five - Episode 7
“Focus Group”: Toby Young Replaces Gail Simmons as a Judge
Jan 10, 2009 Kimberly Kunaniec
After the previous episode of Top Chef: New York, “12 Days of Christmas,” the chefs awaken with a variety of emotions. The three contestants that had been on the bottom all know that they dodged a bullet by not being eliminated. Hosea Rosenberg is thrilled, however, with his second win in a row.
Quickfire Challenge
The chefs enter the Top Chef kitchen and are greeted by host Padma Lakshmi and guest judge Jean-Christophe Novelli, a renowned French chef who is going to have his own show on Bravo called Chef Academy. The chefs quickly guess that they will be competing in a dessert challenge. However, there is a twist. Padma and Jean-Christophe take all the sugar with them when they leave the kitchen.
Ariane Duarte, Carla Hall, and Jamie Lauren are called out as the bottom three, though none of them is particularly surprised. Jeff McInnis, Leah Cohen, and Radhika Desai are named the top three, and Jean-Christophe Novelli names Radhika as the winner of immunity for this round.
Elimination Challenge
Padma tells the chefs that they have the rest of the day to relax and will find out about their challenge later. Head judge Tom Colicchio heads to the Top Chef New York apartments to greet the chefs. He tells them that they will be split into two groups and will prepare family-style dishes for a panel of judges, who will not know which chef made which dish. Everything else is up to them, as the judges want the chefs to put their best foot forward for new judge Toby Young. Radhika gets to choose which group she wants to cook with because she won the Quickfire Challenge. The chefs are also told that two of them will be eliminated this round.
The chefs have $100 and thirty minutes to shop for a meal to feed ten people. They are not told who the remaining diners will be. Each group will have two hours to cook their meal at the Astor Center in Manhattan. Group A heads to the kitchen to cook their meal. Group B faces a big surprise when they arrive at the venue -- they will be at the table with the judges. What they don’t know is that Group A is watching their commentary on a monitor in the kitchen. The judges taste all the dishes and the teams switch places. Toby Young lives up to his reputation and has scathing comments for many of the dishes.
Judge’s Table
Padma comes to the stew room and asks for the chefs who prepared the scallops with fennel (Jamie), the skate dish (Ariane) and the Duck Dish (Stefan Richter). Jamie, the chef at Absinthe restaurant in San Francisco, is named the winner. She has a big reaction to the news, because she has been in the top three many times but had not yet won an Elimination or Quickfire Challenge.
After Jamie is named the winner, they return to the stew room and ask Carla, Eugene Villiatora and Melissa Harrison to face the judges. All three of them are called out on their dishes for either execution or conception. Eventually, Carla is chosen to stay while Eugene and Melissa are asked to pack their knives and go.
Stay tuned for the next episode of Bravo’s hit reality series, Top Chef: New York. where Season Three winner Hung Huynh is the guest judge for the Quickfire Challenge. Episodes air on Wednesday nights at 10 PM. Visit the Top Chef: New York Page for cast profiles, episode summaries, and more.
Fabio claims this is
|
Honey replaced sugar in this Quickfire Challenge
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Film & TV
Latest Articles