Top Chef Recap: Raising the Bar Snacks

Gather around the cheese wheel! In its second episode, Top Chef: Wisconsin is settling into its groove. After a topsy-turvy first week of immunity updates and hectic visuals, Top Chef becomes a more recognizable version of itself in “Living the High Life.” We get a Quickfire, we get a team elimination challenge, and we get a corporate sponsor implicitly telling Top Chef viewers to buy their product. All familiar things, and another one: It seems like the wrong person went home, no?

In last week’s premiere, we got a glimpse of Kristin Kish’s hosting style. She’s going to be casual, she’s going to be encouraging, and she’s going to lean on her history as a Top Chef winner who came through Last Chance Kitchen. All of that comes through again this week as Kristin and Top Chef: Colorado winner Joe Flamm emphasize their shared LCK history (Flamm won it all through an LCK return after being eliminated for subpar cauliflower risotto in a sudden-death Quickfire) and introduce the season’s first challenge in the Top Chef kitchen. In honor of Milwaukee’s beer industry, each cheftestant needs to make a dish incorporating hops. There’s an array of varieties available, like CTZ and Cascade, accompanied by little placards of their flavor profiles — which turn out to be helpful because most of the contestants have zero experience cooking with hops.

Your mileage will vary on whether you think Kristin and Flamm’s “hop to it” to the cheftestants, accompanied by an actual jump, is awkward or adorable. But with $5,000 on the line from the Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card (an apparently real thing that Kristin recites like she was a hostage to the ADR process), everyone needs to hustle to figure out their hops strategy. Amanda describes them as “oregano on steroids,” and more than one chef compares the hops smell to weed, which makes sense since they’re both part of the hemp family. Taming the hops’ bitterness is the biggest issue here, and a lot of the chefs go to the same idea — infuse the hops’ flavor into a liquid, fat, or sauce. Kévin immediately dunks hops into oil to use in his dessert; he owns a pastry shop in Austin, so something sweet is his wheelhouse. Danny is steeping his hops for a sauce, while Laura infuses hers in cream for a rice pudding; Michelle grinds up hers to crust her flank steak, while Valentine and Samantha decide to smoke their proteins with it.

There’s some general “where are things?” confusion in the kitchen, and a few failures in the cooking process that the contestants can’t quite fix: Danny knows his sauce is too bitter, Kenny’s aware that his farro is underdone. But Kristin and Flamm mostly maintain their poker faces with blandly encouraging “Greats” during judging, only breaking form at Charly’s spicy Haitian fried chicken, pikliz vegetables, and plantains, which is too hot for Flamm. Charly slides through the middle, as do Samantha with her smoked rainbow trout, Alisha with her grilled peaches and goat cheese, Dan and his charred cabbage salad, Manny’s pork loin and sweet potatoes (remember, Manny has immunity from his season-premiere pozole win), Savannah’s crab salad and corn puree, Rasika’s crab salad and watermelon ponzu, and Kaleena’s hop-cured tuna. On the bottom are some expected faces: Kenny’s hops and kombu broth with farro, mushrooms, and burrata, thanks to the underdone farro; Danny’s grilled rack of lamb with hops au poivre, because he overdid the pepper in his sauce trying to balance the hops flavor; and Valentine’s hop-smoked duck breast, which didn’t have correctly rendered fat. Meanwhile, the top comprises two desserts — Laura’s rice pudding with berries, Kévin’s roasted fruit crumble and whipped cream — and Michelle’s hops-crusted flank steak with a strawberry-and-hops vinaigrette. Basically everyone who did something sweet-forward to balance the hops’ bitterness does well, and Laura ends up winning the Quickfire, joking that she wished she had immunity but that she’ll save the money to use at her own restaurant. It’s important to invest in yourself, you know?

That ideology also applies to the elimination challenge, which combines a few tried-and-true Top Chef traditions: divide into two teams going head to head course by course, transform a humble or unassuming dish into something fancy, and incorporate a specific product into the food. In continuing with the hops-and-beer theme of the episode, the chefs will need to elevate seven different bar snacks (popcorn, pickles, pretzels, mixed nuts, potato chips, olives, and toasted corn kernels) into high-end dishes, and work Miller High Life, the Champagne of Beers, into their creations. They’ll serve their progressive meals in the historic Miller Caves (which you can tour!), each team will get $500 for Whole Foods shopping, and the best dish from the winning team gets immunity for next week and $10,000 from Miller High Life. (The money’s really flowing this season.)

The chefs pull knives to randomly sort themselves into two teams of seven, with the Yellow Team comprising Alisha, Dan, Kenny, Rasika, Savannah, Manny, and Michelle, and the Red Team Kévin, Danny, Laura, Kaleena, Valentine, Charly, and Amanda. The Yellow Team worries that the Red Team having all the high-cuisine, classically trained chefs is an unfair advantage, which is precisely the kind of thing the editors leave in because either the Yellow Team pulls off an unexpected upset or they end up being right and the Red Team dominates. They initially have some tension during meal planning — Dan and Rasika both want to do dessert, but he acquiesces to her handling the course with a bold-sounding pretzel and mustard dish, and Kenny struggles when conceptualizing how to elevate potato chips. Over in the Red Team’s side of the kitchen, Kévin is pretty determined to start the meal off with olives, and his colleagues decide that their progressive meal will play out almost in reverse, with a big bang of salt from the olives first and then more subtle dishes, including a pre-dessert course that Amanda agrees to take on. Seems risky!

