<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Read more special recaps of this season of Top Chef from Esquire&amp;#039;s food correspondent, John Mariani, right here on Eat Like a Man. Goodness gracious, what a difference an episode makes on Top Chef: Texas! Last week it was all about ego and headbands, tattoos and ineptitude. The judges were as dour as the Spanish Inquisition, yet few cooks got tossed. This week, it&amp;#039;s Happy Time in San Antonio! The ten competing chefs are a cheery, nervous bunch, proud of their work but humbled to be in contention, and you&amp;#039;d have to look hard to find a single tattoo on any of them. Even the music has more funk in it. Colicchio, Padma, Lagasse, and Acheson are all kind and cordial, encouraging, almost asking forgiveness for banishing these nice kids back to their hometowns. Where once Padma used to be Madame DeFarge-like in her dismissals, she now tilts her head, smiles, and says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry, please pack your knives.&amp;quot; The contestants this week include a woman named Lindsay who works on a cruise ship, which gets a smirk from another cook; an African-American guy named Chazz who says he had pictures of Padma in his locker in middle school; a French chef named Laurent, older than the rest by at least a decade, who struts his experience; a Korean-American who carries a paper reading I CAN I MUST I WILL; a macho guy from Kentucky named Edward who slices open his finger and continues to cook while a doctor wipes the blood off his hand (&amp;quot;If he had to cut off my right hand,&amp;quot; he says, sounding like Charlton Heston, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d cook with my foot&amp;quot;); and a few others who are largely indistinguishable. They fret, they sweat, they regret what they&amp;#039;ve done. Yet the judges, who must have gotten over their jetlag, are as affable as Paula Abdul after a few belts. Padma has the best line of the evening: &amp;quot;Your oxtail leaves a lot to be desired.&amp;quot; What becomes clear on this second episode is that Top Chef is really not about cooking at all, or even about food. No student or home cook with a notepad could sit in front of the TV and possibly learn anything about how to make oxtails or octopus or risotto from these contestants, because they&amp;#039;re shown actually preparing those dishes for mere seconds. And the comments by the judges are as enlightening as &amp;quot;greasy,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;overcooked,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;not there.&amp;quot; And you have to wonder how some of these cooks ever made it into contention in the first place. Chazz goes apoplectic from the start because he says he has only 40 minutes to make risotto, then makes it in a pan big enough to feed a battalion of Italian paratroopers. Since risotto never takes more than 30 minutes to cook, one might ask if Chazz has ever made it before. When asked to leave, he shakes his head and says, &amp;quot;I feel like Padma has broken up with me.&amp;quot; Call security! Elsewhere, one cook makes octopus but admits she&amp;#039;s never really worked with a pressure cooker; she can&amp;#039;t get the lid off, so the octopus comes out tough. Lindsay sees Tom ambling over to check how things are going, and she runs away. In the end, Top Chef is really about performance under stress. It doesn&amp;#039;t rise to Hemingway&amp;#039;s definition of courage, &amp;quot;grace under pressure,&amp;quot; nor does it have the tension following the two-minute warning in football. I think it&amp;#039;s a guilty pleasure, like most shows on TV, not odious like Man v. Food or silly like Guy Fieri, but more like reliving high school without the personal consequences. Watching these mostly young cooks sweat \u2014 with the promise of $125,000 and all kinds of media attention if they win \u2014 you sense their lives will be changed whether or not they pass the exam. But we don&amp;#039;t really bask in their misery or share their joy. We just really like to see people, not food, grilled. The suspense was not killing me, even after they piped in the Mission: Impossible-style music near the end. The high-fives of the winners and the blank, I-want-to-kill-myself expressions on the losers&amp;#039; faces close out the show. But not before the titillation of bits from upcoming episodes in other Texas cities, which will feature, for reasons unknown, Pee Wee Herman and Charlize Theron. Plus, the astounding news that, for the first time in nine years (Sergio Leone guitar twang, please), one of the cooks told to pack his/her knives is invited back. Which sounds like a case of a Miss America also-ran who fills in when they discover the winner once appeared in Hustler. So we&amp;#039;re down to the final 16: the grungy crew from episode one versus the sweet kids from episode two. I think I&amp;#039;m going to cook some risotto now. PLUS: More John Mariani on Esquire&amp;#039;s Eat Like a Man Blog and John Mariani&amp;#039;s Official Site "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a11656/top-chef-texas-episode-2-6554219/>