A day after his big win on Top Chef: All Stars, 39-year-old chef Richard Blais is speaking out via a new interview with Entertainment Weekly. In excerpts below, Richard explains why he always appeared insecure about his dishes, his feelings on chicken oyster-gate today plus his next plans.
How He Chose His Final Dishes – “Most of it is on the fly, like, here are the ingredients you’re given. I tried to focus on picking out my favorite ingredients. Hamachi is a fish I really love. The black cod has such a beautiful fat content that it’s easy to cook, especially for a lot of people.”
On Why He Always Doubted Himself – “On Top Chef, we’re getting reviewed every single Wednesday night, and in reality, every day. So you’re just seeing a little bit more intense version of that. But I think all good chefs do that. They analyze and maybe over-analyze the tiniest details.”
On Being A Favorite To Win It All – “There was definitely a tremendous amount of support on social media. It’s such an honor to have people root and cheer for you, and to walk down the street and have people say, “Oh you should’ve won your first season,” and “We’re rooting for you this time.” I definitely got the sense that maybe everybody else thought I was a favorite, but internally I never bought into it.”
When asked about oyster-gate, Richard states it is completely “squashed” and that while Mike might have been influenced by his idea, he did not steal his recipe. For the time being, Richard is still a partner at Flip Burger but reveals he has some new projects ahead that he can’t discuss just yet.
Meanwhile, it seems the folks behind Top Chef can breathe a sigh of relief today as some fans of the show actually threatened to stop watching if Blais did not win. In fact, one fan tweeted to judge Tom Colicchio before the finale aired and stated that all faith would be lost in Tom and the show if Richard lost. Tom replied, “if Richard doesn’t win perhaps you should loose faith in Richard.”
As we all saw, Richard did indeed win which however brings us to an interesting question. If Richard, who appeared to be a much better competitor than Mike Isabella based on wins (9 wins to Mike’s 4), had lost the final challenge hence the competition, would that have been fair? This also seems to be the criticism with contestant Tiffany Derry making it to the final 4 over other competitors such as Dale Talde, who won way more challenges than she did.
Let’s compare the two contestants shall we –
Tiffany – Won 2 quickfires and zero elimination challenges. In the bottom 7 times.
Dale T. – Won 4 quickfires and 3 eliminations challenges. In the bottom twice.
Dale came in 6th while Tiffany made it to the final 4. And oh yeah, both of Tiffany’s wins came in group challenges. Numbers don’t lie and from looking at the above stats, it seems absurd that Dale was sent packing first. This isn’t to criticize Tiffany or put down her culinary talents, but once again, numbers don’t lie.
In Tiffany’s defense, she doesn’t make the rules which leads us to believe it might be time for the show to make some rule changes, taking into consideration the overall season performance, and not just one challenge when it comes to the elimination rounds. The ‘Top Chef‘ title shouldn’t go to someone who got hot in the final challenges, or someone who was mediocre all season long and managed to hide in the middle of the pack.
The Top Chef title should go to the contestant who excelled consistently over a season’s entirety, like Richard Blais. We can’t help but sit and imagine a finale battle between Richard and Dale. Now that would have been something to watch. Fans of the show also seemed to believe Mike was no competition for Richard as our poll question of who deserved to win before the finale aired garnered Richard 84% of the votes. A similar poll from UsWeekly gave Richard 86% of the votes. Something tells us those poll numbers would have been much different had Dale been in Mike’s shoes.
While Mike did end up giving Richard a run for his money, sorta, on the finale, fans of the show still overwhelmingly believed Richard deserved the title. A PEOPLE.com poll had 86% of the viewers agreeing with the show’s end results.
And though the finale showdown between Richard and Mike appeared extremely close on television, Melissa Maerz of the LA Times disagrees. The reason? Maerz was one of the lucky few who actually got to taste the finale dishes during Bravo’s finale party on Wednesday.
According to Maerz, it was not a close call at all. Maerz states all of Richard’s dishes were superb, describing his hamachi dish as “astoundingly delicious and clean-tasting, it was like a magical fish that’s spent its whole life swimming upstream into a Brita water filter.”
As for Mike, his halibut “was the worst dish by far, flavorless and cold, with a slightly sweaty texture, and the overly sweet kumquats lent it an aftertaste of jelly doughnut.” His pork shoulder with pepperoni sauce was “as if someone had nursed a tender baby pig from a bottle of liquid pizza.” Ouch. Maerz however adds that the dishes were not prepared by the all-stars themselves, but rather by a team of chefs.
TELL US – SHOULD TOP CHEF CHANGE THE WAY CONTESTANTS ARE JUDGED? OR IS THE CURRENT FORMULA IDEAL?
