True Colors
Season 23
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
2 stars
**
Photo: Paul Cheney/Bravo
Let’s start at the end of “True Colors.” I say this not in a judgmental way, but in a based-on-the-evidence way: Nana’s elimination seemed like it was only a matter of time. She hasn’t yet served a dish that really knocked a significant number of judges off their feet. She’s had consistent problems with execution and time management. I think that once the judges realized the Elimination challenge was consistently kicking her ass, they didn’t anticipate her suddenly getting better at this. When Gail said at judging, “She’s not locking in to where she needs to be,” that felt like Nana’s kiss of death right there. Someone would have had to do way, way worse than Nana — somehow serve less food than she did — to go home instead of her, and that’s not what happened.
Now, the judges certainly seemed to believe that the vast majority of the contestants failed this Elimination challenge, and I don’t really agree, hence my low rating for this episode. I’m not entirely sure what the judges thought they were going to get, but everyone at that judging table felt weirdly haughty, even nasty, in “True Colors.” Were the judges really expecting neon blue, hot pink, or royal purple food to be served to them? Folks, we have my beloved Hook fantasy feast sequence for that. Be a little realistic here with the ingredients you’ve provided. Use your imagination or something, I don’t know, but I think the contestants got beaten down this episode when they didn’t really deserve it.
Let’s start at the Quickfire. The legendary Emeril Lagasse stops by, and the contestants have to transform livermush, the unappetizing-sounding Carolina specialty, into a dish that most people would actually like to eat. I’m from Maryland, so like Anthony, I basically recognized this as a scrapple-style processed-meat product, and livermush — by North Carolina law! — has to have at least 30 percent pig liver among its other meatscraps and cornmeal binder. There are some quibbles about the smell, and Nana, Duyen, and Rhoda seem to hate the stuff. But broadly, people are more unfamiliar than grossed out, and there is a lot of nibbling on the chunky grey meat block as the contestants get going with their 30 minutes of cooktime to give livermush, as Kristen says, “a little PR love.” Do we think Sieger has actually eaten cat food? Please discuss in the comments.
People struggle early. Jennifer, dealing with lingering pain from a right shoulder injury a couple of weeks before filming began, leaves to get checked out. Nana talks a big game about how other people are making “obvious” dishes, but then she overwhips her livermush whipped cream and ends up with butter. Laurence won the first two Quickfire challenges and is battling some nerves. A lot of people are making eggs, and a lot of people are frying the livermush to crisp it up. Who’s successful? Here are the dishes.
Duyen: Livermush and grilled chicken banh mi with pickled carrots.
Nana: Livermush French toast and maple syrup.
Anthony: Livermush pâté with tomatoes, cayenne, and livermush croutons.
Justin: Brown butter hollandaise, cornmeal fried livermush, roasted grapes.
Jonathan: Livermush Benedict.
Sherry: Livermush foie gras with potatoes and pickled sunchokes.
Laurence: Cantonese steamed egg with livermush and marinated tomatoes.
Sieger: Piccalilli beurre blanc with seared livermush (The Great British Baking Show fans, you might remember piccalilli from “Pastry Week” last season).
Oscar: “Livermushroom” toast with parmesan whipped cream.
Brandon: Arpège egg with livermush (inspired by Chef Alain Passard’s dish from his Paris restaurant Arpège).
Brittany: Crispy livermush, pâté, grape mostarda.
Rhoda: Pork and livermush meatballs inspired by Spanish albóndigas, peaches, Marsala Dijon sauce.
In the bottom are Nana, who tried and failed to coat her French toast in livermush (her dish didn’t taste enough like it); Laurence (whose steamed egg was too wet); and Brittany (whose dish was too dry and too familiar). It’s surprising to see Laurence down there, but Nana and Brittany have both been struggling — the former with finishing in time and the latter with delivering exciting dishes. Brittany’s food seems serviceable but not very personally inspired, and given how much Top Chef has been leaning lately on tell us your story, TELL US YOUR STORY, judging, I get why she’s having a hard time. Meanwhile, on the top are Duyen, whose banh mi, inspired by her Vietnamese heritage, was excellent; Anthony, whose livermush croutons Emeril adored; and Rhoda, whose meatballs smartly took advantage of the cornmeal binder in the livermush. It’s nice that Anthony, who has been a little inconspicuous so far, ends up with the win and $10,000 in cash, but Rhoda’s high placement again suggests she’s the season’s most dangerous competitor. (… For now.)
