S12.E07: Restaurant Wars

[candall]

I wasn't there, but I am familiar with the hotel they held Restaurant Wars in (it's called the Revere Hotel - it used to be a Radisson), and it is has some large, cavernous, dark spaces.  I don't love it as an event space because of that but it is a centrally located space near Boston's Theater District, so it is a pretty popular venue.

Thanks, Eleanor.  (Loved your Lion movie.)

 

I went to an awards dinner once at a restaurant which was warm candlelit cozy and found they had a "banquet room" in the back with hanging fluorescent lights, cafeteria tables and folding chairs.  Ha.  Guess that stuff happens.

[Lura]

To reply to a question asked on the previous page, I don't know who my fan favorite is.  I loved Joy the moment she spoke, and I'm sorry she had to go home so soon.  I've really liked watching Gregory cook.  I think he's come a long way since the days when he had alcohol and drug problems.  Finally, there's Doug, who has kept his countenance while Katsuji and others have beaten him over the head about his height.  I would love to see Gregory win Top Chef, so I think I'd vote for Doug to win fan favorite.

 

It's coincidental that I just read this question because I was wondering what the rest of you think about this field of contestants.  In some seasons, it seems like I like most everybody, and in some (like Texas) I had a hard time liking several of them.  This season's group seems a little boring with so many of them lumped together in the middle of the pack.  No one has really stood out as being a great personality to me.  Maybe it's just me, but the group as a whole doesn't thrill me or make me wish I could know a lot of them personally.  I think they may be nice people but, put together, most of them seem "blah" to me.

[Former Nun]

I mean day old cold crepes sounds like the most unappetizing thing

 

 

...and, biakbiak, filled with some putty-colored "mousse" that has to be scraped out of a container?   I think they would have failed even had Karianne been there to finalize and serve them.

[cooksdelight]

What was Keriann thinking with those heels? It hurt me to watch her walk.

[Canada]

Wow, what a huge difference between each team.  Grey team was fantastic.  They worked well together and showed each other respect.  No one let their egos get in the way of doing the job at hand - serving good food to customers.  It was pretty obvious, just from the composition of the team, that orange was going to lose.

 

Katsuji - Yes, this is a competition that only one person will win.  But RW is a team event that you need to win.  By acting like such a dick, you've just ensured that you will not win.  Not only are you a total dick, and an incredibly unattractive man, but you're not very smart, are you?  Maybe turn down the douche and the ego and engage your brain once in a while.

 

Gregory - I've never made up my mind about you.  But after RW, I'm not a fan.

 

Katie - Useless.  Lucky not to go home.

 

Kari-Anne - Useless.  Deserved to go home.  You weren't making food.  You weren't in the front.  You weren't in the back.  You didn't train the staff.  What exactly did you do?  And where were you?  FYI, banana mousse sounds revolting.

 

The only people left who I'm rooting for are Doug and Mei.  Melissa seems a bit useless sometimes and Adam is kind of annoying.  But neither of them are as offensive to me as Katsuji.  I hope there's a double elimination next week and both he and Katie go home.

 

Last Chance Kitchen - I don't want any of them back.

 

I was disappointed we didn't get to see more of Stephanie and Kristen.  I would rather have seen them than the complete shit-show that was the orange team's service.

[LilyoftheValley]

I think that in the case of Kerriann, her experience on cruise ship was what caused her to fail at RW.  No doubt cruise lines have very strict procedures and instructions already set out ahead of time.  I do not think that Kerriann has very good experience because of that.  There is not a lot of room for creativity on a cruise ship.  To me, Kerriann just seems like the kind of chef who is perfectly suited to working on a cruise ship.  Her dishes always looked perfectly nice but nothing incredible like we have seen from the true top chefs on this show.  There has always been a just certain level of genius that separates the good chefs who come on this show from the truly great ones, and you could tell right from the get-go that Kerriann simply does not have it.  In fact, it seems that most of the people on this board can spot it from the first couple of episodes.   

[Former Nun]

Kari-Anne - Useless.  Deserved to go home.  You weren't making food.  You weren't in the front.  You weren't in the back.  You didn't train the staff.  What exactly did you do?  And where were you?  FYI, banana mousse sounds revolting.

 

 

Canada, I think Kariann got carried away with Katsuji's swooning over how pretty she is and how good she'd look in the front of the house.  Maybe she got it in her head that the job is only window dressing.

[Julia]

Kari Ann's CV seems to be full of junior awards she won when she was a teenager and then a "chef" job on a cruise ship when she was way too young and inexperienced to take over an operation that size, so I assume that was about having a shiny young face, to some extent. She may be a talented cook, but I don't get the impression she knows much about running a restaurant.

Edited December 8, 2014 by Julia

[Noreaster]

Just did a marathon catch-up of the show over the weekend. There were some contestants who brought the drama early on, but overall a pretty underwhelming cast in terms of talent.

