Top Chef Recap: The Meat Sweats

Hello! Howdy! As the people of Calgary apparently say, yahoo! Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi here, and I’m filling in for your normal brilliant recapper Caroline Framke this week. As a longtime Top Chef watcher (and former recapper myself), let me quickly get some things out of the way before we dive into this week’s rodeo-themed episode. My thoughts on the Voltaggios are Bryan > Michael; I’m definitely going to watch Padma’s new cooking competition, America’s Culinary Cup, when it airs on CBS later this year; and I’m so happy Tom is wearing goofy hats again. Everything about the world in 2025 might be crap, but at least this man is still keeping his local milliner in business. Do we think he hit up a hat store in Calgary? With my whole heart, I hope so.

Alberta’s “Cowtown” is the location for this week’s semifinals and for a Quickfire challenge that throws the contestants for a loop. (I am trying to make a lassoing reference here; did it work?) When the six show up at the Calgary Olympic Plaza — where Kristen, Gail, and Tom are wearing so much sherpa that I was reminded of that Colorado elimination challenge at high-altitude Alpino Vino — they learn about the city’s cowboy history. In honor of the Calgary Stampede, an outdoor rodeo held there since 1912, and its pancake-breakfast tradition, the contestants have to cook a handheld pancake that the judges (and 50 diners!) can eat without utensils. It’s a wild challenge and reminds me of the All-Stars L.A. Quickfire in Italy when the chefs had to cook an aperitivo for 30 diners. More Quickfires outside of the kitchen, please, let’s switch it up!

The biggest challenge for the chefs during the 45-minute Quickfire is maintaining the temperature of the griddle; nearly everyone burns their tester pancakes. But also, nearly everyone figures out how to use the flattop except for my beloved loudmouth Massimo, whose pivot into cooking little blini-style pancakes in frying pans leaves the diners (and judges) wanting more. Successful dishes are Shuai’s cornmeal pancake with scrambled eggs, Chinese sausage, and a crispy cheese exterior; Bailey’s buckwheat crespelle with brown-butter pecans, plum maple syrup, and roasted mushrooms and spinach; and Tristen’s Portuguese-style pancake with cheese, berbere chorizo, and charred pepper and bacon syrup. (We get a little insight into Tristen’s multicultural cooking style by learning his mother was in the military and stationed all around the world, and they moved every two years.) On the bottom are Massimo’s (too small) buttermilk pancake with plum sauce, smoked bacon marmalade, and peach purée; Lana’s creamed-corn hoecake with (too much) sausage, poached peaches, and peach and white hibiscus syrup; and César’s (too soggy) XO pancake with basil, Chinese sausage, brûléed tomato, and candied mushrooms. Walking away with the win is Shuai, who nets $10,000 and is now at $20,000 in cash earnings.

The elimination challenge is beef, so much beef, all the beef. Because ranchers and First Nations communities historically commingled at the Calgary Stampede, the chefs will need to do the same with their dishes by pairing beef with an Indigenous ingredient: a particular type of berry. Each chef gets to pick the cut they want, but they draw knives randomly for their fruit. Massimo gets beef tenderloin and elderberries; Shuai, short ribs and black currants; Bailey, beef cheek and Saskatoon berry; Lana, New York striploin and haskap berry; César, rib eye and chokeberry; and Tristen, flat iron and gooseberry. Guest judge and First Nations member chef Denia Baltzer is there to explain the berries if the chefs are unfamiliar, but most everyone seems aware of what they get except for Bailey and Lana. (Yes, their lack of familiarity with Saskatoon berries and haskap berries ends up being a problem. Meanwhile, Massimo is out here saying he’s pleased he got elderberries because they are “very, very refined,” just like him, and I have to laugh at how this man is never not thoroughly himself.)

Shopping goes fine for everyone, and then Kristen takes the chefs out for burgers and tells them to “keep standing on your soapbox and your platforms,” a nice message that’s a little undercut by the immediate Wells Fargo product placement when she goes to pay for their meal. Once the chefs get into the Rouge kitchen, where they’re being hosted by chef Paul Rogalski, though, two issues arise: how to time the cooking of their beef with only 2.5 hours on the clock, and how to accentuate the flavor of their chosen berry without overpowering it. (Shuai’s perk from last week’s elimination win is an additional 30 minutes of cooking time, which he’s pleased to receive given that he’s cooking short ribs.) Tristen worries about how to evenly cook his thin cuts of flat iron, while Lana’s Flintstones-thick steaks seem laughably big in comparison. César douses his chokeberries with sugar, which isn’t as bad as Bailey putting so much sugar on her brûléed blue cheese that I became genuinely concerned for her sanity. Massimo’s plating down to the last second, and drops one of his painstakingly created circles of berry leather on the floor. (I like that dehydrated fruit is becoming his little flourish; will he make a third one?) And while no one’s dish is a flat-out disaster, the problems that the judges point out are mostly about how the chefs mistreated their meats or masked the Indigenous ingredients.

