"jonathan waxman" news and stories

"If you knew what I was cooking, you'd be puking." Leave it to Susan Feniger to mince no words with the Whole Foods cashier as she tried to gather up ingredients for this week's Top Chef Masters challenge.

Yes, even the woman who travels the globe in search of new street food was put off by the proteins given her this week -- and we can't say we blame her.

TCM's first season subjected the nation's best chefs to guts, feet and other offal on an episode. This week, the producers decided to dredge up a "favorite" form of punishment from Top Chef's early days: The exotic surf and turf challenge. This meant rolling out a display cart that looked like a cross between a taxidermist's rec room and a David Cronenberg movie: Sea Cucumber. Geoduck. Giant squid. Kangaroo. Duck tongue.

One question: Who decides which lucky newlyweds get to be a part of Top Chef's perennial "Wedding Wars" episode? And do they take bribes?

Frankly, we weren't planning nuptials anytime soon. But based on the spread served up by eight of the nation's best chefs on this week's Top Chef Masters, we'd like to know the shooting schedule for next season now, so we can get to the top of the list. Forget the registry -- we'd be marrying for the food.

"Wedding Wars" team challenges, of course, are a staple of the Top Chef franchise, along with piercings in strange parts of the body and the creative use of the f-word. But never has the challenge been done like this: Jonathan Waxman can make tarragon roast chicken for us anytime. Even the "boring" wedding food -- potatoes au gratin by Tony Montuano, crab cakes by Carmen Gonzalez -- looked mouthwatering, perfectly crusted and crunchy. And then there was the literal icing on the cake: Five -- five! -- separate desserts by Susur Lee.

Ludo, Ludo, Ludo. As long as the programming savants at Bravo are going to spin off every one of their reality franchises into at least 31 flavors, can we have a Top Chef Ludo, already?

Not that we love the guy, exactly, mind you -- we love hating him, and hate it when we end up loving him. In his second appearance in the inner sanctum of Top Chef Masters -- the first was last year, when he made some offal tacos for tourists -- Ludovic Lefebvre, the Paris-by-way-of-SoCal enfant terrible, managed to astound, confound, infuriate and otherwise entertain anyone unfortunate enough to be in his blazing path of culinary genius.

To judge by Ludo's opinion of himself, "culinary genius" is an understatement. Granted, the man has worked wonders with his LudoBites, his roving, temporary restaurant concept that has delivered chilled liquid-chorizo and other inventions to L.A. denizens for a couple of years now, so any amount of bluster is at least a little justified.

More from last night's episode after the jump.

Photo: Amazon.com

'A Great American Cook:
Recipes from the Home Kitchen of One of Our Most Influential Cooks'
Jonathan Waxman with Tom Steele
Photographs by John Kernick
Houghton Mifflin -- 2007
Buy it on Amazon

It's rather hilarious when a chef's cookbook matches his real-life persona.

We interviewed Jonathan Waxman -- of recent "Top Chef Masters" fame -- a year or two ago about how to properly cut open an artichoke. He was confident that we'd be able to briskly pick up the trick (which could cause an untrained cook to handily slice off a digit) without much practice.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that the man who trained Bobby Flay in the kitchen some 20 years ago is a pretty darn good teacher, and we were happily producing pretty decent artichoke specimens within minutes.

That same confident, coaxing voice is present throughout Waxman's cookbook, a hodgepodge of his culinary experiences. From the red-pepper pancakes with corn and caviar he introduced at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse to a potato gratin he picked up while training in France, this is a fine compilation from a man who has trained many of the American greats -- and who used to hobnob with the likes of James Beard and Julia Child.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying, after the jump.

Jonathan Waxman Photo: Fabrizio Ferri, courtesy of jonathanwaxman.com

Could you feel the love last night on Top Chef Masters? Sure, the season until now has been all about pro-chef bonding: sharing techniques; lending a hand in the crunch; reminiscing about experiences in the culinary world.

But Wednesday was something else entirely. The competing foursome went to a place somewhere beyond mere camaraderie -- a place even further than the conciliatory, bromantic half-hug shared by final-round losers Roy Yamaguchi (Roy's Hawaiian Kitchen) and Michael Cimarusti (of LA's acclaimed Providence). What we witnessed last night was an emotional journey, a blubbering, four-hanky love-in.

The warm fuzzies started with the introduction of this group's demigod, Jonathan Waxman. Not only was the Barbuto owner and New Yorker a literal mentor to Cimarusti years prior, but his clout with James Beard and Julia Child back in the day held Yamaguchi and Oprah's favorite Southern chef Art Smith (Table 52) in awe for most of the episode.

When it came time for each chef to pick the ingredients for each others' final cook-off, their selections the best seasonal goods Whole Foods had to offer, rather than sundry oddities meant to undermine the competition: kumquats, sunchokes, mangoes, beautiful bone-in pork chops. "The word 'sabotage' isn't in a professional chef's vocabulary," Waxman reminded us.