Tag: Laurine

Top Chef Las Vegas: restaurant wars return

I confess I’ve only been watching Bravo’s “Top Chef” for one-plus seasons now, but I’ve become hooked in a hurry. So this was just my second time experiencing “restaurant wars,” when they break up the final eight contestants into two teams and have them run an actual restaurant for the night.

But first, the episode began with a Quick Fire challenge, and the guest judge this week was Rick Moonen, who owns a sustainable seafood restaurant in Vegas. They would have a tag team cookoff, in which each chef had 10 minutes out of 40 to complete a dish, but while one chef was working the others were blindfolded. Man, that looked HARD. They drew knives and Jennifer and Michael V. had to choose teams…Jen chose Kris Kringle (Kevin), Mike Isabella and Laurine, deciding to let the brothers be on the same team and duke it out, literally. So Michael had Brian, Eli and Robin.

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Top Chef Las Vegas: can we fast forward?

Last night’s “Top Chef Las Vegas” on Bravo began with Eli talking about how he, at 25, still lives with his parents–and he’s kind of proud of it. Okay. Then they showed he and Robin bickering in the kitchen of the house they are all living at, and Eli telling Robin “You’re not my mom!” Nice. Anyway, it seems like Robin, who is 15-20 years older than most of the other chefs, is a bit out of place here. She’s also clearly not as talented.

The quick fire challenge featured chef Charlie Palmer, who the brothers Voltaggio have both worked for, as the guest judge. The challenge was to create a dish paired with snack food, namely the new Alexia snacks (which are awesome, by the way)….Palmer judged each one and his least favorites were Robin’s jalapeno and sweet corn custard, Ash’s chilled cucumber soup and barbecue snacks, and Jennifer’s pork chops, which dried out significantly before Palmer tasted them.

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Top Chef Las Vegas: Ben Folds can’t cook shrimp

Last night’s “Top Chef Las Vegas” on Bravo returned after a two-week absence, and admittedly I needed those “previously on…” highlights to catch up myself. Oh yeah, Ron was sent home last time….thankfully, because I couldn’t understand much of what that guy was saying.

Anyway, this episode began with The Food Network’s Tyler Florence as a guest judge, but I don’t think they mentioned Food Network by name. A bit petty, no? Or maybe a legality. Anyway, the quick fire challenge was in the vein of cookstr.com, where each contestant had to use three background descriptions to create a meal in 30 minutes. They used a slot machine to choose mood, flavor profile and type of cuisine–for example, romantic/salty/Asian. Florence would be the judge of each dish. Note: one of the flavor profiles was umami, a newer description to the palate world that I don’t fully comprehend, but it’s definitely a buzzword in the cooking industry–I think it means like tangy or something.

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