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I am not a TC historian, but I believe that the leader of the losing restaurant is practically always, if not always, the one sent home. Someone pointed out last year that this is a good week to lose the quickfire.

On his blog, Colicchio tipped his cap to Kevin, pointing out that terrines are extremely difficult to do well under the time constraints of an elimination challenge. I am a fan of Jennifer's, but her anxiety is starting to get on my nerves. I have a feeling that, one of these weeks, she is going to worry her way out of the competition. There were two reasons why Laurine survived. First, although she did not prepare the rillettes correctly, the concept could have worked. And second, there were other things on her plate that did work. In contrast, Ash's dish was a complete disaster. I am not a chef, but as soon as I heard that he was doing cold pork, I wondered, "How could that be good?" Even with perfect execution, I don't think it could have been a great dish. It also didn't help that he had intended to do something else, and let Mike Isabella talk him into this flawed idea. As Colicchio put it: I know that the competition isn't cumulative, but there was justice in this outcome. In eight episodes, he was never in the top 3, and he was in the bottom 3 four of the last five times. Laurine has been in the top 3 twice, although she has not won.

Definitely not. The Feed did an informal survey of the blogs, and Sifton is batting at best 50/50. I liked the piece, but remember, most people liked Frank Bruni's first piece. In hindsight, that review was the harbinger of many bad ones to come. The question is whether Sifton is going to deploy an "I'm so cool" style in every review, or if it was just his attempt to capture the vibe of DBGB. We'll know pretty quickly, as he's reviewing Marea next week — a very different kind of place.

What did Eli get for winning the quickfire? There is usually immunity, a prize, or a specific advantage in the elimination challenge. I must have missed it, but he didn't seem to gain anything.

I didn't think that mattered much. I got that reference, but there were two others in the review that I couldn't place. What did matter is that I perfectly understood what he meant, even if I didn't know whom he was quoting.

Sifton has been writing about food for a long time, and I recall earlier pieces of his, which were in a similar style. He isn't finding his voice; he found it a long time ago, for better or worse. Bruni's first review (Babbo) contained the howler that the restaurant did not get four stars because of the music. I don't see any mistakes on that level in this review. Angst about Bruni built up over a long time. The NYT critic has to cover a wide variety of genres. It's one thing to write a hip-hop review of a hip-hop place in a hip-hop neighborhood. It's quite another to write that same review of Marea or SHO Shaun Hergatt. We'll have to see if Sifton is able to respond just as appropriately to other types of restaurant, or if he becomes the Johnny one-note that Bruni sometimes seemed to be.

These errors are getting corrected gradually. La Goulue and Vong, among the most dubious stars in the first NY guide, no longer have them. Eleven Madison Park, one of the worst omissions, now does. Obviously I would prefer that the errors never happened at all, but at least they do have a process for detecting and removing them. In five years, Michelin has demoted 19 restaurants (that is, taken one or more stars away). That's not counting restaurants removed from the guide because they closed. In five years as NYT restaurant critic, Frank Bruni never once corrected one of his ratings downwards. He did add stars to his own ratings, but no more than half-a-dozen times.

The early reviews trended slightly negative, but most of them came out in July and August. Bruni's retirement gave Boulud an extra couple of months to fine-tune the place.

I think the purported value proposition was always something of a mirage. The Momofuku restaurants were never cheap eats, except maybe for Chang's first 15 minutes of fame. They are now, and have nearly always been, relatively expensive, especially when the missing amenities are factored into the equation.

When the price went up to $125, they said that more expensive ingredients would be used. Are you saying this is untrue? I have to say, if you left hungry after a dozen courses, you have a remarkable appetite. I agree that Degustation is a suitable point of comparison, which no doubt would be more expensive if there were greater demand for it. My recollection is that the service at Degustation was similar to Ko, and the ambiance (counter stools) certainly is. Far from ignoring them, I am pointing out that this is one of the things you are getting for the extra money you pay at those places. (And yes, I think the food is more advanced too.) Ummm, you can't get the fried chicken at Ko. Different restaurant.

The details quoted above are a 12-course meal, counting amuses. The price of $125 is a good deal for a long tasting menu. For instance, Eleven Madison Park's equivalent menu is $175. Per Se is $275, which is equivalent to about $220 without service. Ko, of course, is much less comfortable than those places, but their price reflects that. Ko still seems to be selling out most of their seats. When it opened, cancellations would be snapped up in about 30 seconds. Nowadays, it sometimes takes longer. But as of this moment, the next 6 days are totally sold out, and that usually seems to be the case.

