‘MasterChef’ USA season 4 review: The calamari catastrophe

There are tough challenges on “MasterChef,” and then there is the restaurant face-off that always causes stress. We don’t necessarily like seeing this show become “Hell’s Kitchen” for a week, mostly because these people are not necessarily actually trying to face off in order to be the next big chef at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. They are just trying to honor their own dreams, and that may not even involve them cooking on a line.

But this cook-off still happened, and we had one of the biggest choke jobs in the history of the show thanks to James, Krissi, and Bri. Despite the three getting a huge lead on appetizers, they crashed and burned from there on out and allowed Jessie, Luca, and Natasha to creep in there and take the cake. It’s interesting how Natasha has somewhat turned things around; we found her insufferable earlier this season, but now, she has actually become one of the more interesting competitors at this point.

After this terrible restaurant result, it was off to the ever-familiar pressure test, where they had to cook something that is basically the ultimate appetizer in fried calamari with marinara sauce. It’s deceptively simple, given that it is way harder to make this turn out successful than you would first think.

The sad news here is that we ended up losing Bri … again. She was already gone from this competition once, but we have to report now that she is once again eliminated after this didn’t turn out the way she wanted. It was a pretty close match, though, and at this point we’re not really sure who the favorite is to win.

Do you think that the judges made the right choice this week? If you want to read some more “MasterChef” news, including some exclusive interviews with the cast, just be sure to check out the link here.

Photo: Fox