"Top Chef" Season 4: Week 2

What a clever little challenge we had this week. The chefs were to cater a party at the Chicago zoo. They were broken up into teams of three and each team was assigned an animal. The challenge was to prepare a menu based on the diet of their assigned animal.

Between the bottom two teams, Team Gorilla and Team Bear, it's difficult for me to decide which of the two was actually the weaker team. On one hand, you have Team Bear, who decided to serve their stuffed mushrooms even though they failed to even taste them before service. (Gail Simmons referred to them as "bear dropping" in appearance. I think Rocco DiSpirito writes her jokes for her).

Then there was Team Gorilla, who I think made a bad move by adding meat to their menu for an animal who has an entirely vegetarian diet. In my opinion, they didn't meet the requirements of the challenge. I mean, what would they have done if a gorilla had come up to their station, eager to eat from a menu designed specifically for him, picked up a plate of Stephanie's seemingly meatless salad only to find out that it was chock-full of crab meat. I can hear it now: "Um excuse me ma'am, is there meat in this?" the gorilla would ask. And after hearing "yes," he would probably ask to speak to the manager, and despite the sincerest of apologies from both the chefs and Ms. Lakshmi, the gorilla would probably still end up throwing his poo at her. How embarrassing for the chefs...and the gorilla.

In the end I think Valerie was a good choice for going home. I know nothing about blinis and when they should or should not be made, but I do think that she was just not tough enough for the title of Top Chef. Plus, she looked just like Rachel Dratch from SNL and I just kept expecting her to get all "Debbie Downer" on us and start talking about the frequency of cross contamination in the kitchen and the number of salmonella deaths per year as a result. Waah-wahhhhhh.