‘Top Chef: California’ episode 3 review: The exit of an early favorite
“Top Chef” continues to mess with us time and time again when it comes to its edit. There are times when we feel almost as though it intentionally works overtime to throw us off, and they did just that with the third episode of their “California” season Wednesday.
Basically, the show went a long ways out of their way to convince us that Frances was someone destined to stay in the competition for a long time. While she had never won an Elimination Challenge, we didn’t blame her for the vegan food disaster last week. Also, she received a ton of air time and was presented as this likable underdog with an inspiring story as a former addict who had gotten her life back together. Little did we know that a surf ‘n turf challenge in Santa Barbara would be what did her in.
We feel like there’s also another developing story in this season that is about Angelina staying in the competition almost as much as the people leaving. Angelina’s got a lot of guts for appearing on this show, but it feels like she needed a few more years under her belt. She’s one of the youngest people in the competition, and this was her second time in three episodes being at the bottom. Also, she lost the Sudden Death Quickfire against Giselle, and only stayed because Giselle had challenged her, knowing that she was a weaker chef. We think that Frances could beat her more often than not, but just had a bad day.
While we’ve talked about Angelina as someone on borrowed time, let’s talk about the other youngest chef in the contest in Kwame! He’s really rising to the occasion now after winning the surf ‘n turn challenge, and he single-handedly saved his entire team on this past episode. This guy is showing a lot of skills in a very short amount of time, but they have all been so far rather impressive! Let’s see if he keeps it up.
As a whole, we found this episode to be a little bit of a mixed bag. We really love the city of Santa Barbara as much as the next person, but this entire hour felt like a lengthy advertisement for all the great stuff they have to eat. We’d much prefer something a little more organic and a little less upfront, since neither the quickfire (sea urchin based) nor the elimination challenge brought anything new to the table. The culinary drama saves it only slightly. Grade: B-.
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