 

This has to be one of the weakest restaurant wars ever.  Early frontrunner Gregory taking a back seat in this challenge?  So disappointing.  Did the judges call him out on this at all?  I understand the strategy behind not wanting to take the high risk/high reward executive chef role, but come on, where's the drive? Go big or go home. Same goes for some of the other contestants like Mei.  

 

I dislike that front-of-the-house remains an important part of restaurant wars. These contestants are back-of-the-house people, and all the other challenges test those skills. 

 

Ugh, seeing Kristen reminded me of how gimmicky her season ended up being. I dislike the last chance kitchen concept so much...when a contestant who doesn't have to endure all the regular challenges gets to please just one judge (Tom) in much simpler tasks. What a joke to let that person come back to the finale.  And Kristen's exit was completely warranted with her ineffective leadership in restaurant wars.  And oh my god, that stupid Iron Chef-like finale. That season's format was horrible, making me feel that Kristen was one of the least deserving Top Chef winners ever.  

[Bella]

 

 

This has to be one of the weakest restaurant wars ever.  Early frontrunner Gregory taking a back seat in this challenge?  So disappointing.  Did the judges call him out on this at all?  I understand the strategy behind not wanting to take the high risk/high reward executive chef role, but come on, where's the drive? Go big or go home. Same goes for some of the other contestants like Mei. 

I dislike that front-of-the-house remains an important part of restaurant wars. These contestants are back-of-the-house people, and all the other challenges test those skills.

 

I've been reading the dissatisfaction with Restaurant Wars - I quote this passage simply because it fits the theme and is directly above - and I'm starting to think that it no longer does what it was designed to do. Maybe it needs to be revised or even ditched altogether.

 

It is now to the point that talented chefs like Gregory and Mei hang back, and with good reason. Katsuji caught a lot of criticism for his ill-advised statement about just cooking his own dish, but there was a lot of truth in that. It's an ugly truth, but he stated a fact. If you are on a team of four, and that team loses, you had better not have the weakest dish or you are going home. In that scenario, you are going to cook something strong but not daring in order to increase your chances of moving to the next round. 

 

That's not what viewers want to hear, but if I were Gregory, here's what I would have seen: the two weakest competitors, Katie and Keriann, and a wild card in Katsuji. What were the odds that that group could do better than the other four, where there were three solid chefs and a wild card (Adam) with some cooking chops? Is there any way that anyone could have pulled together the three Ks to win? I certainly don't think so. I suspect that Gregory went with the same mental calculus and figured that self-preservation, especially the week after his first appearance on the bottom, was his best strategy. I agree completely, even though of course I would have liked to have seen more from him. It doesn't play well to the viewers, but we're not the ones advancing him to the finale.

 

Mei, meanwhile, was confident enough to just cook and let someone else take the glory (or risk, unlikely though that was). RW plays big to the viewers, but it's just another elimination challenge in the scheme of things, and winning it doesn't get you anything extra beyond a possible special prize or an advantage the next week - the same as winning other elimination challenges. So Mei just cooked.

 

To me, RW is now predictable. I know what to look for early on, so by time they're actually cooking, it's a snooze. TC needs to mix it up somehow. I'm not sure how, and I have limited mental energy to spend on this issue, but to me the bottom line is that it's no longer interesting and the chefs have figured out the risks and rewards long before they go on the show. Even Doug, who did an awesome job as EC for the grey team, had clearly calculated that in his quest to advance his career via TC exposure, the risk would be worth it even if he failed.

 

And yeah, FOH is a useful thing for a chef to know in the big picture of owning his or her own place, but don't send a chef home over it. It's become all about personalities. Adam had a good mix of charm and OCD to manage it, but that was interesting for about 30 seconds. Keriann was lost and never recovered, but was she ever going to? No suspense there, either.

 

Sorry this is so rambling, it's largely off the top of my head. But I've thought for several seasons that RW is broken.

 

YMMV, of course.

[Lura]

I think that Restaurant Wars is an audience favorite.  It certainly is mine.  However, Bella, you make a good argument for abolishing it.  Is it my imagination, or have contestants clamored to be FOH for many seasons now?  Fabulous Fabio set the standard for what FOH could be, and everyone hopes to be the same smooth operator that he was!  For that matter, Fabio, to this day, still maintains that it's the contact with his clientele that is his biggest reward in the restaurant business.  I think he's onto something, too.  If Fabio flashed his smile at me when I entered his establishment, I'd be putty in his hands and would automatically believe that his restaurant was a well-oiled machine!  But I digress.

