Life's Ceviche and Then You Blog

Oh the thrill, possums, the thrill.

Jennifer Carroll worked at Le Bernardin for five years, and now heads another Eric Ripert restaurant, and she can’t pronounce ceviche?!? Oh the vapors, possums, the deliciousness of it all.

It made us think of that speech Anthony Hopkins recites in The Silence of the Lambs, about Jody Foster’s character wearing cheap shoes and being a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. We know nothing about the background of Jennifer Carroll—who, to our delight, described herself as “a freakin’ bitch in the kitchen” who’s “made enough boys cry”—but something about her gives off a whiff of the trailer park. Is it the accent, her admission that she drinks too much and does stupid things as a result? Is it the way she looks perennially unkempt, or drunk, or angry, or on the verge of tears? Whatever it is, we love this hot mess, and the woman can cook. Had this been last season, we would have pegged her as the one most likely to engage in drunken hate-sex with the Asshole of New Jersey, except that this isn’t the season of Leah and Hosea, and the Asshole of New Jersey doesn’t deserve so much as a hate ass-whoopin’, much less a hate fuck.

Make no mistake about it. She may be unfamiliar with a comb, but she can handle a spatula like a dream, and will make for entertaining television. And best of all, she might just take the whole thing.

Seeing How the Sausage Is Made

And there’s a lot of gristle in that sausage, possums, if the above is any indication. We came upon that on Television Without Pity, where poster SisterOfSylar said the tidbits came from a friend with access to inside information.

We have, of course, no way of knowing whether any of these tidbits are true, but if they are, they help to make sense of other events.

For example, during many of his post-win interviews, Hosea Rosenberg oddly discusses how demoralized he was after his make-out session with Leah Cohen, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Earlier, we theorized that remorse on the part of Leah and Hosea was not necessarily the result of their consciences needling them, but, rather, “a product of discovery, a realization that their encounter would be televised, and would have consequences.” And if Il Colicchio did indeed have to do a finger-wagging chat with the two lovebirds, it makes this theory of ours all the more plausible. And it’s easy the stress from a fruitless attempt to convince editors not to show the make-out footage.

In any case, very interesting, possums, very.

(Click on the picture to enlarge it and read the details of Scott Conant-Fabio-Colicchio Italian-offs, Colicchio-sick-making food, and avuncular ursine scoldings.)

Page Six: Leah & Hosea at It Again

Even Tom Colicchio Wants to Know If Leah and Hosea “Hooked Up”; He’s Betting on Fabio for Fan Favorite, and Liked “Slumdog Millionaire”

Hosea Rosenberg’s “Tasty Treats,” “Hugs, Kisses, and Spoon-Feeding” at South Beach

For details, read this account of the party hosted at the Pelican Hotel by Jeff McInnis, and featuring the work of Jamie Lauren, Melissa Harrison, and—surprise!—Leah Cohen.

Money Shot! $100,000 Shot

Hey, possums, ain't nothin' wrong with that passionate kiss; they're both single now.

Mamma Mia! Fabio Viviani Says His Mother Is “Smoking Hot”

On the video (which, until Bravo reintroduces embeddable viewing, you’ll have to watch here), Fabio says Hosea and Leah were more than friends and less than lovers, that males kissing is “a European thing,” and that he would vote for himself as fan favorite. He also asks Bravo to provide him the DVD of the season because (ahem) Bravo doesn’t sell DVDs of Top Chef.

Wayward & Biatchstein Investigate: The Red Shirt Diaries, a Softcore Epic

Possums, as part of our analysis of Leah Cohen’s tenure on Top Chef, we were particularly intrigued by a statement she made during an interview with our pals at The Feedbag:

I didn’t want to be on the show anymore. Especially after the night before Restaurant Wars. They told me they had footage of Hosea and I [sic]. That had happened before that. Why would they tell me that right before restaurant wars? At that point I just felt like Bravo’s little puppet.

But…but…but on the show it looked like the marathon make-out session took place the night before Restaurant Wars. And here Leah is saying that it happened before that. Surely the Bravo editors wouldn’t deceive us or fiddle with the timeline of events? No, impossible!

This was definitely a job for Wayward & Biatchstein.

To the tape, possums.

Take a good look at the photo below. According to the chronology of the episode as aired, it depicts the night before Restaurant Wars. As you can see, Leah is wearing a short-sleeved white t-shirt and Hosea is wearing a red t-shirt. An unkempt, tired-looking and -sounding Leah says to Hosea that she is going to sleep.

