A critic’s experience on ‘MasterChef’
“Look fierce!” commanded a tall blond Valkyrie whose boots and shaggy vest were right out of “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
Seventeen restaurant critics from across the country gazed down at her from a gridwork balcony overlooking the kitchen set for Fox’s “MasterChef.” The Los Angeles-based show that pits home cook against home cook had invited us to critique the semifinal round of Season 7. In the episode that aired earlier this month, four contestants remained out of the original field of 20. (Critics were asked not to write about the episode before it aired).
I accepted partly out of curiosity — I wanted to see how the reality-cookingshow sausage was made — and partly because the show’s strong Houston connections had piqued my interest. Our city’s Christine Ha, competing as the program’s first blind contestant, had won Season 3. I know from firsthand tasting experience that both she and Alvin Shultz, a contestant on Season 2, are wildly talented. Ha has traveled widely and published a cookbook since her win; Shultz was recently hired as consulting chef to reinvigorate the menus at Houston’s Berryhill restaurants.
I’ve also heard raves about the work of both Season 4’s top-five finisher James Nelson, who co-owns artisanal hot sauce and pickle maker Bravado Spice here, and that season’s ultimate winner, Luca Manfè. The Italian-born New Yorker last year chose Houston as the launch site of his wellreceived “farm-to-street” food truck, The Lucky Fig.
So there I was, under instructions from a Furiosa-look-alike producer to appear intimidating, marching in single file with my fellow critics off that openwork balcony and down a narrow, makeshift passageway into the show’s fauxrestaurant set. Seventeen tables-for-one awaited us. All the climbing up and navigating down and around backstage had me wishing desperately that I had not worn my Japanese platform origami shoes.
I couldn’t have known what suitable footwear might entail when the excursion bus picked us up at our West Hollywood hotel that morning in early March. We’d been told not to wear patterned clothing, and that was it. As the bus trundled our small herd of critics through manicured Beverly Hills and over the Sepulveda Pass into the unglamorous Valley, where the studio rambled through a warehouse complex, it felt like we were on some peculiar adult field trip.
Aboard were friends and strangers, some of whom I recognized. New York magazine’s Adam Platt towered over the multitude, raising a quizzical eyebrow. Jeffrey Steingarten, a veteran of Vogue whom I knew from James Beard journalism awards galas past, delivered one-liners like a sly, curmudgeonly Yoda. I was glad to see Tim Carman of the Washington Post, who once worked at the Houston Press, and to meet Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, the visionary founders of the Food 52 website.
At the studio, we were shepherded into a creaky outdoor tent with hopelessly overmatched air conditioning, where we were fluffed and smoothed by a makeup team fighting a mostly losing battle against the heat, the sweatiness and the reality that food critics seldom are hired for their telegenic looks. There were coffee and breakfast pastries, and they were dismal.
We talked shop. All the cool kids seemed to have dined at Cassia the night before or were headed there later. (I had popped into chef Kris Yenbamroong’s Night + Market, eager to see how the famous larbs compared with Houston’s contemporary Thai sensation, Foreign Correspondents.) I discovered that Eddie Lin, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, once lived in Houston and worked at his parents’ Chinese buffet restaurant. It failed, he told me, in the face of competition with our big buffet chains. “Write that book,” I told Lin, hoping he would take me seriously.
At some point, Gordon Ramsay, the British celebrity chef and star of the show, sailed into our tent in a bright-blue suit tailored to the nth degree. He glad-handed his way through our small throng like some benevolent royal personage, meeting and greeting, exchanging small talk.
From the golden waves of his hair to the buffedup radiance of his tan, Ramsay seemed enveloped in an impermeable gloss of the sort I’ve come to associate with Hollywood stars seen in the wild. He did not look entirely of this Earth.
Under special instruction, I told Ramsay that my sister, a die-hard fan of his cooking and restaurant shows, was nostalgic for the days when he’d call people “donkey,” one of his then-favorite epithets. He regarded me with something approaching alarm.
In due course, we were summoned into the studio, past vast shelves and storehouses of cookware and ingredients, and up metal stairs to the Balcony of Doom. There were no contestants rushing about in the big kitchen area down below, frantically trying to finish off their dishes before the clock counted down to zero. There were just 17 critics, directed by our Valkyrie to approach the rail; to gaze down toward the empty Red Team kitchen at one end; now toward the empty Blue Team kitchen at the other; attention, at ease, repeat.
