Top Chef (Season 6, Episode 7) – “Dinner Party”

Quickfire: Tonight’s high stakes quickfire challenge starts at the slot machine with guest judge Chef Tyler Florence. The challenge is to create a dish incorporating three keywords which will tell the mood, taste/texture and type of cuisine. With a pull of the slot machine handle, the slots will give the three keywords. This quickfire challenge is sponsored by Cookstr.com. Cookstr.com is a website that helps the at home cook find the perfect recipe for every occasion. You can find them on Twitter here @cookstr

Bottom three: Robin, Eli and Jennifer
Top three: Mick I., Kevin and Michael V., with the win going to Kevin.
Kevin gets to pick between immunity or $15K. He chooses the $15K. Smart choice.

Onto the elimination challenge. The challenge is to cook an at-home dinner for Tyler Florence, Nancy Silverton, Govind Armstrong, Takashi Yagihashi and Tom Douglas.

The chefs draw knives to pick the ingredients that they will be cooking with… ingredients brought by the chefs named above. As the chefs team up and start cooking with their ingredients, it’s becoming clearer who the strong contestants are. In my opinion, if you’re complaining, you’re weak. The strong players have confidence no matter who they have to team up with.

Back to the Top Chef kitchen and Padma calls in Laurine, Bryan, Kevin and Jennifer who are the top dishes. Tyler tells Jennifer she’s the winner with the prize being a $10K Macy’s card.

The bottom four are Ash and Michael, Eli and Ashley. Michael takes a reaming for his fish which was overcooked due to the problems he had with the power going out. They tell Michael he can’t blame the power, which I don’t think he was really doing. Ash kinds of throws himself under the bus telling the judges how good of a cook Michael is. Bad move on Ash’s part. Eli and Ashley have the biggest problems in my opinion. After some discussion, the judges explain how both teams had one person who was really to blame for the failure. As soon as I heard that, I knew it wouldn’t be Michael going home. He’s way too talented to get sent home for one failure. Sure enough, the judges send Ashley packing.