The quickest way for a chef to pack their knives on Top Chef is to present an under seasoned dish to the judges.  If you haven't mastered Basic Cooking 101 with salt, pepper and herbs, you have no business being in the kitchen.  After watching the fifth season of this popular cooking show, I think all the contestants were under seasoned.  This was painfully obvious in the very first episode where 50 chefs from the New York area who didn't make the show slammed the dishes presented for the elimination challenge.  That was a tough crowd for any chef,  but the contestants should've been able to wow some of them at least.

As the season wore on, I lost all interest in who stayed and who went home, didn't read the blogs, and simply didn't care while watching the episodes.  The cooking was uninspired.  If you're going to serve deviled eggs, the deviled eggs have to be phenomenal because anyone can make plain old deviled eggs.   If you're going to serve tender lamb, you don't butcher and hammer the meat to tenderized it to death.  Even when there was eight contestants left in the Restaurant Wars episode that pits two teams to create and execute a restaurant concept from scratch, they managed to blotch that with a lackluster performance.  The moronic contestants from season two, which almost killed the show because the focus was on reality TV rather than the food, could cook a lot better than these contestants.

I did take a shine to was Jamie from San Francisco (executive chef at Absinthe).  For the first six episodes, she came close but not close enough to winning something.  That didn't change until she won episode seven.  When she got eliminated in episode 11, she looked bone tired.  (I know that feeling from having worked at The Old Spaghetti Factory as a backup cook for three years.)  She had an opportunity for the semi-finals in New Orleans to come back into the competition but she didn't win the Quick Fire challenge.  Jamie seems like the only one who had heart and soul behind her cooking.

When regular judge Gail Simmons left the show for her honeymoon, Toby Young, a British food critic with no professional culinary training, joined the judges table.  His comments - "I have found the weapons of mass destruction in this bowl," "the bland leading the bland," and "taste like cat food" - was unusually harsh.  No surprise if you read his book or seen the movie, "How To Alienate People and Loose Friends," where he comes across as being a total prick (which seems to be a British personality type).   The contestants were shocked and horrified by him.   I was disappointed that he toned down his comments for the rest of the season.  This season might've turned out different if he had hammered them rather than sugar coat the truth.

Maybe season six will have better contestants.

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