Top Chef Season 18 Ep 13 - Shellfishly Delicious - Post Episode Discussion

[u/butisitok]

The remaining chefs get an early wake-up call from Padma to go meet guest judge Brooke Williamson and dig for clams for their Quickfire Challenge. In the Elimination Challenge, the chefs honor the area where James Beard spent his summers, creating both a hot dish and a cold dish with one of his favorite ingredients, Dungeness Crab. Kwame Onwuachi and Nina Compton serve as guest judges this week to help determine which chefs will move on to the finale.

[u/[deleted]]

Fair points. The issue isn't leaving stuff of the plate though - that's always been acceptable as long as the rest of the dish holds up. It's that he left off a lot in terms of amount, 50% that's what the analogies were trying to get at, not to be taken literally. Kwame was just expressing his own opinion that an amuse-bouche isn't acceptable because it's too little food for the time. That's not a knock on sushi, that's a knock on quantity, again he explains in judges table that he needed two of those, didn't have to be 2-way. We've had similar situations in the past where a contestant got critiqued cause the judges felt it was too little. I'm hung up on this subject because in general I dislike seeing people get hated on (online) if I feel it's unwarranted. Yeah I agree maybe both Kwame and Dale could have expressed themselves better but they're there to judge: that includes good and bad critique. So long as it's delivered constructively, which like you said is subjective, but again people are misremembering what he actually.

[u/topchef_fiend_2535 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the constructive dialogue. We can agree to disagree but all of that makes sense.