The contestants featured on Top Chef are all talented, but even the best sometimes make terrible mistakes. This was evident during tonight’s episode, when Phillip Frankland Lee somehow thought that serving a nasty-looking dish on a rock was a good idea.
The Quickfire challenges on Top Chef often bring out the best of the show’s featured contestants, who are forced to get extra creative. However, these challenges also quickly prove that even the world’s most talented chefs sometimes suffer huge flubs.
More: Meet the Top Chef Season 13 contestants
This week, the big challenge was to harness the sun’s power. Half of the contestants were given solar-powered ovens, while the other half had to work with solar-powered stoves. Several were able to come up with recipes that were both eco-friendly and delicious. Suffice to say, Lee was not part of this group. He somehow thought that it would be a good idea to serve oysters in extreme heat — and on top of a random rock.
The only good thing to come out of Lee’s dish was an amusing name from Padma Lakshmi. She referred to the vile creation as “snot on a rock.” This label only made the rock-based dish look worse, an accomplishment viewers would have otherwise thought impossible.
More:Top Chef‘s best and worst reactions to cheftestant dishes
The crazy thing is, Lee knows what he’s doing. A young chef with a very impressive career, he has been highlighted on Zagat’s list of 30 under 30. At this point, he should have a good instinct for when an idea is completely ridiculous.
The judges weren’t impressed with Lee’s creation and neither were fans of Top Chef. On Twitter, his dish was compared to everything from mucus to gum on a rock. Nobody really had anything good to say about Lee’s work — the comments ranged from bemused to completely disgusted.
Lee has yet to respond to these negative tweets, but when he does, he won’t be able to blame bad editing, as he has while explaining the not-so-humble behavior featured during past episodes.
More: Top Chef fans love Kwame Onwuachi for not being a reality show jerk
Amazingly enough, Lee was not eliminated during tonight’s episode. Stranger still is the fact that few wanted him to go home. Instead, fans were rooting for a prompt Grayson Schmitz exit — and the show obliged. Lee definitely has his issues, but he is nowhere near as annoying as Schmitz. Hopefully, he will learn from his Quickfire disaster and return with dishes that are at least a little more appetizing.
Leave a Comment