 

As someone said so well upthread, I think that Keriann believed that her looks and her personality (and her bacon-greased lips) would carry her through  successfully as FOH.  Not so, as she learned.  And that's where RW becomes fun for me.  I can't wait to see whether the FOH fails miserably or hits one out of the park.  The teamwork becomes all the more interesting because I like to see the mix in a team and how well (or not) they work together.  It's a unique episode, and I'd hate to see it dropped.  Despite its flaws, it's so entertaining!

 

 

[MangoFed]

I think you have to heavily incentivize risk-taking. In the All-Stars season, the winner of the challenge got $10 000, which is enough of a reward for most of these chefs to force them to come out of their shell. Maybe throwing money at the problem is the solution? Of course, then you get into feasibility issues and whatnot, and whether the person footing the bill thinks it's worthwhile.

[Constantinople]

With names like Four Pigs and Magellan, you knew one team was getting slaughtered.

 

I haven't watched every season so maybe someone who's more of a TC historian than I can say, but has anyone ever been sent home from the Wars who was not tasked as either Exec or Front of House?  I don't remember seeing that in the seasons I've seen, and I think the RW competition puts big targets on the backs of those two and the others can skate.

As I recall, Mike was booted in Season 2 for failing to buy olive pit dishes, or some such thing. I think that may be the only time a RW cheftestant was eliminated for negligent dishware purchasing, though I skipped most of Seattle and all of New Orleans.

[eleanorofaquitaine]

That's not what viewers want to hear, but if I were Gregory, here's what I would have seen: the two weakest competitors, Katie and Keriann, and a wild card in Katsuji. What were the odds that that group could do better than the other four, where there were three solid chefs and a wild card (Adam) with some cooking chops? Is there any way that anyone could have pulled together the three Ks to win? I certainly don't think so. I suspect that Gregory went with the same mental calculus and figured that self-preservation, especially the week after his first appearance on the bottom, was his best strategy. I agree completely, even though of course I would have liked to have seen more from him. It doesn't play well to the viewers, but we're not the ones advancing him to the finale.

 

 

I find this premise, which seems to be about defending Gregory's decision-making, flawed because I think that Katie is not a weaker chef than either Katsuji or Adam. Katie has a better record (at least according to wikipedia) than Adam re the Quickfire, and compares well to Katsuji in that while he has more wins than she does, he also has more lows.  Now, as I've stated, she wasn't a great leader, but perhaps if Gregory - who made such a big deal about stepping up as a leader - had led, he could have corralled a good performance from both Katsuji and Katie.  Keri Ann was always going to be the weakest link of that team, and a better leader could have found a better use for her.

 

Now, I am not saying that Gregory had to be a leader, but it is perplexing that he made such a big deal about it previously.  And, in any case, the idea that Gregory just had such weak teammates that there was nothing to do to save that time seems pretty flawed to me, when you review their records.

[phoenix780]

I think you have to heavily incentivize risk-taking. In the All-Stars season, the winner of the challenge got $10 000, which is enough of a reward for most of these chefs to force them to come out of their shell. Maybe throwing money at the problem is the solution? Of course, then you get into feasibility issues and whatnot, and whether the person footing the bill thinks it's worthwhile.

Maybe instead of cash they offer some kind of super-immunity, a "get out of jail free card" to be used by the contestant at will up until a certain point.  

 

Despite it's weirdness, and that it was kind of boring this year (imho) I think it's a nice respite from the other challenges, especially in seasons that are more about catering/volume of food produced.  

 

And, in any case, the idea that Gregory just had such weak teammates that there was nothing to do to save that time seems pretty flawed to me, when you review their records.

 

I think it's about perception, not stats.  Katie only stands out in my memory for crying during the baseball challenge and losing to Aaron during the high stakes QF.  So to me she's one of the weaker contestants left.  And I think that before this challenge she was a bit of a wildcard in terms of leadership ability.

 

That said, I'm not convinced Gregory went through any complicated thought process.  And, he may well have thought he was taking a position that could have helped save them by actually executing dishes (people can forget a lot if the food quality is on point...or at least forgive a lot).  I mean- maybe on that team EC wasn't where the strongest chef needed to be.

[Lura]

I must say that on reading Belle's logic, it makes a lot of sense to me, at least the part about the contestants figuring out the whole RW "system" ahead of time.  I wonder whether the addition of a monetary prize for the Best Chef Award would make each individual chef work harder, especially with yet another corporate sponsor who could donate a fat, lucrative financial prize to the mix.  In that case, possibly people like Greg and Mei would step up their dishes and not hang back, trying to fly under the radar.  If they added a smaller financial reward to each team member on the winning team, the cheftestants would have to work together and have even more incentive to do so.  There is so much work involved in this exercise that paying the outstanding people might have merit.  Every year I'm amazed by how much they have to do and how they manage to do it.  Maybe some hard, cold cash would light a fire under all of them and make it seem more worthwhile.

[BC Mama]

I am a Gregory fan, so I might a little biased, but perhaps Gregory was trying to let someone else have a chance to shine? After all, Gregory has had a chance to show offside leadership skills in the past and o think it is reasonable for him to take a step back.

