Top Chef episode 11 recap

Top Chef recap: Chef Evelyn surges with seafood in Galveston, plus, who's out

For the 11th episode of Top Chef season 19, the remaining six cheftestants (welcome back, Sarah Welch) travel to Galveston. A cynical recapper might posit that the episode mostly serves as a commercial for a vacation rental company, but let’s try to keep things positive.

In a twist, the chefs are tasked with cooking for a close friend or family member in the Elimination Challenge. Watching the chefs reunite with loved ones they haven’t seen in weeks makes for a surprisingly emotional episode. Still, the show must go on, and poorly cooked squid sends a chef packing.

Let’s break down the show from a Houston perspective by highlighting the local people and places who appeared in the episode. Then we’ll check in on the progress of local cheftestant Evelyn Garcia and keep track of the overall competition.

Featured ~~Houstonians~~ Galvestonians
It seems that this portion of the recap may have reached its end. Other than Top Chef alum Dawn Burrell, it has been weeks since we’ve seen any Houston chefs on the show.

Moving to Galveston does provide some beachfront views. The cheftestants get a limited tour of the city that includes La King’s Confectionary, the essential sweet shop on the Strand. For Houstonians, the store likely recalls memories of over the top sundaes and other frozen treats; the show focuses on its chocolate selection, which is pretty great.

Still, it seems like Top Chef producers missed an opportunity to showcase more of the island. Why not have the chefs visit Katie’s Seafood Market for a Quickfire based on the day’s catch? They toured the island by trolley bus; couldn’t they have stopped at Maceo Spice & Import Company for a muffaletta? Or had legendary Galveston restaurateur Francisco “Paco” Vargas serve as a guest judge in some capacity?

How did Evelyn Garcia do
Once again, our local cheftestant shines. She secures her first Quickfire victory with a Thai-spiced take on a Viet-Cajun seafood bowl. [Check out this clip of Garcia on a recent episode of Live with Kelly and Ryan to see her make something similar.]

Cooking for her father Jose in the Elimination Challenge, she impresses the judges with her fried snapper with coconut sticky rice and pickled chilis.

“I love dishes that have layers like that, herbs on top with the spice,” guest judge Sheldon Simeon raves. “The crust of the fish was unique. I thought it was a delicious dish all the way through.”

By any measure, Garcia has to be considered among the favorites to win the season.

Who wins
Speaking of favorites, Buddha Lo wins his second Elimination Challenge in a row. Typically, chef Buddha’s dishes have incorporate fine dining touches that reflect his extensive training, but he mixes things up this week with a homey plate of pasta Amatriciana. As he explains, it’s the dish his wife cooked for him that made him fall in love with her.

Who goes home
Chef Ashleigh Shanti makes the sort of fundamental cooking error that almost always leads to a chef packing her knives. The squid she serves as part of paella-inspired heirloom rice are so undercooked that host Padma Lakshmi spits it out into her napkin. With Last Chance Kitchen having wrapped up, she’s out permanently.

Who exceeds expectations
Chef Damarr Brown continues to look like one of the season’s frontrunners. Cooking for his mentor and boss Erick Williams, he joins Buddha and Evelyn in the top three with his herb bread-crusted redfish with little neck clams and white beans. It seems fairly like this group of three will be battling it out for the title.

The judges assess the cheftestants.

Photo by David Moir/Bravo

The judges assess the cheftestants.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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