Now take a look at a photo from the make-out session, which, if you believe the chronology of the episode as aired, took place shortly after this exchange.

What’s this? Leah’s hair is no longer Medusa-like, and she is now sporting a white tanktop, and Hosea is fully dressed and sporting a white t-shirt. So, if you are to believe the chronology of the episode as aired, Hosea changed his clothes, and the half-asleep Leah changed her clothes and combed her hair, just for the purpose of making out secretly on the couch.

But hark! Here is the red t-shirt again, and what is Hosea saying in his interview while he sports said shirt? “Last night, Leah and I are sitting on the couch for probably two hours, and we ended up kissing” (emphasis added).

Say what?

Again, if you are to believe the chronology of the episode as aired, you have to believe that Hosea started out the night in the red t-shirt, then changed into jeans and a white t-shirt just to make out with Leah, and then changed back into the red t-shirt the next day to say they kissed “last night.” Uh-huh, yeah.

As Miss XaXa put it, “Not hardly likely.”

In our opinion, it looks like Leah was telling the truth, and that the make-out session did not take place the night before Restaurant Wars.

In our theoretical “red shirt” timeline, the make-out session likely took place the night that Ariane Duarte was ousted for butchering the lamb on the “Down on the Farm” episode. Indeed, if you pay attention to what Hosea says during the interview bits where he wears the red shirt, he refers only to events that took place during the “Down on the Farm” episode and during the first day of the “Restaurant Wars,” e.g., the Quickfire Challenge judged by Stephen Starr. This supports the theory that Hosea’s interview took place the evening of the first Restaurant Wars day, after the Starr challenge.

Thus, our “red shirt” timeline goes something like this:

Day A: The cheftestants travel to Stone Barns and prepare lunch for the farmers. They return to New York in the afternoon, and during Judges’ Table Ariane is pykagged. As Leah told TVGuide.com, the camera people “usually leave when everyone is going to sleep.” And that night, after Ariane’s ouster, thinking the cameras had gone, she and Hosea had their make-out session on the couch (without, of course, taking their body mikes off).

Day B: No apparent remorse following the make-out session. Stephen Starr Quickfire Challenge; Leah selected as head of one of Restaurant Wars teams, hugs Hosea following positive verdict from Starr; go shopping at Pier One; return to apartment; production staff inform them of make-out footage from previous night; Hosea, wearing red shirt, talks about their kissing “last night”; Hosea and distraught Leah go over menu for next day’s Restaurant Wars.

Day C: Restaurant Wars; demoralized Leah.

Well, you may say, possums, so what? So you spent hours reviewing the episode footage and trying to figure this out, but what difference does it make?

Leah, it seems to us, casts this as a dark plot to demoralize and manipulate her (and possibly the outcome of Restaurant Wars): “Why would they tell me that right before restaurant wars? At that point I just felt like Bravo’s little puppet.”

We wouldn’t go that far. We think, though, that the real sequence of events casts a different light on Leah and Hosea’s behavior. The episode is edited to suggest, if not outright state, that Leah and Hosea were, to quote Fabio, “een a sheetee mood” on the day of Restaurant Wars itself because of morning-after remorse and regret on account of their make-out session, and that such remorse affected their performance during Restaurant Wars. It’s a much more moralistic gloss, immoral cheaters undermined by the realization of their own immorality (and, we have argued and will argue elsewhere, plays into a storyline about Leah as some sort of temptress leading stolid Hosea astray).

But look at this image from the Quickfire Challenge, which took place the morning after the make-out session (or even earlier, if the make-out session occurred before Ariane’s ouster).

Does it look like these are two people in the throes of remorse for having, in Leah’s words, “cheated” on their significant others? Again, not hardly likely.

However, if Leah’s version of events is correct, then her bad mood during Restaurant Wars was due not to natural morning-after regret, but to the fact of having been told by producers, “Gotcha!” The “love birds,” as Ariane described them, thought no one had seen their encounter, and they were wrong. Her remorse, and Hosea’s remorse, and the attendant “sheetee mood,” were a product of discovery, a realization that their encounter would be televised, and would have consequences.

We were rooting for Radhika Desai’s team, and we’ll certainly never know, but perhaps Leah’s team would have performed better had this not come into play.

