Top Chef: Wisconsin Recap: Join the Club

Alert: We have reached an episode of Top Chef: Wisconsin in which Rasika is not on top. Alert! Alert! The early frontrunner has put a foot astray!

“Supper Club” is full of drama thanks to a new villain’s emergence during the complicated (perhaps overly so) Quickfire challenge and a budget-stretching team Elimination challenge. Don’t worry, we’ll talk about how Laura might be the new Kaleena later. But perhaps the most significant thing that happens in “Supper Club” is that Rasika is somewhat mid in the Quickfire, despite getting a sauce that pairs quite well with her planned dish, and falters quite badly in the Elimination challenge by severely oversalting two out of three elements on her plate. She had immunity this episode, so neither mistake ends up pushing Rasika out of the competition. Those missteps could open up a lane for other cheftestants, though, like Amanda and Dan, who both do well in the Elimination challenge. Damanda! We witness them!

Overall, this is a pretty topsy-turvy episode, where no one who did well in the Quickfire ends up doing well in the Elimination and a team challenge that, somewhat hilariously, makes the cheftestants groan when it’s announced. Three team challenges in five episodes does feel like a lot, and this one comes after a Quickfire challenge with two surprise elements. A video message from Kristen instructs the cheftestants to shop for ingredients at Dane County Farmers’ Market, conveniently located outside their hotel in Madison’s central square, for an unknown dish. With really no guidelines at all, some of the chefs pre-plan dishes (Kévin considers a shakshuka, which he makes with his girlfriend every Sunday), others stick to ingredients that are familiar to their culinary styles (Charly buys habanero peppers, Amanda Thai chilis), and a few buy random things that strike their fancy (okay, just Rasika does this, ending up with items as varied as bratwurst sausages and jalapeno popcorn).

When the chefs meet Kristen and their guest judges, comedian, television host, and activist W. Kamau Bell and James Beard Award-winning chef Tory Miller, on the rooftop of the building where Miller’s restaurant L’Etoile is located, they learn the next aspect of their Quickfire. The challenge is meant to honor Chef Carson Gulley, who worked at the University of Wisconsin for three decades and hosted a cooking show with his wife in the 1950s (the first Black couple to do so). The cheftestants are supposed to randomly pick one of his sauce recipes, put their own spin on it, and then create a dish, using their purchased ingredients, that complements the sauce. Honestly, this whole construct sort of sucks. I don’t really know why they couldn’t select sauces first and then shop afterward — it seems like this would have led to more cohesive dishes! The double-random element here results in some food that seems pretty wack, and that’s without even considering the fact that Laura kind of, sort of, cheats?

Laura’s already on my “seems irritatingly self-involved” list after she spilled all that cheese on the Top Chef kitchen floor in “Take It Cheesy,” didn’t clean it up — resulting in Dan slipping, falling, and nearly injuring himself — and then didn’t really apologize. And yeah, I don’t love that she initially takes one recipe card, looks at it, seemingly decides she doesn’t want it, and then tosses it down to grab another after Kristen had explicitly told them to just grab one and go. (That quick cut to Dan, who seemingly ended up with her discarded initial choice of tartar sauce, basically rolling his eyes at her antics? Excellent for me, a person who wants those moments of honesty in my competition TV.) So sure, Laura ends up in the top tier for her herb sauce with a fattoush salad of vegetables and bread, but it’s not like she got one of the easiest-seeming sauces thanks to pure luck. Also praised by the judges are Manny’s Figaro sauce with farmers’ market succotash and rainbow trout and Charly’s Creole sauce with fingerling potato; he gets the win and $7,500 in prize money. Meanwhile, some of the people with the most outside-the-box sauces struggle, like Amanda’s egg sauce with shrimp and coconut (the sauce is too gloopy, too salty, and lacks fresh citrus) and Michelle’s raisin sauce with a spinach-and-feta baked egg, cherries, rhubarb, and ham (“Taylor Swift and Slipknot happening at the same time” is how Kamau describes the dish’s disharmony). Kévin ends up on the bottom, too, for his mushroom sauce with a cooked pepper, poached egg, various other vegetables, and bread schnitzel; all the textures are too soft and too similar, Kristen says.

It’s not the most exuberant judging session, but the cheftestants perk up when Kristen shares that their Elimination challenge is going to be supper club-focused, and will include a trip to The Harvey House, a train station-turned-restaurant whose owners, Shaina and Joe Papach, will be the next guest judges. The chefs pull knives to sort into two groups of five, with Amanda, Laura, Danny, Charly, and Manny ending up on the green team (all four but Manny had worked together as the losing red team in “Living the High Life”) and Savannah, Michelle, Rasika, Dan, and Kévin on the purple team. Each group will need to serve five courses — a relish tray (vegetable, dips, that kind of thing), a fish dish, a chicken dish, a beef dish, and a dessert — and they’ll cook for the judges and 40 supper club enthusiasts at The Harvey House.

