‘Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen’: Was one chef screwed out of squab in this week’s contentious battle? [Watch]

“I really deserved to be eliminated,” admits Begoña Rodrigo after her ouster from “Top Chef” in the episode “Holiday Vacation.” “I tried all the dishes from all of my colleagues, and the worst one was mine. I’m disappointed with myself. I’m here to prove myself that I am on fire, that I have still been really good and I can keep on fighting for everything that I want.” Watch her episode of “Last Chance Kitchen” above, where she battles Dale MacKay and Luciana Berry.

This round of “LCK” will be decisive. As host and judge Tom Colicchio explains, this will be a two-part battle to decide who gets back into the competition. But this challenge doesn’t relate directly back to the one Rodrigo lost, which involved a family-style holiday home-cooked feast. Instead, the three chefs have 30 minutes to (sort of, not quite) work together on a three-course menu using three textures. One dish should be creamy, one should be crispy, and one should be chewy.

But the conflict starts right away. The chefs are supposed to negotiate the different components of their courses. But illustrating the obvious problem with asking chefs to work together when they’re being judged against each other individually, Rodrigo doesn’t bother with the whole negotiating part. She announces abruptly that she’s doing chewy and proceeds to get her ingredients, leaving Berry and MacKay a little shell-shocked as they now have to work around Rodrigo.

Rodrigo doesn’t bother coordinating ingredients with her fellow chefs either, so she and Berry both end up cooking squab, though Berry is stuck with a crispy preparation while MacKay works on a creamy dessert. I’m not a fan of Rodrigo’s aggressive my-way-or-the-highway approach, especially because it’s probably the reason one of her fellow competitors is eliminated.

Rodrigo ends up with Colicchio’s favorite dish of the challenge — not surprising since she’s the only one who really got to choose what she wanted to make. MacKay’s mascarpone and lemon curd sabayon is the second-place dish. That leaves Berry at the very bottom, forcing her out of the competition for good. Rodrigo’s stubbornness certainly contributed to that result. Cutting up her squab into small pieces and frying them to differentiate herself from Rodrigo caused Berry to overcook the meat. She doesn’t seem to bear any ill-will towards Rodrigo at the end, but it’s a disappointing outcome given how close they became when they were both competing on the show. All’s fair in love and “Top Chef,” I guess.

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