Classin' it up with Top Chef

Top Chef is in Vegas! And there's show-girls! And they're wearing a combined 180 ft of red feathers! And they're doing that thing where they stand there with their soulless smiles and kinda bounce up and down in time with each other... but there's no music. I can't find them arousing. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to, but I can't get past the... surrealness? surreality? I can't get past how surreal it is to have an entire chorus line standing in the kitchen wearing all those red feathers, and bouncing.
Top Chef starts the season off on the surreal foot. I have to assume this is not the usual. I'm watching my first ever season of Top Chef at behest of the girlfriend, who swears I'll like it... I think she's trying to class me up by getting me away from FOX reality shows. I also think it's working.
Within the first 10 minutes Top Chef was able to separate the contestants I can give funny names to -and therefore remember, and the contestants I don't care about. Also, most of these chefs have won an award of some sort, or studied under someone special. I found it interesting that the first contestant they showed received the James Beard award, and has a giant beard. I'm going to call him Beard-O. One of the interesting facts about Beard-O is that he passed up a full scholarship to MIT in order to go to cooking school because the advancing our species means nothing to him. He just wants to heat things up and watch people eat them. Also, he has a huge beard.
Aside from Beard-O, there's Frenchie-Red-Kerchief -He was originally just Frenchie, but then he showed up at the house wearing all white with a red handkerchief tied around his neck boy scout style and a red belt - now he's Frenchie-Red-Kerchief. There's also Neck Tattoo, Gay Chef, Ed Hardy -Ed Hardy and Gay Chef may be the same person... I'm not sure who Gay Chef is, actually... I just know that he's "the only chef here with a boyfriend... a same sex boyfriend". Clearly I was looking away from the TV when he said that. If he's not Ed Hardy, then I'm not sure he deserves a nickname. I'll pay more attention next episode. We've also got Hector (that's actually his name, he's a giant from Puerto Rico. He doesn't need a nick name, and I'm afraid to give him one), Haitian Lavell (He reminds me of the comedian Lavell Crawford for some reason), Evil Twin and Boring Twin (Boring Twin benefits from Evil Twin's presence, without him he'd be just a guy), and Fat Kid.
So there's a lot of them, and I don't have the time or attention span to remember them all. Also, it's a week until the next episode, so I reserve the right to change nicknames, forget who people are, or completely miss the next episode at my discretion.
The girlfriend explained to me -then the TV reiterated- that they do it like this; There's a rapid fire challenge, which results in someone winning immunity from elimination. Then there's the bigger elimination challenge from which elimination is judged. Seems simple enough. Also, this week involves Wolfgang Puck, who is interesting in his own right, but didn't call nearly enough people "Fat Cow" for my taste.
The rapid fire challenge this week was a relay- a some-french-word relay. They split the 17 contestants into groups of four... Wait! 4 doesn't divide 17 evenly! What gives?! Well, they pass around a hat with poker chips in it... there's five colors of chips, 4 each of the colors I don't remember -except green, because Haitian Lavell got green and was real excited, but I can't understand anything he says, so I don't know why. One of the chips was gold, and gave the receiver instant immunity. That chip was selected by an older woman who I find annoying and have no desire to give a nickname to. It was then revealed that the winner of the French-word relay would not only win immunity, but also win $15,000. Because the show strives to be fair (I think.. maybe that has nothing to do with it), they gave the old lady with the gold coin a chance to relinquish her immunity for a 1 in 16 shot at $15,000 and a 1 in 16 shot at going home. She didn't like those odds. I think it was Ed Hardy that summed up her obvious lack of confidence by saying; "One less old lady for me to worry about". Thank you Ed Hardy.
The Rapid fire French-word relay challenge is three seafood preparation challenges followed by a steak preparation, because -clearly- their list of "Things in the ocean that can be prepared as food" only had three items on it. I
Station 1 was clam shucking. Station 1 separated the four teams into two groups; teams competing to win and teams that wouldn't finish station 1. My favorite moment of station 1- As the teams were deciding who would work what station, a chef I didn't bother to remember -who had been assigned clam shucking- said to her teammates "Is shucking a clam just like shucking an oyster?" Teammates: "Not at all"... nothing else was said. Guess which group that team ended up in. Also, neck tattoo cut the crap out of her fingers... I don't know what else happened with that, though. There was one quick shot of her bloody fingers, then no mention of it from there. Maybe they gave her a glove, or maybe she has regenerative powers.
Nothing exciting happened in station 2, I think it was shrimp peeling. Nothing really exciting happened in station 3 either -It was Lobster preparation. Frenchie-Red-Kerchief was very good at it, but I don't care. Lastly, station 4 wast the steak preparation station (hehe). There was a mad dash to prepare the rib-eye steaks (I think they were rib-eye... maybe they weren't). I believe Hector was involved. I picture him smoking a cigar while he's doing it, though, so maybe I'm making it up.
Once the French word relay was done, they had to pick one of the four members of the wining team. So each of the members had 30 minutes to prepare a dish using the ingredient they had prepared in the French word relay. The clam lady won, but I didn't care. Clam lady is insufferable, but will probably be one of the finalists. Still I'm not into her enough to give her a nickname. So there that is.
The food challenge theme (there has to be restrictions to the food challenge, or at least the appearance of restrictions) was "Vices", because they're in Las Vegas, our country's capitol of hedonism. When the girlfriend and I realized that this was the theme, we both immediately saw the huge obvious flaw; the Chefs could just say something like "My vice is food" or something else that didn't limit them in any way. Oddly enough, non of them did this, though a few chefs missed the meaning of "vice"... some of them went instead with "personality flaw"... some -OK Haitian Lavell went with "Harrowing story of defecting to America on a raft" but he gets a pass from me (and apparently the judges, though the man-host did twice point out that he wasn't "sure how that's a vice) because I can't understand what he's saying, and he defected on a raft! One of the boring chefs went the Michael Scott route with "My vice is that I'm too complicated"... I'm not sure how that's a vice or a flaw, but thanks to the Girlfriend for the kick-ass Office parallel.
Finally they chose the four best and four worst dishes.
The four best; Beard-O: Procrastination, Ed Hardy: Don't remember, Clam-lady: Also Don't remember. I'm pretty sure Haitian Lavell was there. Doesn't matter. Beard-O won nothing. At least nothing that I saw. He get's a D- in "understanding what 'vice' means." But I like Beard-O, so congrats to him for having the best "vice" dish, receiving the fewest scathing comments from Wolfgang Puck and "winning".
The four worst were Hector -who was there because he deep-fried his steak, which I guess is a cultural thing- Complicated Woman, Neck Tattoo, and a woman with a lot of mouth piercings (I think I'll grow to like her enough to give her a nickname, but it hasn't happened yet). Ultimately, it came down to Neck Tattoo and Complicated Woman and they both gave Terrible long (I know, who am I to talk?) rambling defenses of their food. Ultimately neck tattoo left. And not a moment too soon! She had those ear-ring things, you know, where they keep putting bigger and bigger rings in their earlobes and stretch them way out? Nothing makes me feel like I'm old and un-hip more than ear-rings, they freak me out. I mean, how do you recover from them?! Your ear lobes don't go back to their original size! Can you do reconstructive surgery on an ear-lobe? Do we have any examples of what happens when ear-ring people hit middle-age?! Are they all just assuming they won't make it past 30?!
OK, this blog is at approximately 38,000 words. Most of them don't matter -Who am I kidding? None of them matter.