While planning a five-course meal at The Harvey House (please, someone send me a grasshopper pie posthaste), pretty much everyone gets the dish they want. Dan and Danny will go head to head on the relish tray, Charly and Rasika on the fish course, Amanda and Savannah on the chicken course, former Power Bottoms Manny and Kévin on the beef course, and Laura and Michelle on the dessert course. There’s only some brief friction between Michelle and Rasika, who both wanted to handle the purple team’s fish course. Michelle is gracious in letting Rasika have it, though, so Rasika doesn’t have to do a dessert again, and Michelle can do one for the first time. Instead, the actual tension flares up at Whole Foods, and it’s within the green team. To bring up “Living the High Life” again, I don’t get why the chefs shop individually for this challenge instead of, as the yellow team did in that preceding episode, creating a giant list of ingredients everyone needed, figuring out exactly what they could afford, and then shopping collaboratively. Yes, each chef would theoretically receive $200 from the $1,000 group budget, and should plan their dish according to that allotment. But there was clearly some level of miscommunication (or perhaps delusion or dishonesty?) amid the green team as Laura goes way, way over budget for her four leches dessert comprising a tres leches cake that’s served with a boozy chocolate after-dinner drink.

If we’re to believe Top Chef’s editing, Amanda, Charly, and Manny spend a combined $600 and then hand the conveyor belt over to Laura — and once her ingredients are done scanning, the green team’s Whole Foods total is at around $925. Instead of spending $200, Laura went over budget by $125, and her $325 of the team’s budget leaves only about $75 for Danny’s relish tray and results in him dumping ingredients. Why didn’t someone stop her? We see Amanda attempt to by announcing Laura’s costs, but I’m shocked that Danny — the one directly hurt by Laura’s shopping! — didn’t get the rest of the team on his side to intervene. Everyone seemingly just stood around and let this happen, whereas I, a petty bitch, would have immaturely lost my shit and then absolutely kept that receipt to whip out later when Laura tried to claim that she hadn’t spent more than $150 on her dish. Ma’am, we all know money is fake, but your self-centeredness is very frustratingly real!

That tension bleeds into the kitchen. Danny oversalts his black tahini and white beans for his North African-inspired relish tray (which also includes labneh with za’atar, pickled vegetables, smoked whitefish, and frena bread). Manny struggles with properly cooking his steak (ancho-crusted New York strip loin with pommes puree and Marcona almond salsa verde). Charly fires off his trout (epis-rubbed fried fish served with preserved lemon pikliz) with an astonishing 35 minutes to go before service, so it ends up way overcooked. All of those issues drag the green team down, and the judges are unimpressed with Laura’s dessert, too, the tres leches cake, which they call too soggy and too sweet, and the accompanying chocolate drink too disjointed. Amanda’s dish, a hot chicken katsu with apple-miso-mustard sauce and cabbage slaw, is praised most universally, but she’s the only real high note in the green team’s meal.

Comparatively, the purple team isn’t perfect. Dan’s relish tray of raw vegetables in soil, steak tartare, chicken liver mousse, pickled shallots, and seed toast is exceptional (Tom calls it “lively,” which is fun), but everyone thinks Rasika’s semolina fried fish with smoked sturgeon herb sauce and peanut and jaggery dip is garishly salty. Opinions vary on whether Savannah’s chicken tonkatsu with white sturgeon caviar emulsion and sweet pickled cabbage needed the roe at all, and Kévin’s beef tenderloin with sherry jus and confit potatoes is criticized as too undercooked. While Michelle’s coconut bread pudding with caramelized pineapples and pineapple cream sauce is positively compared with pineapple upside-down cake, Tom gripes the small amount of pineapple he received. (Good for Michelle for sticking up for herself and explaining how the team’s budget shortchanged them when Tom complains to her face during Judges’ Table, because come on, $1,000 to feed 50 or so people five courses is wild.) Still, the purple team does well enough to pull off the win; Dan, Savannah, and Michelle’s dishes are praised; and the very affable and deserving Dan gets the top prize of immunity for the next week.

When it’s the green team’s turn, no one directly throws Laura under the bus. But maybe Kristen and Tom had some inside intel, because neither really accepts Laura’s “Proteins, ingredients … it’s expensive” explanation for why the team so quickly ran out of money, and Tom gives her a stern talking-to about extravagant spending on her just “okay” dish. Laura’s safe, though, as the judges have more problems with Manny’s undercooked meat and Charly’s overcooked fish and ultimately decide to eliminate Charly. When Gail said “it was sort of mush,” the writing was on the wall for poor Charly, who ignominiously goes home for an Elimination challenge the same week he wins the Quickfire. “Every single thing that you do, we’re gonna pick apart,” Tom says, and if that’s the case, I have a Whole Foods receipt I would like Tom to take a look at.