Jean-Luc Naret (Michelin head) said that they visited Daniel eight times this year. Given any level of reasonable budget, they simply can't give all 600+ listed restaurants (and probably hundreds more visited, but not listed) an equal amount of scrutiny. Those receiving the highest ratings naturally are explored much more carefully. There is simply no other way to do it. I suspect that if you posted your 55 favorite restaurants (that's the number with stars), there would almost certainly be a few that the rest of us considered controversial. Our tastes and interests are too widely varied for there to be a list of 55 that everyone else agrees is 100% reasonable. I think it's kind of fun to see a list that isn't just the usual suspects recycled. Their treatment of Ko is more sensible than Frank Bruni's decision to award both Ko and Ssam the identical three stars. Ssam does have a Bib Gourmand. The lack of a star for Yasuda is one of the handful of decisions that I cannot rationally explain, but again, I suspect your list of 55 would have at least a few of those. Frank Bruni's certainly did.

It seems to be a conceit of the show, and I suspect Colicchio knows that it's hogwash. If these mishaps happened in his own restaurant, Colicchio would have many options these chefs don't have, such as cooking the dish over again, offering the guest something else if that is not possible, and so forth. As I recall, Colicchio asked Ashley whether she would have considered sending out her plate without the ruined shrimp. Of course, he's right that you shouldn't send out a plate that you know is fatally flawed, but sending out a plate without the protein would never be a practical option either. In a real restaurant situation, there are usually alternatives. On Top Chef, when the bell rings your dish must go out, and there is seldom enough time to change gears if you realize your original plan is going down the tubes. I suspect that if Mike/Ash's dish had been equally bad as Eli/Ashley's, the extenuating circumstance of Mike's equipment failure would have been the tie-breaker that kept him on the show. All else being equal, that shouldn't be the reason for sending someone home, at least not at this phase of the competition.

Yes, they did give Bibs Gourmands in NYC (about 60 of them), and I do not recall any other Thai places being mentioned. Sri had a BG previously, so it's not like they never heard of the place. For some reason, they took it away.

The Setai is the name of a small chain of ultra high-end hotels and condominiums. I don't know the derivation of the word.

There is a pretty good whiskey bar, I believe at the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue. It is not, of course, a cocktail bar, but that is where I would go for a drink nearby after Per Se, assuming (which is unlikely) that I was in the mood for any more alcohol after that big meal.

The preview of next week's episode suggested that they are going to be cooking for a "Big Deal" guest judge. Any guesses as to who it could be? I am guessing Thomas Keller.

I am not sure what they could realistically do. The challenges are scheduled months in advance. They can't put the whole show on ice because one chef is not feeling well. The knock-on effects would be unacceptable. Giving her a free pass would be unfair to the other chefs. As far as whether it was appropriate to cook when sick, several chefs (including Colicchio) said, "We've all done it." Ash is highly unlikely to win. Hosea wasn't the best chef of Season 5, but in relation to the competition, he was near the top, which put him in position to benefit when a few others, notably Stefan, screwed up. It wasn't his fault that the producers recruited a weak cast. This year, there are at least 5 chefs remaining who are way better than Ash. I just don't see a scenario where all of them falter. It is pretty obvious why Ashley was sent home. The judging process was to choose the worst dish, and then, choose the most blameworthy person on the team that created it. The horrible interaction between Mike and Robin was not seen by the judges, and dishes aren't graded solely by what they look like. There is an element of luck, too. Robin managed to get immunity last episode, and this time the dish she worked on wasn't the worst. Ashley and Eli were on the bottom, because the gnocchi and the prawns were both ruined. In such cases, they usually send home the person who cooked the protein: hence, Ashley. If Mike and Ash's dish had been the worst, the judges would have had a dilemma. On the one hand, Ash did very little. But on the other hand, by virtue of that, he wasn't the one who ruined it. But the issue was moot, as their dish was not the worst, so Ash skated through. On team challenges, a weak person sometimes survives because the team as a whole was not the worst.

We dined at Pera a few months ago, and liked it better than we expected to.

