‘Top Chef: Boston’ premiere review: Were you down for the new twist?
Another season of “Top Chef” is upon us, which is personally a cause for great celebration. We in a way dislike most of the other competitions that take place across the board, since it feels almost like they dilute the original brand. To us, this show is about many talented people from different parts of the country converging to show off their skill and creativity, with one person then going on to chef superstardom.
Oh, and sometimes there are crazy twists.
When we first heard about the new Sudden Death Quickfire, which could send a chef home immediately after the challenge, we were not particularly thrilled. However, we’re now so much more cool with it now that we understand the way it seems to work. The loser of the Quickfire gets to challenge someone else for a duel, and if they manage to come out on top, they stay. If not, they go home. There’s no penalty for the other chef, and the Quickfire loser gets immediately a shot at redemption.
So do we feel bad for George Pagonis? Slightly, but he sank his own ship in a way by struggling during the prep portion of the Quickfire, and then choosing an opponent in Gregory Gourdet based on feeling slighted earlier, and not based on skill. Gregory proved himself to be a beast tonight, and George is going already despite his Mike Isabella connections.
George was in the top three for the later challenge, which was an inspired cook-off for a food show in Boston. Everyone was tasked with creating an evolved version of the first food they learned to cook, which is something that we feel really works well for the early going. It tells us so much about the contenders, and this season, that includes them really liking fried chicken.
The winner of the challenge in Mei Lin created something in comgee that can be very simple, but she added so many flavor-layers to it to pack a serious punch. Meanwhile, we were worried for Katsuji Tanabe (a great character already) for his bizarre quesadilla, mostly because he had so many different ingredients that it was just a hot mess in the end.
Luckily for him, someone else went home in Michael Patlazhan for a fishy corn soup. Maybe his food really was the worst, since we cannot say from the sidelines. All we know is that he definitely did bring a bizarre sort of arrogance to the table when talking about his food, almost like Tom Colicchio didn’t understand his technique and had a bad palette. If he went home, that means all four judges had bad palettes! Maybe he’s a great chef, but his attitude was off-putting and that makes it hard to be too particularly sad he is gone. We prefer our chefs with a little humility.
Overall, a very solid premiere for the 12th season of the show. The twist worked better than we thought that it would, and while there were not enormous shocks, the presence of Richard Blais as judge and some great cuisine was enough to keep us excited for the rest of the season. Grade: B+.
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