All the while, great camera-bearing cranes swooped silently back and forth from below: approaching, receding, staring fixedly from yards away with cold glass eyes, like machine predators from some Terminator vision of the future.
Then it was back to our stifling tent for lunch. We filled plates from an outdoor steam table and ate off picnic tables laid with red-and-white plastic gingham, as if we were at a family reunion where the food was no better than it had to be. In self-defense, I consumed two pieces of not-bad cheesecake.
It was now afternoon. Finally, we were ushered back up the studio staircase and across the balcony into the restaurant set. More stage directions and instructions from the producers ensued. “Don’t let it affect your judgment if the food is cold,” we were told; that’s just the way it is on a show like this. We had little notebooks in which to inscribe our appraisals of each dish. We squirmed. We talked shop. I was fortunate to be seated next to Platt and in front of Steingarten, so jokes were plentiful.
From time to time, we could hear muffled thumps and cries from the adjacent kitchen set. I had to wonder what was going on. We had seen exactly none of the cooking action, although later — when I watched the show — I was amused to hear the contestants bemoaning our “death stares” as they peered up at the (empty) balcony, and lamenting that we looked like “stone cold killers,” although they had not yet laid eyes on us.
At long last, Ramsay and judge Christina Tosi, the celebrated pastry chef of Momofuku Milk Bar fame, appeared with guest judge Richard Blais, a former winner of “Top Chef” who went on to glory. Waiters began bringing in the food. They poured some ghastly red wine. The four semifinalists appeared, self-sorted into teams of two. Red: David Williams, Vegas poker player, and Tanoria Askew, Tennessee credit manager. Blue: Brandi Mudd, Kentucky schoolteacher, and Shaun O’Neale, Vegas DJ. They described their dishes. They disappeared again.
We ate the food. Yes, it was coldish — well, room temperature, actually. Which didn’t bother me overmuch. What discombobulated me was the pale yellow and lavender dots of purée ranged across my plate of hazelnut-crusted halibut with asparagus salad. They looked off-puttingly ditsy.
“When I first saw them I just went, ‘No,’ ” I explained to the camera crew that came through recording our reactions. That solitary “No” — part of the episode introduction — turned out to be my sole line of dialogue in the five minutes of the show actually devoted to the “critics-in-a-restaurant” segment. It was kind of perfect, given our assigned role as scary death-star monsters in the vein of Anton Ego, the critic in “Ratatouille.”
Of course, the reality was more complex. I had gone on to say that little dots or no, the dish had won me over with its graceful springlike quality, and the liveliness of that slivered asparagus salad in Meyer-lemon vinaigrette. It picked up the tartness of the Meyer lemon beurre blanc, of which I blush to say I could have eaten twice as much. And my fish was cooked to a nice, pearly slide — although Platt, at the next table over, complains on the show that it was slightly overcooked. Such are the vagaries of cooking and delivering food on a restaurant scale.
I was less persuaded by the Red team’s duck dish. The logs of very, very rare duck meat seemed clunky and insufficiently ras-el-hanout-y. The port-and-pomegranate sauce seemed curiously disconnected. But I loved the tart Brussels sprouts slaw in its grain-mustard vinaigrette, as well the crisped polenta cake. It was a dish for winter, but the halibut had reminded me of the season in which we found ourselves.
I ended up impressed with the skills and composure of both teams, and it was fun, when the episode finally ran, to see what had gone into their labors. These shows aren’t for sissies. Neither are they for the shy or the understated. I can’t imagine having the self-possession to compete under such crazy pressures, to say nothing of the drama — whether real or manufactured.
My favored Blue team ended up winning the day, and its O’Neale went on in the next episode to take the MasterChef title.
But I found myself humbled for the thousandth time at how critical judgment can turn on a dime, or on pastel dots of sauce “the size of M&Ms,” as I heard Jeffrey Steingarten grouse at the table behind me. And though my instinct was to blurt out congratulations to these four young people, I dutifully followed my mandate to exit poker-faced, or preferably scowling, as I turned in my evaluation sheet.
Steingarten, exiting behind me, played it his way, as I discovered when I watched the show. He greeted the Red team warmly, said he had voted for it, exclaimed over the polenta cake — all over the faux remonstrations of Ramsay. It was an ideal bit of made-for-TV drama, and I loved him for it.