I totally agree. At least "Per Se" is relatively easy to spell and pronounce. For the record, "SH" are the chef's initials, and "O" is the logo for the Setai, where it is located. This is just hopelessly unintuitive. I mean, even if the chef had been Daniel Boulud and the name "DBO", it would have been a dumb name. They compound the problem by calling the place "SHO Shaun Hergatt," in essence using the chef's name twice. I'm a fan of this place and impressed with every decision they made BUT this one. I think the "Dining Briefs" decision was the Times's way of saying, "Let's wait and see." It's clear that if Wells had posted a full review, he would not have given it three stars, and for a restaurant of this kind, anything less would have been a condemnation. The Standard Grill, on the other hand, is probably as good as it will ever be, so nothing would be gained by waiting to review it later. It was reasonably predictable that none of the pro critics in this town was going to love this place. There's just no one writing pro criticism these days with the background or temperament to appreciate this type of restaurant. The Setai people were either not aware of this, or forged ahead because they believed strongly in what they were doing. The Michelin people gave them proper recognition, and I see it has a 29 food rating in the new Zagat. As for Sifton, I have no idea if the city finally has the well rounded critic it deserves, but we'll start finding out next week.

Yeah I know, maybe I just have a personal dislike of Casa Mono from when I went there. However, there are a lot of people who love Casa Mono. When Frank Bruni retired as restaurant critic, he was asked where he'd be dining, now that he's spending his own money. He named three places, and CM was one of them. That doesn't make it right (I disagreed with Bruni many times), but it's clearly not a ridiculous choice.

I am going to make two assumptions. First, the NY stars are not meant to have any connection to what the restaurants would have received if they'd been in France. Second, restaurants from different genres are not directly rated against each other. The second assumption is also the system that the New York Times uses. After all, I believe Frank Bruni once gave two stars to Le Cirque and the Little Owl in consecutive weeks. Robuchon and Minetta Tavern both have the identical three-star ratings from Bruni. There are tons of seemingly dissimilar restaurants that have identical Zagat ratings. If you make those assumptions, then the ratings of L'Atelier and Casa Mono are understandable. The twitter feed, I agree, is absolutely moronic.

I don't really buy into the notion of "dated" food. Exactly when does a good idea become a bad one? Some of the best dishes are timeless classics, assuming they're executed well. And if they're not executed well, the fault is in the preparation, not the idea itself. Of course, some ideas are bad to begin with, but I don't quite get the notion that a formerly good idea has a sell-by date. Hergatt's food, whatever era it dates from, is something no one else in town is doing. He clearly didn't take a marketing survey before drawing up the menu, or we'd have had the city's 83rd farm-to-table restaurant.

Someone PM'd me that the $69 dinner prix fixe is still in effect. I suspect that the reference to a $79 price was a typo.

We've been to SHO Shaun Hergatt only once (blog post here), but based on that visit, I'd say this is the best luxury restaurant to have opened in New York since Corton. When we dined there, the three-course prix fixe at dinner was just $69. I gather it has gone up to $79, but even at that price, it is the least expensive restaurant in its peer group. When you count the blizzard of amuses and petits-fours that come with a meal here, it is indeed a bargain. The restaurant is part of the Setai, a high-end condo a block away from the stock exchange that is still under construction. It was clearly planned before the recession. Having said that, there are many ways the owners could have dialed down the concept, and it's to their credit that they have stuck to their guns—at least for now. I am rooting for this place to succeed, but it cannot be denied that it has multiple strikes against it. It's named for a chef no one in New York has heard of, and it's in a neighborhood that's not known for fine dining. The latter concern is mostly psychological. With most of the city's subway lines crossing nearby, practically all of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn is no more than 30-40 minutes away. People in this town go to much greater inconveniences to reach lesser restaurants. The restaurant also opens in a town with few critics capable of appreciating what it's doing. At the Times, Pete Wells relegated SHO to Dining Briefs, complaining that it wasn't greenmarket driven, and that "Mr. Hergatt’s favorite purveyor seems to be Federal Express." Had he noticed that critical darling Michael White is doing the same thing at Marea? At New York, the bumbling Adam Platt awarded three stars for the food, but subtracted one "for the location and the décor," apparently because he doesn't like Wall Street and the place is too fancy for him. But the vast majority of non-pro reviews I've seen have been positive, so there is hope for this place.