Hooray! It's finally time for the Champions Round on Top Chef Masters and you know what that means: The show may actually get better from this point on.
For round one of the finals, we welcome back the "Eight Great" challengers who crushed their chef competitors in the previous weeks: Tony Mantuano, Susan Feniger, Carmen Gonzalez, Jonathan Waxman, Rick Moonen, Susur Lee, Jody Adams, and Marcus Samuelsson.
For the Quickfire, they're bringing back the kinky blindfolded tag team challenge. From the looks of the preview (below), I can't tell if Waxman is really excited about being blindfolded (in that way) or extremely nervous about it (in the claustrophobic way). Five bucks says he almost passes out.
The Elimination Challenge sees the chef'testants on two separate teams catering for a wedding. While you may be thinking this is going to be a walk in the park for these skilled chefs, remember: they're probably not used to actually doing the cooking themselves for big catering events (that's what sous chefs are for, duh) and, with that many egos in one kitchen, there may not be enough room for the mass amounts of food they have to put out.
In the preview, Lee looks like he's kicking some ass with his fancy tower of cream puffs and scary side eye stare. (I'd watch out for him, just because he looks like he belongs in some badly dubbed Kung Fu movie, doesn't mean he wouldn't cut you for messing up his mise en place.)
Tune in to Bravo tonight at 10 pm EST/9 pm C, join our Twitter party during the show (Jeff: @TheStew, Katie: @culinarypirate), and listen to our podcast here tomorrow! (You can even download us on iTunes!) Check out our fellow Top Chef fanatics, Please Pack Your Knives And Go and All Top Chef, for the latest news (and some laughs).
Videos after the break:
This article appears in May 5-11, 2010.