The judges’ favorites are Massimo’s tenderloin with umeboshi-style elderberries, pickled elderberries, smoked kohlrabi, and elderberry-soup purée (Gail calls it a “showstopper”); Tristen’s Alberta flat iron with kohlrabi, gooseberries, and bone-marrow pemmican, a First Nations dish that Tristen creates by using nitrous oxide to set a mixture of beef fat, gooseberries, and meat; and Shuai’s stuffed cabbage with braised short rib, wild rice congee, and black-currant black-pepper sauce, a spin on a dish his mother “Mama Wang” makes. The judges praise all the dishes, but there are some quibbles with Tristen serving Gail an unevenly cooked piece of meat, and Tom doesn’t love that Shuai’s dish is “heavy on heavy” between the stuffed cabbage and the porridge. So the win goes to Massimo, who almost seemed to have pissed off the judges when he said that standing before them was “the fucking worst part of my life.” He clarified that he meant “the silence” before learning whether his dish landed him in the top or bottom, but still, Gail didn’t look pleased! Regardless, the judges, Tristen, and the show’s own editors have fun with Massimo proclaiming that he was “leaning far away” from French cooking in this elimination “to show love for the Indigenous community” by immediately cutting to him basting his tenderloin in a bunch of butter. Massimo’s a good sport in the face of all their ribbing, though, and I’ll be honest, his bombastic, well-meaning buffoonery has grown on me.

That leaves on the bottom Lana’s grilled steak with Pommes Anna potatoes, haskap-berry condiment, and smoked haskap-berry jus; Bailey’s beef cheek braised with Saskatoon berries, creamy polenta, brûléed blue cheese, and roasted walnuts; and César’s grilled rib eye with chokeberry reduction, rutabaga cream, and bone-marrow cornbread. Tom criticizes Lana’s meat for being overly rested, Gail thinks her potatoes felt like an afterthought, and Kristen complains about her heavy-handed use of sage. On Bailey’s, Gail and Tom don’t care for the brûléed cheese, while the First Nations diners think Bailey diluted the flavor of the Saskatoon berry with her use of pomegranate juice. And while a lot of elements of César’s dish work, especially the cornbread, the judges are all surprised that he cut the natural acidity of the chokeberries — an ingredient he said he normally works with at home! — with too much sweetness. At the end of the day, Lana’s the one to go because too much on her plate was off, leaving Massimo, Tristen, Shuai, Bailey, and César in Calgary for another week before four chefs travel to Milan, Italy, for the finals. Lana’s “I just got outcooked” is a gracious way to go, but for everyone who’s pissed Katianna didn’t make it back into the competition (including me!), yeah, it sure feels like we’re inching closer toward an all-dude endpoint.

Leftovers

• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: all of the pancakes — I will never turn down a pancake — and either Massimo or Shuai’s elimination dishes. I’m partial toward cabbage and any form of gelatinous rice, so the congee is really calling to me.

• I gasped when Massimo’s fruit leather fell on the ground and again when he picked it up and served it, but I guess it fell on the floor parchment-paper-side down? Even still, major PTSD flashbacks to every time someone on The Great British Baking Show drops something onto that awful carpeted floor and then gives it to Paul and Prue. Ack! And yuck!

• Shuai is really coming into his own in the last few episodes; it’s a good time to be hitting your stride. My money is on a Tristen-Shuai-Massimo finale. I suppose it makes sense to keep Bailey around because she cooks Italian food and the finals will be in Milan, but I simply can’t get over my intense hatred of her overreliance on the word “cute.”

• Good-bye to Lana; the writing was on the wall when early in the episode, she said of her recurring time in the bottom, “I’ve been giving them some really nice food, in my opinion,” and even more so when she got to reminisce about staging for Kristen (who didn’t seem to remember her very well?) years before. “Really nice” isn’t going to cut it at this point.

• Calgary got such a rugged description in this episode that I have to assume an NBCUniversal executive is imagining a Yellowstone-style series set there.

• César apologizing to a mushroom for dropping it while gathering Quickfire ingredients — I have never felt more represented on TV, given how often I talk to produce at the grocery store. Apologies to everyone who has to hear me whispering things like, “Are you ripe?” while tapping a watermelon.

• Coming up next week: outdoor cooking! “Build a fire” always feels like a cruel Top Chef challenge; I’m looking forward to it.

• Folks, has it been a “really, really, really great season,” as Kristen impresses upon the chefs? I have not been blown away, but please counter my cynicism if you disagree.