Did you catch last night's Top Chef Masters? Finally, a worthy episode on what seemed like a season in danger of backsliding into the histrionics of regular Top Chef with the F-bombs and manufactured drama. That's not to say there wasn't some of that last night, just less.
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It was a good show all around, and not just because our friend Eddie Lin was part of the “Scary Surf and Turf” Elimination Challenge tasting panel (actually, I thought they could've used more of him). I liked it because the Simpsons Quickfire Challenge before the main event was inspired. For the first time, it's not some blatant way to promote Bravo's other shows (sharks were being jumped when they had the Real Housewives on to judge earlier this season). Instead you actually had a set of judges that actually had something interesting to say, and something interesting to say it about.
The chefs drew knives on a Simpsons character to cook a dish for. The judges included Matt Groening, the Simpsons' creator, and Hank Azaria, who does the voices of Chief Wiggum, Apu and others. Azaria did his due diligence and spoke in character as Apu on receiving the Indian dish that Marcus Samuellson cooked; but it was Groening who provided the single-most interesting bit of Simpsons food trivia. He revealed, upon eating Jody Adams' Lisa-inspired vegetarian dish, that Sir Paul McCartney agreed to do the now legendary guest spot on the classic episode where Lisa turned vegetarian on the condition that Lisa remain a vegetarian forever. Now that, I didn't know!
And if you're still hungry for Simpsons-related food fun, check out this post by our sister paper's blog: Top 10 Simpsons Food References!
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.