‘Top Chef Masters: Battle of the Sous Chefs’ review: The path to redemption

In this week’s edition of “Top Chef Masters: Battle of the Sous Chefs,” what we had here was actually a pretty novel idea for a competition: Force these sous chefs to admit to their greatest mistakes ever, and then try to tackle these mistakes again with dishes that impressed on just about every front.

This is where this idea started to go off the rails: Why only tell us about two of the stories? We don’t know why most of these people cooked what they did, and we have a hard time really having fun with the dishes that they made here. What was nice was that we at least got to see a greater variety of food shown off this week, everything from Chinese cuisine to ravioli to roasted chicken. We don’t quite know how Hugh Acheson really prepares his palette for all of this every week.

What happened from here was at least a nice showcase of something being done well that rarely is on this franchise: Risotto. We don’t know how he managed it, but Douglas Keane managed to find a diamond in his replacement from Drew Glassell in Paul Winberry Jr. This dish was enough to earn him some sort of advantage in this coming episode, which Douglas could use even further to progress himself on the show. He’s already in our mind one of the favorites to win.

Meanwhile, Ted Hopson felt the pain of defeat yet again, which means more bad news for Sang Yoon after he had a difficult performance in the last elimination challenge. Jorel Pierce gave a similar problem to Jennifer Jasinski, just one week after the two teamed up to get her back in the competition again.

At least the nice thing about “Top Chef Masters” and this web series is that all of the contestants are talented and also nice people. Therefore, it’s hard to be too particularly upset about any of them going far and winning.

If you want to read some more news related to the show, just be sure to head on over to the link here.

Photo: Bravo