[cooksdelight]

At this point in the game, I'd be more like Katsuji and looking out for numero uno and not allowing anyone to outshine me. You're there to win.

[Qoass]

 

At this point in the game, I'd be more like Katsuji and looking out for numero uno and not allowing anyone to outshine me. You're there to win.

 

I agree but I don't think I would be so willing to discuss it in the talking heads.  That's no way to get fan favorite!

[biakbiak]

Perhaps in another team challenge where you are solely responsible for your own dish but that isn't the case with Restaurant Wars where the two people on the line have to execute other people's dishes (not only FOH but a great deal of the EC because they are busy expediting) in addition to your own and how well you work as a team is factored in. Best thing to do on RW is do everything in your power to make sure stuff runs smoothly and jump in and help when it doesn't because that is how you shine.

Edited December 9, 2014 by biakbiak

[Julia]

Perhaps in another team challenge where you are solely responsible for your own dish but that isn't the case with Restaurant Wars where the two people on the line have to execute other people's dishes (not only FOH but a great deal of the EC because they are busy expediting) in addition to your own and how well you work as a team is factored in. Best thing to do on RW is do everything in your power to make sure stuff runs smoothly and jump in and help when it doesn't because that is how you shine.

 

Unless you're CJ or Josie or Mike Isabella. Working the line in restaurant wars is a great way to throw someone else's body on a grenade and live to fight another day. 

 

Hell, Jamie wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the New York season if anyone had cared how much work people do in team challenges, and Sarah would have gone home after her fit of the vapors during the barbecue challenge in Texas.

[questionfear]

Unless you're CJ or Josie or Mike Isabella. Working the line in restaurant wars is a great way to throw someone else's body on a grenade and live to fight another day. 

 

Hell, Jamie wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the New York season if anyone had cared how much work people do in team challenges, and Sarah would have gone home after her fit of the vapors during the barbecue challenge in Texas.

I am loathe to defend Sarah from the Texas season, but that did look pretty serious. It would have been lame for them to boot her for what appeared to be heatstroke, even if she was a pain. 

[Julia]

I am loathe to defend Sarah from the Texas season, but that did look pretty serious. It would have been lame for them to boot her for what appeared to be heatstroke, even if she was a pain. 

 

Well, maybe, but she showed up perky and bubbling just in time for judging and strongly suggested to the judges that she'd actually done something, so I tend not to give her the benefit of the doubt.

[carrps]

Well, maybe, but she showed up perky and bubbling just in time for judging and strongly suggested to the judges that she'd actually done something, so I tend not to give her the benefit of the doubt.

I'm with questionfear. Heat stroke can kill you.

 

Once it's identified and treated, though, recovery can be pretty quick.

[Julia]

I'm with questionfear. Heat stroke can kill you.

 

Once it's identified and treated, though, recovery can be pretty quick.

It's also hard to disprove. The symptoms are remarkably similar to the symptoms of overheating and exhaustion. I'm going to guess the medics would have signed off on a number of the other chefs if they'd punked out.

That said, if I accept that she was suffering from heat stroke when she jumped ship, she presumably had recovered when she led the judges to believe that she spent the night cooking.

[Lura]

While we can't know what goes on in other people's minds, I sometimes feel that Gregory is receiving undue criticism for "holding back."  If your food is consistently bad, people begin to notice you.  The same is true if you are always outstanding and winning many of the challenges.  In either case, you draw attention and feel the pressure of the spotlight on you.  Up until the Revolutionary War challenge, Gregory became almost "expected" to shine.  So, he decided to risk doing something nearly impossible and wound up in the discard pile.  This week, rather than taking a leading role as EC or FOH, he chose to do what he's best at -- cook and be available to help others if needed.  Who can blame a choice like that? 

 

This show is a complicated game, and strategy is sometimes everything.  If Greg didn't want to wind up in the dumpster again, then he'd be safer as a cook than he would be in a starring role.  So be it.  Doug, on the other hand, was itching to be EC, and who can blame Doug?  That was his strategy, to have his skills recognized, as he said.  Each contestant has to decide how to play the game, and both Greg and Doug played it fairly the way they wanted to.  I don't feel that Greg let anyone down by choosing to cook this week, and I fail to see his choice as "coasting."  If it was, then I think that his coasting strategy paid off for him and Doug both.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

 

 

 

[carrps]

That said, if I accept that she was suffering from heat stroke when she jumped ship, she presumably had recovered when she led the judges to believe that she spent the night cooking.

This I wholeheartedly agree with!

 

Eh, I think the only reason people are giving Gregory shit for laying low during RW was because of his calling out the "battle" team for not reigning in Aaron. I have no problems with him playing the game. Just don't mouth off about other people playing the game, too.