The Chopping Block Finale: A Long Time Coming

No other way to say it – after seven episodes stretched out over four months, NBC has finally gotten around to showing who walked away with $250,000 to create a restaurant as the winners of The Chopping Block. However, that doesn’t mean we’re going to find out the winner straight away once the eighth and final episode begins, because as any fan of reality television will tell you, there has to be a big montage looking back at the failures of the previous contestants before the finalists face one last challenge.

In this case, we have two couples competing against each other: Chef Lisa and her ex-husband Anapol versus Chef Kelsey and her sister Vanessa. Episode Seven ended with Kelsey & Vanessa winning a tasting contest at an art museum against Lisa & Anapol. Host Marco Pierre White also announced one final dinner service that would determine the winner of the show. Because they won the art museum challenge, Kelsey & Vanessa got a prize – the advantage of picking which restaurant they would use for the final challenge – Crimson, where they have worked the past few weeks, or the opposing team’s restaurant, Soul. Kelsey & Vanessa picked Crimson.

This pick certainly makes a lot of sense in a competition. After all, it is giving the two women a home-court advantage over the other team since they know the layout of the place, both in the kitchen and out front. Meanwhile, Lisa & Anapol will have to work in unfamiliar surroundings (as readers may remember, Lisa & Anapol also worked out of Crimson over the past several weeks) and pretty much work out any problems with the space in a very short amount of time while also getting ready for the final service.

So, good play by Kelsey & Vanessa. However, I did cautiously mention in the review for Episode Seven that the one thing that would obliterate such an advantage is if the producers decided to strip the restaurants down to nothing so that the two teams would have to rebuild the restaurants from scratch. That would be a terrible idea, I mentioned at the time, as it meant the “Great White Challenge” of the art museum tasting menu was pointless, since the prize meant no advantage whatsoever. It would mean that we could have simply not seen Episode Seven at all and still have the same resolution, making Kelsey’s & Vanessa’s win in that episode meaningless. Ironically, according to Wikipedia, Episode Seven never aired in Britain when the series ran earlier this year. Maybe they were on to something.

Alas, the final episode opens with the teams arriving at their respective restaurants to find them emptied and the walls painted white. (Upon entering, Vanessa refers to the look as “walking into a cloud.”) This is intercut with Marco, in his ever-comfy chair, stating he had this done so that the teams would have a “blank canvas” in order to recreate the restaurants they wanted.

Well, that’s all fine and good, but why wasn’t that made the challenge the previous episode – to have the places redone and then (let’s say) have a designer come in and review which of the two looked the best and was the most practical – AND THEN have the final dinner service still be done in the finale with some other prize given to the winner of the design challenge. Instead, it seems as if no one working on the show really knew what to do once the program got to the final teams.

Then again – and let me go on this rant here instead of saving it for the end of the article – it has been obvious that the producers were never sure what they were doing with this program. It began in the first episode when it was evident that the audition process failed by allowing a couple, Khoa & Denise, that didn’t understand the competitive nature of the reality show (or any reality show) bow out after being disturbed by the aggressive nature of the other competitors. Then there was the elimination method that left one team with not enough help to match that of the opposing team, giving the team with more members an unfair advantage. This is, until the producers resolved the problem by giving the smaller team outside professional help to even up the numbers. True, it did make the teams equal, but it also meant the smaller team got PROFESSIONAL help that the other team did not. This happened on more than one occasion.

On a more direct note, an excellent breakfast service by Dean & Shari during a competition was ignored, as “only the lunch service will be critiqued.” A condition never mentioned until after the competition was over. Thus, even though Dean & Shari had obviously won at breakfast and were essentially neck-and-neck with the other team for lunch, the critic begrudgingly gave the other team the win. A rather unfair advantage indeed.

Beyond the inconsistencies of the rules in the program, there were other problems as well. Marco has proven a very dull host who seems much more interested in proving himself a sage overlord in a comfy chair rather than actively involving himself with the contestants as a teacher or even critic. Obviously, he sees himself as “above it all” in an attempt not to favor some contestants over others. Yet his attitude gave off an air of disinterest in what was happening – so long as he came off as the smartest guy in the room.

Then we had the bizarre encounter where Marco reached out to Kelsey & Vanessa in order to give them a pep talk for the next to last competition. It was bizarre because he did no such thing with any of the other competitors. Of course, we’re dealing with reality-show editing, where drama is the key. Maybe Marco did speak with the others and those talks lacked the “drama” of his threat of eliminating Kelsey if she did poorly But because all we saw was his talk with Kelsey & Vanessa, it would be no surprise if the audience felt that they were the “teacher’s pets.” In essence, it made both Marco and Kelsey & Vanessa look bad.

On the other hand, perhaps there was a good reason for Marco to detach himself from the contestants – almost all seemed inept both in the kitchen and out front in the restaurants. No one seemed to know how to cook basic dishes or even to have heard of some. (Never heard of fish pie? Really? Even if you had not, wouldn’t the concept of how it was made be readily apparent?) With the exception of Dean and Lisa, most of the chefs acted like they never advanced beyond Jiffy-Pop popcorn and microwave dinners. Even the contestants on Hell’s Kitchen seem like master chefs compared to the majority of the chefs on The Chopping Block. Nor did the others in each couple seem to understand basic service skills out front, or general skills needed to run a business. What were they there for if not to help win the competitions for their chefs? One has to ask why these people became contestants after seeing them perform so poorly. Were they the only chefs left in America that hadn’t appeared on another cooking show?