Leah & Hosea to Cook Together Again

And under the auspices of Jeff McInnis, who is throwing a recession-buster of a party in South Beach. Tickets (only 150 are available!) are “$175+taxes+fees” and give you, possums, “access to both penthouses on the top floor of the Pelican [Hotel], culinary entertainment [ahem] by Top Chefs, open bar and ocean views.” The sweet stylings of Nero on the lyre are complimentary. Buy your tickets now! And if you do go, possums, be sure to send us a report.

Previews: Denial, Gimmicks, Creative Monkeys (Borrowed from Hung?), Leah Sows Her Wild Quaker Oats, and How the Hell Is Nikki Cascone an “All-Star”?

“Top Chef” or the First Ad in JDate’s National Television Campaign?

Of course, there’s a third possibility to explain the actions of Leah Cohen and Hosea Rosenberg in the interstitial, but we’ll get to that in a sec.

But first, possums, we call “bullshit.” The interstitial was broadcast after the obligatory Stew Room scenes and right before Alex Eusebio was euthani-pykagged by Padma. The strong implication, since the “tribal marking” session clearly took place in the Stew Room, was that it was happening the same night that bridegroom Alex was to be put out of his Miss-ery and launched into Mrs-ery.

This, however, doesn’t appear to be the case. As shown below, during the breakfast Quickfire Challenge, little hearts drawn by Hosea could be seen on Leah’s hand. This means that the love graffiti was inscribed the night before, i.e., the night that Richard was pykagged.

Why the deceit, and what was the point of this whole interstitial in the first place?

Certainly it could be part of the Leah-and-Hosea-sittin’-in-a-tree storyline, but we already had that in a previous episode, so this seems unnecessary. It’s apparent from the reaction of those around them that their antics have caused some amount of eye-rolling (except for the always understanding Carla, who chalks it up to sexual chemistry). We find something unsettling in this setting up of Leah as a needy, clingy Jezebel twining herself around a gap-toothed Rocky Mountain patriarch (and it isn’t just the name Hosea that makes us think this; his very features cry out for a Mennonite hat and a barn-raising, and Harrison Ford hiding out from the bad guys).

Indeed, when Alex went into the sequester house with the other misfit toys, he re-enacted that twining and referred to Leah as a “Ho fo’ Sho’” (leaving aside for just a second how sexist this is, wouldn’t it be more accurate to call her, in light of the object of her affection, “Ho for Ho”?). Would any self-respecting chef, especially someone who cooked under Anne Burrell, want to be portrayed on television as a cat in heat and called a “ho”? (Furthermore, given how proud a number of Asian-themed blogs and media outlets are of Leah (her mother is Filipina), it seems an added injury for the editors to trot out these suggestions of the old, sexualized, “me love you long time” image of Asian women in this portrayal of Leah.)

But what if the whole thing was about nothing more than product placement? It cannot have escaped anyone’s notice that Hosea was using a Sharpie to write on himself and on Leah. So wasn’t the entire Leahosea episode just an insidious Sharpie commercial? Can it be just a coincidence that Sharpie’s commercial tagline, “Write Out Loud,” is practically the same as “Live Out Loud,” the tagline for the Oxygen Network, which—wouldn’t you know it—is run by Bravo’s president, Lauren Zalaznick (indeed, as detailed in a New York Times story, she was instrumental in choosing the tagline)? And yet, we find no record in the end credits of Newell Rubbermaid paying any promotional consideration. We nonetheless find it hard to believe that Bravo would feature a product for nothing; it’s simply not in their corporate genes. On verra.

You know, possums, this rant originally had a point, though we’d be hard-pressed to find it now, so while we’re ranting, let us call “bullshit” on two more things:

* Padma saying in the previews for last week’s episode, very somberly and dramatically, “We have a situation,” of which nary a mention appeared once the episode aired. We say, “Bullshit” (and narrative cockteasery).

* Hoda Kotb making Kathie Lee Gifford faces while sampling Jeff McInnis’ malfouf roll, as if the flavors (including sumac) were so very exotic or unknown. Um, (C)Hoda Kotb is Egyptian-American, spent summers in Egypt while growing up, and worked extensively as a reporter in Egypt and Iraq. We say, “Bullshit.”

OK, possums, rant over. We’ll go lie down for a second to ponder how a harmless little post on cheftestant puppy love turned into a rant, and we will think of Gail Simmons to cool our fevered brow.