Elimination time! Kristen and Emeril announce the challenge by dropping a bunch of dyed sheets of cloth from the ceiling behind the contestants, and it’s a little jarring, and I do not need jump scares on Top Chef, thank you. To honor the Carolinas’ textile boom, the contestants will have to use natural food dyes to create a dish with two naturally dyed elements. They have access to a table full of natural dyes, like turmeric, hibiscus flowers, chlorophyll, saffron, freeze-dried fruits, and charcoal, but when Emeril and Kristen list the foods that reflect what they’re looking for, they mention very concentrated-in-color items — rainbow bagels, tricolor pasta. I’m sorry, but what? Take a look at that subtly hued fabric and tell me how the contestants are supposed to get the neon shades of rainbow bagels out of those natural dyes. There’s incongruity here from the jump, with the judges expecting that the contestants will be able to work Wonka-style dayglow miracles, and that doesn’t seem fair. I think Kristen and Emeril, and then Tom and Emeril during their kitchen pop-in, really should have assured the contestants that their food wouldn’t be considered childish or goofy if they went in super-colorful directions. That felt like a subconscious fear from the contestants, as if everyone was afraid to go too bold and be labeled juvenile, and I don’t think the judges encouraged them enough.
At least the contestants get a good amount of time — two hours to prep that night, then another hour the next day — and Jennifer comes back from urgent care with news that nothing is broken, but she probably has a pinched nerve. She’s choosing to cook through the pain, and I’m surprised more people, besides Jennifer, Laurence, and Brandon, didn’t decide to make dough because it can carry so much color. A lot of the contestants just seem to be going with an “I’ll put some natural food dye in a white-colored ingredient and hope it turns out okay” approach, and it’s a little jarring to see a group that last week were so intentional about integrating peppers into every aspect of their dishes now be so inconsistent. I also wonder why more chefs didn’t use other ingredients to impart color into their dishes, like tea leaves, tomato paste, or fresh peas. Two things can be true at the same time: The judges’ expectations could have been too high, and the contestants were so focused on using two dyes from the table that they lost sight of pushing themselves.
Sigh, okay, let’s talk about Nana. Some other chefs have issues: Laurence swaps out cherry juice for dehydrated strawberries in a redo of one batch of bao dough; Jennifer can’t make her milkbread dough the first day because her arm is in too much pain. But Nana’s lagging furthest behind. She’s one of the first two chefs serving her food, and she’s cooking a chicken galantine stuffed with crab. She admits she’s “not good with time management,” so her plan is to prep everything the first day so on the day of service, she’ll be “home free.” But that’s not how things go. She overstuffed the chicken when rolling it, so when she goes to cook it the next day, the roll hasn’t cohered. She has to unroll it, take some filling out, then reroll it and somehow get it cooked through, rested, portioned, and plated in an hour. It’s making me anxious to even type this out. Time management is an important skill, but no matter how skilled you are, you can’t create more time, and that’s what Nana needed. The episode’s editing implies that she takes the chicken out of the oven with only 30 seconds remaining, and there’s no way to cut and plate 10 or so slices of chicken in that time. She only gets a blob of onion puree on each plate — no one gets the chicken — and she screams in agony again in the kitchen when time runs out, and it’s really upsetting to watch how disappointed she is in herself. Here are all the dishes.
Brandon: Deconstructed lasagna Bolognese with marbled pasta, whipped ricotta, and an herb olive oil.
Nana: Yassa onion puree (chicken galantine not served).
Jennifer: Milk bread bun stuffed with pickled shrimp, served with red eye gravy.
Anthony: Mole negro, mole rojo, and mole verde with chicken.
Laurence: Flight of three bao: yellow chili pork, green curry beef, strawberry matcha.
Brittany: Pan-seared scallops with broccoli and chlorophyll puree, daikon, carrot and saffron broth.
Justin: Lamb and clams with dyed vegetables.
