The Chopping Block, Episode 7: But Is It Art?

Ratings continue to hold steady for The Chopping Block -- lousy as ever. The show came in third out of the networks for programming during the first network hour on July 17 – but it could be worse. At least we can give credit to NBC for bothering to run the show to its finish, even if it isn’t really coming off much better than it did in the first few episodes that aired back in the spring. But perhaps any analysis of the show as a whole should wait until the finale airs.

But we’re not quite there yet. So let’s look at the two final couples – Lisa and her ex-husband Anapol, and Kelsey and her sister Vanessa. They’re about to go up against each other in a final “Great White Challenge.” As readers will remember, Lisa and Kelsey are the two chefs from the Red Team, which ran the Crimson restaurant. With Episode 6 seeing the departure of Dean and his wife Shari, the Black Team’s Soul restaurant was closed down. Thus, with two couples from the same restaurant left to compete, it will be interesting to see how they set up the next challenge. After all, to send one couple over to the other restaurant would mean giving them the disadvantage of an unfamiliar location to work in, while having both teams working out of the same restaurant may be uninteresting.

Things get cracking this week with Marco standing in the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue in New York. He is looking up at The Portrait of Adele by Gustav Klimt as the contestants come in, whereupon he turns to them and asks them if they like art. While it is tempting to reply, “No, but I know what I like,” instead the contestants play along and tell Marco yes. Marco tells the group that the painting they are looking at holds a world record for its sales price of $135 million dollars. He then goes on to discuss the simplicity of Klimt’s painting, which either shows that Marco is fixated on the word simplicity to the point of neurosis or that he’s not completely familiar with Klimt’s work. Klimt has been called a lot of things, but simplistic has never been one of them, and The Portrait of Adele is certainly not a painting that screams “simple.”

Fortunately for Marco, he stops with the art criticism and tells the teams that their next challenge is cooking for fifty individuals at Café Sabarsky, which is located in the art gallery. The objective is to create a six course tasting menu, where each chef will individually create an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert that represents the mood of the work they are viewing within the museum. Marco emphasizes that the people they are feeding are “posh and used to eating well,.” Marco encourages the teams to study the artwork by Klimt and see how they can make food that is like his paintings.

And it is here that Marco makes a fatal error – while he may be stuck on the word simple, he does understand that Klimt’s work is considered luxurious, while at the same time shifting into overt sexual overtones (some more blatant than others). In other words, Marco’s looking for something that brings out the sometimes hidden, fiery sensuality of Klimt’s work. Lisa states she’s inspired by the art, but her inspiration involves thinking about what the people in the paintings would eat. Meanwhile, Kelsey sees gold in the main painting and decides she wants to do something with edible gold-leaf in order to copy it. In other words, as the old saying goes, they’re missing the forest for the trees.

While the teams flounder a bit over what exactly they need to bring to the challenge, one thing that is clear for the chefs is that they are glad to be working away from each other. Kelsey sees the break away from Lisa as a chance to show what she can do on her own instead of giving in to Lisa’s “my way or the highway” attitude in the kitchen. As for Lisa, she states multiple times that she is relaxed because she knows she will readily win the challenge since she doesn’t see Kelsey as competition. In fact, Lisa flatly states that she can’t see any way her team can lose, knowing that Kelsey is who she has to beat.

After this musing, Marco shows the couples to the kitchen in the museum, which is a tiny place that the two chefs will have to share, side by side. The kitchen is a floor down from the restaurant itself, with a dumbwaiter system used to get orders up to the customers. In an interview from his “study,” Marco says he’s interested in seeing if the couples work with each other as they have in the past, or if they will work against each other now that it’s come down to one or the other winning.

The answer is readily apparent in the next shot when the couples are going through what protein is available to them. Lisa wants the filet of beef, leaving Kelsey with the lamb-chops, because Lisa believes the kitchen is too small to do the lamb properly and believes she is helping to set Kelsey up for a fall by leaving the lamb with her.

With the proteins sorted out, the two couples are sent off to Eli’s Market with $500 to purchase food and décor for the tasting. Kelsey’s menu is:

Steamed clams in saffron broth

Lamb over avocado fennel salsa (the menu shown on-camera states tomato fennel salsa instead)

Chocolate-dipped cherries over cinnamon whipped cream, with edible gold-leaf

Lisa’s menu is:

Crab salad with Bloody Mary vinaigrette and fresh dill

Filet Mignon with Swiss gruyere grati and a cabernet au jus, with fried sage

Black fig with warm goat cheese sauce and pomegranate seeds

At the market, Anapol tells Lisa he isn’t sure they need $50 blocks of cheese for their meal, especially with their total budget of only $500. Lisa, however, can’t see making her dishes any other way and keeps the cheeses in her cart. The couples are shown quarreling over the avocados, as both chefs want to use it, but things seem to go in Kelsey’s favor – although we don’t get to see how they arrive at this choice.