Assorted amuse-bouche

• Tom hat watch: STILL no hat. It’s bumming me out.

• I ask this not sarcastically: After this episode, did you get a real sense of what was special about supper clubs and why they were historically important, especially in the Midwest? I honestly didn’t; this episode sort of flattened the experience of dining at a supper club to simply being served a multicourse meal of specific staples in a “social” environment, which doesn’t seem that different from any other modern-day restaurant experience. If you’re interested, this story gave me more insight into why these establishments flourished after Prohibition and how the late-night entertainment they initially provided morphed into more of a family-friendly communal atmosphere.

• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: From the Quickfire, Manny’s Figaro sauce, farmers’ market succotash, and rainbow trout (I eat shakshuka a lot in my normal life, so I’m purposefully picking something different to branch out!), and from the Elimination, either Amanda’s katsu chicken or Michelle’s coconut bread pudding with caramelized pineapples. I prefer a more soaked, custard-y bread pudding so I can be as gluttonous as possible, but it looked pretty good.

• Did it sound to anyone else like W. Kamau Bell said “Carson Daly” instead of “Carson Gulley,” or do I just remain TRL-pilled?

• Whatever illness Amanda was dealing with that kept her away from Judges’ Table, hopefully it wasn’t too wretched.

• The Whole Foods shopping edit suggested that Laura bought a bottle of Four Roses, which is bourbon, but she talked about her desserts being inspired by the Brandy Alexander cocktail, which includes brandy and not bourbon. Where did the bourbon go? Was it in the chocolate drink? Did Laura use the bourbon thinking it was brandy? If so, how did none of the judges notice the difference? Did she also buy a bottle of brandy that we just never saw? All of these questions boil down, really, to one thing: Someone should have stopped Laura from spending all that damn money.

• Related: During service, Kristen asks the first two chefs on each team how they dealt with the budget, which probably would have been a question better asked of every chef at Judges’ Table, no? Another Judges’ Table note: I don’t get why we’re not seeing as much of the judges telling cheftestants what they did wrong. In previous seasons’ team challenges, even with a win, if a couple members of the team delivered subpar dishes (like Rasika’s salty fish and Kévin’s overly raw steak), the judges would dig into that. But between “The Wright Way” and this episode, we’re not seeing that level of feedback. I wonder if it’s an editing decision to exclude those conversations or if they’re not happening in the first place.

• Manny revealing that he used to do MMA and Gail swiping her finger through chicken liver mousse are, I’m sure, very important new sexual interests for a certain portion of the Top Chef audience. Enjoy!

• Oh, the Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card is increasing its Quickfire prize money to $7,500 this week? Cool. I’m old enough to remember when they agreed to pay $3 billion to settle a bunch of investigations into their shady business practice of opening millions of accounts for people without their consent.

• LAST CHANCE KITCHEN SPOILERS AHEAD: Well, well. Guess who made it into the competition proper? It’s Soo! What a surprise! Now, to be fair, Kaleena makes it to the top, too; the two of them will join Top Chef again next week, while Charly definitively goes home. But again … I’m squinting at this. In this two-part mid-season finale, the three chefs have to cook twice. First, Tom requests a breakfast club sandwich with at least five layers. (I think it’s goofy that condiments can count as a layer, but whatever.) Kaleena serves a toasted croissant circle with bacon, tomato chutney, a poached egg, and chipotle hollandaise sauce. Soo also reaches for prepared bread from the pantry, using two kinds of loaves to make a sandwich with a fried pork cutlet, eggs, fried raisin bread, orange marmalade (also from the pantry), cheddar, and mornay sauce. Charly, however, cooks the bread substitute in his dish from scratch, with fried bananas on the top and bottom and grilled skirt steak, pikliz, avocado, and harissa cream sauce in the middle. Tom likes everyone’s dishes a lot — so much so that he doesn’t eliminate anyone, but gives the win to Kaleena and has them cook for him again. This time, the competitors need to prepare one bite of food that captures who they are as chefs, and Kaleena gets extra time on the clock because of her earlier win. Kaleena taps into her love of the outdoors and her foraging hobby to prepare grilled venison with miso-sweet potato puree, mushrooms, daikon, and pear. Charly honors his Haitian heritage with a dish he grew up on, espagueti; he makes fresh pasta and serves it with a sauce of smoked herring, andouille sausage, and egg yolk. And Soo emphasizes his adventurousness (I think?) with a bite of caesar salad with black garlic and fish sauce dressing, fried anchovy, pecorino, and aged balsamic, that is finished with some smoke and served in a little glass cloche. It feels exactly like something gimmicky Buddha would have made, but Tom praises it a ton. Ultimately, Charly’s overly flour-y pasta gets him sent home, and we get to watch everyone else be shocked by Soo’s existence in next week’s Top Chef.