Truces and Vanilla Candles Ruin This Week's ‘Top Chef’

Howie the Steamroller will beat you with that pan.Courtesy of Bravo

On this week’s Top Chef, the contestants faced a Quickfire Challenge in which they were asked to make burgers for Daniel Boulud. The usual disasters ensued, but CJ came out on top, and although not granted immunity, got to choose his team for the elimination challenge: creating a restaurant from scratch. CJ, Tre, Casey, and Brian created Restaurant April, which was almost as bad as Hung, Howie, Sara, and Dale’s The Garage. Both were so dismal that the judges thought to give them a do-over. No eliminations! Frustrated, we sprinted to the computer, where Top Chef blogger Amuse Biatch was waiting for us on Instant Messenger. (Adam Platt is hiding from the city’s restaurateurs in rural New England.)

Ozersky: Well, Tre dropped the ball again, but his potatoes looked better than Howie’s dung droppings on yellow cake uranium.
Ozersky: But what’s with all this design stuff? What show is this, anyway?
Amuse Biatch: It looked like How to Set Up Your Own Sex Club.
Ozersky: That would explain the candles.
Amuse Biatch: I was all ready for Dale to be kicked off, in order to slip into Elton John mode and eulogize him for having decorated like a scented candle in the wind.
Ozersky: Dale had it together … he’s turning into the hero of the show. Brian is dispensable. What is his role? He’s not the bulldog, he’s not the evil genius … he’s basically a regional anchorman.
Amuse Biatch: Well, I don’t particularly like Ron Burgundy, er, Asshat, er Malarkey, so I would have been happy to see him go.
Ozersky: You know, I was supposed to be in that episode.
Amuse Biatch: You were going to be Andrea Strong?!
Ozersky: So to speak. It was supposed to be a whole table of bloggers — Daniel Maurer and I for Grub Street, Eater, Restaurant Girl … but they wanted us to not write about Top Chef at all, and that couldn’t happen. Only Andrea took the pledge.
Amuse Biatch: Oh, that’s too bad … was it her or DB that got off that zinger about The Garage looking like a massage parlor?
Ozersky: DB. The thing is, it didn’t look like a massage parlor. It looked like some stoner’s apartment.
Amuse Biatch: Well, you know, a garage is also where people die of carbon-monoxide poisoning. Or, I guess, vanilla-air poisoning.
Ozersky: This whole episode was weird … I miss all the hatred, the tension, the confrontation. They better ratchet that up next week.
Amuse Biatch: Look, if Howie and Sara can get along, how about the Sunnis and Shiites?
Ozersky: That Howie-Sara business was more of a temporary truce, like the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Ozersky: By the way, where did you find those bikini pictures of Padma? I think your blog is becoming straighter every week. What’s up with that?
Amuse Biatch: Oh, there’s loads more where those came from.
Ozersky: Really!
Amuse Biatch: Even some nekkid ones
Ozersky: !!
Ozersky: So any final thoughts on tonight’s episode?
Amuse Biatch: Dale’s line about being half-prostitute, half-performer applied to the entire Top Chef enterprise itself. Unfortunately, tonight there was no happy ending in that massage parlor.