Hello TCFL! Sooo... what did we think of Restaurant Wars? I personally have never been more convinced after picking teams of who was going to win, only to be even more convinced during and after service that the same team was going to lose. To illustrate the roller coaster of emotions through the episode (and how wrong I continue to be about everything), let's go through the draft:
Pick #1 - Voltaggio
Team: Country Captain (Kevin)
Grade In The Moment: B+. As soon as Kevin drew first, Voltaggio was always going to be the pick. They've basically done 1.5 seasons together at this point. The only reason why this is a B+ is because under 99% of circumstances, Melissa is the #1 pick.
Grade After Service: C. Voltaggio sure did a lot of worrying and complaining in this episode. His dishes did not do well with the judges. He is now the only active Chef that has a negative score (-5).
Pick #2 - Malarkey
Team: Kann (Gregory)
Grade In The Moment: F. This is insanity. Melissa should have been the pick here and basically everyone knew it, including Malarkey himself. Everyone so knew it that Padma was compelled to ask Gregory why he made that pick.
Grade After Service: A+. He's opened the most restaurants. He is (according to Tom), the person who has earned the most money outside of the show. He might be the first Chef who is constantly thinking about and playing the game of Top Chef. He took care of all of pre-opening FOH by himself and ran a tight ship during service. He was the MVP.
Pick #3 - Melissa
Team: Country Captain (Kevin)
Grade In The Moment: A+. Tremendous value! She has easily been the best and most consistent Chef of the whole season. That she fell this far is a trave-sham-ockery.
Grade After Service: B? Her dishes did well with the Judges. This was a very non-descript episode for her, but the format of the challenge made it so. Because of the importance of the challenge of the previous week, this was the perfect time to be a line cook. They weren't going to be touched for elimination unless something egregious happened. Which brings us to...
Pick #4 - Lee Anne
Team: Kann (Gregory)
Grade In The Moment: D. Lee Anne can't get anything finished on time. How would that help in any way during Restaurant Wars? Yes, she was previously eliminated, but Karen was the pick here. Also, Lee Anne got the "homesick" scene, so she has to be the one going home... right?
Grade After Service: D. Easily the weak link on Kaan. She basically had a meltdown with the servers and needed to be rescued by Stephanie. If for whatever reason Kann lost, it could have been Lee Anne that would have been eliminated.
Pick #5 - Karen
Team: Country Captain (Kevin)
Grade In The Moment: A. More value for Country Captain. This is just textbook "letting the draft come to you" and "just picking the best available" and [insert more draft cliches here].
Grade After Service: D. Kevin rightly went home (and we'll get to the speech in a bit). But there was an argument to be made for Karen. She did not handle pre-opening FOH well, and while it isn't necessarily her fault that guests lingered, if that's gonna fall on anyone, it's her. Also, what a disappointment that the clip of her spilling wine, which has been shoved into our eyeballs all season, ends up being not that big of a deal.
Pick #6 - Stephanie
Team: Kann (Gregory)
Grade In The Moment: C. Can't really grade the last/only available pick. But how you drafted earlier dictated that you'd end up with both Lee Anne and Stephanie on the same team.
Grade After Service: B+. Stephanie has basically destroyed my TCFL team (For now? Holding out hope.) but I really like her. She was a calming presence in Gregory's BOH and essentially saved Lee Anne's ass from berating all of their servers.
Stray Thoughts:
- Kaaaatsuuujiii! I enjoyed seeing Katsuji during Gregory's RW flashback. If you guys want a little peek into what TCFL used to be, Katsuji's (and Gregory and Melissa's) season was played by myself, the two other Founding Fathers (Mike and Rich), and Mrs. Commish. Four people. That's it. Katsuji wasn't even picked to a team. Here is the final Scoreboard from that season, with Mrs. Commish taking the crown. (Yes, my team was worse than the Chefs that went undrafted, shut up.)
- I liked that there was basically no parameters in terms of number of dishes to serve, if there needed to be dessert, etc. Though obviously the freedom ended up being a detriment to Kevin/Country Captain.
- Restaurant Wars seems like a very late episode to be seeing our first mention of Terlato Wine. Have they already made their appearance this season in an earlier episode and I missed it?
- Man, I thought $40K was a sweet sweet Restaurant Wars prize... which it is. But then I looked up the secondary prize of an OpenTable subscription for your restaurant for a year. According to my half-assed internet research:
OpenTable has a one-time fee of $1295 and a $199 monthly fee, with an optional fee of $99/month to be featured in the OpenTable Dining Guide. For online reservations, there isn’t a monthly subscription fee. Instead, OpenTable charges a pay-per-performance fee of $1.00 per cover booked on OpenTable.com or $0.25 per cover booked via the restaurant’s website.
- What's poor Stephanie going to do with an OpenTable subscription for her non-restaurant? I'm surprised no one brought this up 5x before the end of the episode. (If you can't tell, I'm now a Stephanie-defender.)
- I wanna go to the '&' apron store whose name I didn't know until this episode! Also, Gregory's aprons were so much better than Kevin's.
- I'll be honest: I had no idea what was going on with the whole "plate fight". It was either a gross overreaction (by Kevin) or was a super dick thing to do (by Malarkey) and I have no idea which it is.
- The running gag of Padma having to pretend that she made a reservation to the RW restaurants has been replaced by the even more ridiculous Padma having to pretend that she has an OpenTable account.
- For the first time (from what I can remember), there wasn't a "winner"/MVP declared for the winning team. Truly a team win? Sure. For our purposes, that just means that everyone got a +10.
- Like I said earlier... Kevin deserved to go home. Everything that he said was spot-on. That they asked him during Judges' Table why he shouldn't go, then his speech, then making the call right there, without further deliberation made for fantastic television (or at least fantastic editing). For me, it made me like Kevin even more.
- It just so happens that Team Socially Distant Queen was over this afternoon for a responsibly socially distant drink with Mrs. Commish in our backyard. I asked her what she thought of the episode and she thought the opposite of me for Kevin's speech. She, like me, thought that Kevin deserved to go home so the speech was unnecessary/dramatic. I respect the take and didn't even consider it that way. What do you guys think?
We're just about halfway through the season now. For anyone still reading... thanks for sticking around this long, and I hope we have a great 2nd half of the season. Till next week!
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