The Chopping Block, Episode 5: Think of the Starving Children!

As anyone keeping track of this series so far knows, the fifth episode did not air as originally planned on June 26. This was due to the untimely passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson and NBC deciding to go with special news-programming instead on that day, which was understandable – NBC has been winning the Friday night ratings-war thanks to Dateline of all things, so more of the same is only in their best interest.

But all good things come to an end and since there was no need for a three-hour review of Karl Malden’s life and career (although he probably deserved it more than some others), The Chopping Block finally came back on July 3 for another new episode. Amazingly, ratings have picked up, albeit slightly, with the show gaining a little over a quarter of a million viewers since the fourth episode aired. That still left it with less than 2.3 million viewers, but with NBC Dateline’s help, it pushed NBC into the number one spot for the evening.

Which shows you how low ratings are this summer for the networks.

Episode five starts off, as every episode has, with Marco in the kitchen preparing a dish. The emphasis is on preparation, as his Great White Challenge this week is for the Black and Red teams to take twenty minutes to prepare ingredients for a main course and then ten minutes to cook it. To show them how easy this can be if they keep it simple, he has the preparations in front of him to make grilled tuna with black olives, lemon, and herbs. He tells the teams to time him to see if he can get it done within give minutes. He does it in just over three.

The teams then begin their challenge. The Black Team, playing for the Soul restaurant, has Angie making shrimp piccati, while Dean works on pasta carbonara. The Red Team, playing for the Crimson restaurant, has Lisa and Kelsey working on pasta dishes, which isn’t really explained in great details in the show. As they cook, Marco is surprised to see that Dean is putting black olives in his carbonara; Dean, however, insists that it’s his mom’s recipe and the olives really add to the favor. Marco lets it go, stating that he’ll be interested in trying it. Dean’s partner, Angie, is not happy with the fast pace that Dean is working in, but assumes that it is just a difference in styles and lets it go. As for the red team, although Marco insisted before the challenge that the teams need to be more aggressive in communicating with each other and Marco (he demonstrates this by trying to get Kelsey to shout at him), Lisa and Kelsey rarely speak up while working on their dishes.

With Marco rapidly tapping his spoon on the counter, the teams get their courses in front of him at the very last second. The Red Team is first, with Marco sampling Lisa’s dish first of the two. He isn’t happy and tells Lisa that “you could do better.” He likes Kelsey’s dish, however, so it appears they may still have a shot at it. Yet after sampling the Black Team’s food, he decides that they are the winning team and will get the advantage for the next competition.

The competition that will decide which couple will next be leaving is that of a lunch service serving Italian food to Italians (okay, mostly Italian-Americans, but you mostly hear the short-form term being used within the program). Having won the challenge, the Black Team will get the benefit of an espresso machine from Seattle and the use of a barista. Why they need a wrestler there to chokeslam people, I have no idea. No, I’m thinking of Dave Batista of the WWE. (Oh, ho! What humor! I… er… eh… you do what you can with the material you’re given.) A barista is essentially a bartender for coffee drinks, and since everyone goes on about how Italians (i.e. Italian-Americans) love their coffee, it is a plus for the Black Team to have the barista’s services for lunch.

The other big challenge for the competition is that the front of each restaurant will have to do the service without menus. So the dishes being prepared will have to be memorized by those on each team that won’t be in the back preparing the food. As Marco points out, as long as the chefs keep it simple, the front should be able to remember the menus off the top of their heads.

The teams are sent to Little Italy to get ingredients and Dean has a field day showing everyone the great ingredients available for them. Knowing that they are Italians (aka Italian-Americans) and cooking for Italians (who happen to be Americans) and making Italian food (which is just Italian food… unless you go to Olive Garden, and that’s fried food with tomato or cream sauce smeared on it). As for the Red Team, they are concern because not only is the food not arriving as scheduled, but tomatoes had been recalled due to a salmonella outbreak, leaving them to make Italian food without tomatoes.