Sherry: Charcoal-brined pork chop with rainbow spätzle, red cabbage, kumquat and sourdough vinaigrette.
Jonathan: Cochinita pibil (slow-roasted pork), jalapeno cilantro crema, turmeric rice, hibiscus pickled onion, habanero salad, and guajillo oil.
Sieger: Vadouvan-poached scallop, braised daikon, braised calamari with squid ink and onion soubise.
Oscar: Tricolor red snapper, corn nuts, and leche de tigre.
Rhoda: Mussels in escabeche with marbled potatoes, mojo rojo, and mojo verde.
Duyen: Brioche-stuffed roasted chicken with preserved lemon tagine and charcoal parsnip puree.
I cannot emphasize this enough: The judges are really, really hard on the chefs, with increasingly shocked reactions and flabbergasted — even mean — comments from Tom, Gail, Kristen, and the guest judges. One of the guest judges genuinely complains that no one gave them blue rice. It’s almost farcical? They really thought they were going to get a Crayola box of dishes, and there’s no discussion that maybe they were being unreasonable, or maybe the judges understood the challenge differently from the contestants. There’s a lot of grumbling from the judges about whether the chefs transformed the ingredients, but was transformation really part of the challenge? Wasn’t it just … dye some stuff and feed it to the judges and make it taste good? This leads to a really unprecedented Judges’ Table where Anthony, Laurence, and Brandon are congratulated for having the top dishes in both flavor and color, but then everyone else gets called forward as being on the bottom.
Judges’ Table is actually pretty short, because Tom puts all of the other 10 contestants on the spot and asks if any of them were proud of or want to defend their dishes. Never do this! Never admit anything! Tom is going to tear you apart! He calls Sherry’s pork “flaccid” and its accompaniments “wacky.” He says Oscar’s knife cuts were “not precise at all.” There’s very little feedback, though, because Kristen doesn’t even go through the motions of saying three people are at the bottom. (Who do we think would have ended up there? I’m thinking Brittany and, shockingly, Rhoda, whose dish the judges describe as funky and murky.) Kristen simply says that Nana’s dish was “a shame” and that she’s eliminated because she only got one dyed element on the plate. Now, this is interesting, because Top Chef doesn’t always take a hard line on whether people actually completed the challenge. Sometimes there’s squishiness about what fulfilling the brief really means. I think that Nana’s lackluster Quickfire, though, and her pattern of struggling with Eliminations added up to her expulsion. She’ll be one of the first competitors on Last Chance Kitchen, but she’ll miss season 22 winner Tristan Epps and what looks like a soul-food challenge next week. Sieger, you know better than to serve okra to Tom, don’t you? Don’t you???
• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: Give me Jonathan’s deconstructed lasagna, Jennifer’s shrimp milk bun, Laurence’s bao flight, and Brandon’s pork. I also am contractually obligated to eat every single banh mi I ever see, so send over Duyen’s.
• Last Chance Kitchen premieres next week, on March 30. Fingers crossed we won’t have that “Here’s a ringer who has to fight their way all through LCK, against the already-eliminated chefs,” format again.
• Unfortunately, some of the grey-colored food made me think of how fashion bloggers, authors, and cultural commentators Tom and Lorenzo describe dreary-shaded dresses as looking like dirty dishwater and, well, yeah, that’s what Duyen’s charcoal-dyed parsnip puree looked like.
• I get a pinched nerve in my right arm from resting my elbow weird when typing too much, and it’s absolute hell. Hoping Jennifer recovers soon. I also have to admit Justin endeared himself to me this episode by admitting “I did a lot of drugs in art school” and calling Jennifer “Pickle,” which is a cute nickname.
• Also endearing: Laurence’s mom being in a Chinese rock band. If you want a TV show along those lines and loved We Are Lady Parts, watch Riot Women on BritBox. It’s great, it has Lorraine Ashbourne, what else do you need?
• Also also endearing: Oscar saying “This is how gangs start, I think,” about himself, Rhoda, Sieger, and Brittany sitting around in the Top Chef apartment, wearing matching sweatsuits and putting on face masks. Someone get this man a skincare campaign and some free products.
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