‘Top Chef: Seattle’ review: Silence is not always golden

It’s interesting to watch season after season of “Top Chef,” but yet see chefs continuing to make a variety of the same sort of mistake that we have seen on this show time and time again.

The biggest one? If you are in some sort of team challenge, you have to communicate with the person that you are working with! On this particular occasion in Seattle, this meant that Josh and John, who were working together for the first time since getting into a massive shouting match last week, struggled to figure anything out. They were so worried about angering each other that they didn’t point out any of their flaws during the elimination challenge, which was really a test of using some local (and rather unusual) ingredients from the market in new and interesting ways.

We single out these two for their communication problem, but they were far from the only people with issues. As a matter of fact, pretty much everyone across the board was pretty awful this time around, with the meal as a whole being so bad that Padma Lakshmi apologize to the artisans who created the primary ingredients used in the dishes. Tom Colicchio took the $10,000 prize off the table, and even Bart & Sheldon (who went into this challenge with immunity from the breakfast-themed quickfire) were feeling rather miserable. The nail in the coffin was simple this: two chefs were going to leave as a result of this failure, and the judges just had to figure out who.

Overall, we didn’t really like the way that this episode was structured: we really didn’t get to see enough of the contestants, and it felt so obvious that Josh and John were leaving that even if they stayed, the eliminated team was done a disservice over a general lack of air time. CJ and Tyler were the two that did go home, and here was what the main problem with them was: Tyler didn’t really have the drive to win he needed, and CJ came up with some sort of bright idea that making a burger would be a great way to highlight a pickle.

What did you think about this episode as a whole, and did the right people go home to you? Be sure to share your thoughts below, and you can check out more news from this season here.

Photo: Bravo