After some brief Whole Foods shopping shenanigans (each member of the Red Team shops for their dishes individually, which doesn’t seem very collaborative), the chefs hang out at home, and Dan shares in his talking-head interview that he’s been diagnosed with Kennedy’s disease, a neuromuscular disorder similar to ALS that causes muscular degeneration. He hasn’t told everyone yet (he will later in the episode, and they all treat him with compassion), but he’s optimistic about a group challenge, and how it could generate collaboration: “I have to trust my teammates … to be there and support me.” The next day, as the teams cook outside, everyone seems to be taking that sentiment to heart even without Dan having yet shared his news with them. No real interpersonal drama occurs on either the Yellow or Red Teams, but there are issues with various dishes on the Red Team: Kévin struggles to complete his 30 olive canapes and enlists other team members to help, Valentine worries about how starchy and thick his corn soup is, Charly spends more than 40 minutes individually arranging shards of potato chips to look like scales on his fried fish. And when it comes time to serve to the judges, those three dishes end up being heavily criticized.

Flamm calls this type of conceptual challenge, which relies on the contestants’ definitions of “high-end,” a “fucking trap” if the contestants’ and judges’ understandings don’t align, and neither team is perfect. (My personal complaint is that the featured ingredient isn’t the same course to course; I would have appreciated that symmetry.) Tom criticizes the Yellow Team for keeping the snacks as snacks rather than turning them into full-on dishes, like with Alisha’s smoked salmon rillettes and olive chimichurri served on a lavash cracker, but the Red Team also made the same mistake with Kévin’s trio of olive bites, which Gail says is far too salty. The Red Team’s salt-first progression confuses nearly everyone, especially because it’s erratic (Laura’s badrijani nigvzit, eggplant rolls stuffed with nuts, are too aggressively seasoned as a third course), and Tom and Flamm both criticize Amanda’s pre-dessert course of pretzel beer foam and lime granita — it’s delicious, but how much work did it really require? The Yellow Team has more standout dishes, like Michelle’s roasted corn kernel and crab biscuit with spicy High Life honey butter, Manny’s guajillo and mixed nut mole with roasted chicken, Kenny’s potato chip pavé with beer-braised short ribs, and Rasika’s barley pretzel cake with pretzel granita and honey mustard sabayon. Those help them secure the win, and Rasika walks away with the best dish of the night for the dessert Tom calls a risk that paid off.

The three worst dishes on the Red Team, the judges say, are Kévin’s olives (an unimaginative sodium bomb), Valentine’s beer and corn kernel soup with pickled fresh corn (overly thick, not enough toasted-corn-kernel flavor), and Charly’s potato chip-crusted Spanish mackerel with black bean puree (blandly seasoned, and with one diner served raw fish). From the judging, it certainly seems like Kévin is going home; Tom’s “Is that the best thing you can do with olives?” is fairly scathing, as is Gail’s point that there was no distinction between the flavor of the three canapes. (Plus, didn’t Kévin set the Red Team off on their underwhelming path by suggesting the super-salt progression? Shouldn’t that be taken into account as another fault against him?) But Valentine ends up getting the boot for not really embracing toasted corn kernels as his ingredient, and his low position after the Quickfire probably factored into that. I’ll miss his energy; let us all raise our UNO cards and Miller High Life coupes in his honor.

Assorted amuse-bouche

• Hello! I’m Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi and I’ll be recapping Top Chef: Wisconsin this season. I miss Padma dearly, but we must all be strong and carry on.

• Tom hat watch: No hats this episode. Did he take David’s criticisms to heart? Stay strong, Tom! Don’t stray from your haberdashery truth!

• Danny mentioning his obsessive need to keep his workstation clean feels like a setup for some anxiety down the line, doesn’t it?

• Kenny’s really shaping up to be an early fan favorite with that “I needed to twerk. I mean, tweak. Oh, God” flub during Quickfire judging. He dropped out of culinary school because he forgot to sign up for his next semester? Amazing.

• “To win money just for cooking food … is one of the coolest feelings ever.” I am not anti-Kristin, but I also would like her observations to feel slightly more intentional. However, I can admit that her Quickfire jumpsuit is very Cyberpunk 2077 and I enjoyed it.

• That was a huge pack of sizable steaks that the chefs unwrapped from Whole Foods and cooked for themselves for dinner. First, what is their individual shopping budget? And second, I would absolutely read a food diary of what the contestants cook and eat together.

• A lot of granita and gremolata this season so far. What third “g”-item can we embrace for alliterative purposes?

• Do people know if Kristin and Joe Flamm are actually friends in real life? It felt like they were both pushing a “we are close and we put each other at ease” united front. Kristin and Stephanie Cmar are also tight, so I’m expecting her to show up. And honestly, a Stefan Richter appearance would be fun.

• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: Laura’s rice pudding with berries and Michelle’s roasted corn kernel and crab biscuit with spicy High Life honey butter.

• Miller High Life is legitimately good, incredibly lightly flavored, and fairly affordable. A good “I don’t like beer” beer, said by me, someone who doesn’t like beer and only drinks this beer.

• You can learn more about Kennedy’s disease here.