At Soul, Angie wants Dean to work on the clams, which concerns him because A) they’re very small and thus hard to clean all the grit off of them and B) she only wants three on a plate, which Dean sees as being very skimpy for Italians (Americans with Italian backgrounds), as they usually like a bit more on a plate when being served. Although Dean is letting her have her head, Angie is starting to feel the pressure and thinks Dean is setting her up to fail. Later in the episode, she states that she feels Dean is asking in the role of head chef even though he knows she is in charge, “but he’s a man and that’s what they do,” she shrugs. In an interview, Marco states that he is very interested in see Angie “step up” to the challenge of being head chef. As viewers may recall, Angie avoided the position in all previous instances even after being warned by Marco that she could be eliminated if her team lost in Episode 3 (fortunately for her, the Black Team won).

As for the Red Team, Lisa explains the menu to Anapol and Vanessa – the other members of the team who will be serving in the front for the lunch competition – and zips through a list about a mile long of the items. While that was discouraging enough to Anapol, he is even less thrilled about trying to do the espressos. If the situation seems somewhat depressing for the competitors going into the competition, their spirits are momentarily lifted when Marco stops by both restaurants to tell them that he would be dining for lunch at their restaurants during the competition with his friend of thirty years, Mario Batali. The idea of cooking for Batali, a famous chef known to have worked his way up through the business and famous for his restaurants and his previous television work on The Food Network, both excites and causes anxiety amongst the team members.

The contestants’ concerns, however, should be geared more towards pleasing the critic amongst the customers, who is Colman Andrews of Gourmet Magazine. He arrives in Soul to test the Black Team’s food just as Marco and Mario sit down at a table near the front door at the Red Team’s restaurant, Crimson. Andrews orders the percatelli ala carbonara with kalama olives, although he is mystified by the addition of olives to the dish. While all this is going on, Vincent Pastore, an Italian-American actor who played “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero on The Sopranos, arrives at Crimson with some friends for lunch.

While one former Sopranos star tries his luck at Crimson, another one, Federico Castelluccio (who played Furio), arrives at Soul with a few people. Hey! An Italian actually born in Italy! What a concept! He orders an espresso and is impressed after taking a sip, which goes to show that winning the Great White Challenge can lead to a good bonus for the later competition. To bring that point home, the camera cuts over to Crimson, where Anapol states he wishes he had a mechanic there to fix their espresso machine, which is malfunctioning.

Anapol isn’t the only one fuming at Crimson, however, as Vincent Pastore is wondering where their table’s food will arrive. Marco, upon hearing about the frustration, goes into the kitchen with Mario and asks what went on with the order. Lisa admits in an interview that somehow it got missed although she’s not sure how. Mario and Marco take the food out personally to Vincent’s table, while Lisa cusses to herself over the mistake done in front of both Marco and Mario. After a time, Vincent comes back to compliment the food, which is graciously taken, although Lisa doesn’t seem completely pleased with the situation, even after the compliment.

As Marco and Mario sit at their table, more customers arrive. Oddly, they all seem to recognize Mario but have no words to say to Marco, as if they have no idea who he is. This makes it appear that the show may have been better off with Mario as the star instead of Marco, since he seems to be more recognizable to the people coming in off the streets, but no doubt that has a lot to do with the editing there.

One group of customers has some children with them and Marco brings Vanessa over to advise her to sit the “kiddies” and always keep an eye on everything happening there in the front, as it will affect how the customers perceive the restaurant. Vanessa goes off to find space for the group waiting. This ties in directly with a woman at a table with young children asking Anapol what they have that kids will eat. Anapol offers a couple of options such as pasta with a butter sauce and the woman reacts as if he had suggested she fed her children maggot-infested rat heads. Her response to the camera is, “Happy children make for a happy restaurant.” Actually, it should be, “No children in the restaurant make for a happy restaurant.” Certainly that would be the case in what is supposed to be an upper-scale adult restaurant, which Crimson is supposed to be.