Wednesday, August 19, 2009

HOLY MOLE: A satisfying end to a satisfying Top Chef Masters season -- well-chosen challenge, , smart judging, and a result wholly justified by the cooking we've seen and the editing. As Jay Rayner writes, it was "a meal that was, depending on your point of view, either the kisses of angels and the delicate beating of butterflys' wings made nourishment, or an outrageously decadent gustatory assault course, from which it was a miracle that we escaped without a gushing embolism each."

And, in summary, "What struck me about the vast majority of the food cooked for me by the chefs involved [all season long] was that it could only have come from the US.... It was there in the fascination with provenance, the commitment to how things tasted, and mostly in the lack of prissiness. Over here in Europe there is too often a grotesque fascination with painting pictures on the plate, as if creating dishes was advanced therapy for people with obsessive compulsive disorder. On this show there was elegance and control, but nobody went all painterly on us. It really was all about flavour, flavour, flavour."

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