I had a dream last night that Michael Isabella is really a fifteen-year-old girl. I was so startled I woke up.
Last night's episode made me more convinced than ever that Kevin is going to win this thing. Not only does he make consistently good food (and win with it--two Quickfire and three Elimination wins), he makes very American food that somehow manages to be both homey and sophisticated. Michael V.'s food is more dazzling (though he's won only one Quickfire and one Elimination), but I'm betting the judges go for the good old boy (a good old boy who also seems to be a truly decent guy, by the way). (I don't think Bryan will win because, even though he's obviously a wonderful chef and has won a lot of Elimination challenges, he doesn't wow. And Jennifer is coming off as a gifted second banana more than an innovator.)
I bet at this point in the competition, the other contestants must have been royally tired of seeing Jennifer, Michael V., Bryan, and Kevin troop out of the stew room first. These four have won all the Elimination challenges. They have been the dominant competitors from the start. I imagine Laurine, especially, sitting around just waiting for the ax to fall. Eli is just a punk kid, so he probably just bluffed it out, and Mike I., and Robin are clearly delusional, so I'm guessing they spent a good deal of time pretending to themselves they had a chance. (Could you believe it when Robin talked about winning as a possibility? And when she said yearningly [I paraphrase], "If I win this, it would mean I'm invincible, and that would make me feel really good," did you want to punch her as much as I did? And did you also want to punch Mike I. when he bragged about all the different styles of food he'd cooked, including on his list Asian, which last week he acknowledged he'd never made before, and cuisines that everyone else had had to cook as well?)
Random observations:
*This week for the first time I got annoyed with Jennifer's incessant "I'm nervous." I'm sure she always was, but, still, shouldn't her record give her some comfort/confidence? She reminded me of DfK worrying that Tom would forget him.
* And this week Michael V. came off as the jerk I thought he was when the season began. Deliberately goading his brother, deliberately goading Eli--the guy is a bully.
* Toby Young's armpit comment was very classy.
* The guest judge had an absolutely repulsive moustache.
* Robin is horrible, but I hate the way the others gang up on her. The way last night's show was edited, it looked as though the four front-runners didn't join in, which made the behavior of the others even more disgusting to me, since it suggested underdogs turning on the weakest member of the pack.
* I'm relieved Ash is gone. He was a pleasant-enough guy, but, god, what a wimp when it came to cooking. It was painful watching him declare his commitment to making "his own food" and then hearing him say he was going to follow Mike I.'s suggestion rather than make the dish he'd originally planned for the Elimination challenge. As soon as I heard him say that, I knew he was doomed. That boy needed some of Hector's cojones.
* I was shocked that Laurine apparently didn't know what rillettes are.
* Is it not unsurprising to learn that Eli is a mama's boy? And how disgraceful is it that at age twenty-six he doesn't pay his parents any rent?
Restaurant Wars looks like it's going to be entertaining.
