So, Dale! He always looks so sad when he's sad. And honestly: who saw Antonia and Tiffany in the final five?

The last odds revision I posted looked like this (eliminated chefs in italics):

Fabio - 50:1
Marcel - 30:1
Tiffany - 25:1
Tre - 25:1
Isabella - 23:1
Antonia - 12:1
Dale - 9:1
Carla - 6:1
Angelo - 4:1
Richard - 4:1

Well, okay. My powers of prognostication look a little better with the original lines.

Jamie - 100:1
Fabio - 50:1
Tiffani - 35:1
Casey - 32:1
Isabella - 30:1
Tiffany - 25:1
Tre - 20:1
Spike - 15:1
Antonia - 11:1
Little Dale - 10:1
Carla - 7:1
Marcel - 5:1
Angelo - 4:1
Richard - 3:1

My attention is stretched over bigger and thornier issues than Top Chef right now, but here we go. The final betting lines.

Tiffany - 50:1
Carla - 12:1
Isabella - 6:1
Antonia - 4:1
Richard - 3:2

Also, shrimp fried in grits was literally the first thing I thought during the Quickfire last night. I'm not sure that I'd hang my hat on blowing Paula Deen away if I was Mike. ....fried butter. Come on.

So, yeah. Love all you guys who come here for the food, but this blog started out political, and now the food is taking a back seat to political once again.

If you haven't been watching any other TV than Top Chef, you're missing a truly amazing event in Wisconsin. Workers public and private, union and non-union, adults and students, have been taking to the streets and the halls of the Capitol to protest the governor's proposed union-busting legislation.

I've been there in part for the past three days. I still haven't watched this week's Top Chef. I know I still haven't published last week's recap (Fabio bites it! Richard boosts someone else into the winner's circle!). I honestly don't know when I'm going to get back to recapping, and I'm not planning on recruiting any guest-bloggers because all my friends are as engaged with the rallies as I am.

So please--take a look at the news coverage of this event on MSNBC and BBC News. (You could see my flashlight in the crowd on The Ed Show last night!) When the time comes that I can return to food blogging, I will. Feel free to check out my latest review for Isthmus, on the new Great Dane Pub location; it'll be linked up to the right later today.

Solidarity!

Yes, an unoriginal pun, but I'll be honest: I haven't watched this episode yet. Stay tuned later today.

Strip away all pretense. Remove extraneous ingredients. Simplify preparation.

Italian food, or this episode of Top Chef?

I'm a week overdue, so this is going to be extremely brief. Just basic thoughts. The Quickfire Challenge, one without any tasting and based solely on plating and presentation, was an interesting one but standing in stark contrast to the Elimination Challenge--cook a great Italian dish for a bunch of guys with questionable mob ties.

(Yes, this place really does have a lot to do with organized crime. Recently, in fact.)

Richard totally got the Quickfire's challenge: get outside the normal mode of thought and stop thinking about flavor. I thought his dish was by far the best, and deserving of the win. Dale was inspired by graffiti? Austin Scarlett did it first! Carla's was nice, but not particularly inspiring. How Fabio's hot mess ever made it into Isaak Mizrahi's good graces is beyond me. And dude, by the way, can that bitch cut.

The Rao's crew--Frankie No, Jimmy Wingnuts and Stereotype Jones, or something--dined on the products of the Elimination Challenge with Lorraine Bracco, perhaps most well known for her role in The Sopranos. The chefs were split into the three typical courses of an Italian meal: antipasti, primi, and secondi.

Three Italians in the crop of chefs (Isabella, Antonia, and...um...Dale? No! Fabio.) dominated the conversations in their respective kibbutzes. Isabella wanted to try fresh rigatoni, and even Dale took a shot at fresh pasta. Tre decided that risotto was the way to go, but Antonia gave his efforts the stink eye.

It's hard to look back and say what looked good and what looked either bad or unambitious, since these dishes are ideally fairly simple. Antonia's mussels would have been a snooze in most challenges, but in this one it got her in the top group. Same with Carla's minestrone. Richard's panko-breaded pancetta cutlet blew the table away, but he got overlooked--because he had immunity?

Indeed, Antonia's mussels with fennel and a parsley ciabatta was so gloriously elegant that it took the big prize. The bottom group was the entire primi course: Tre, Dale, and Isabella. Dale didn't incorporate all of his otherwise deliciously promising components. Tre's risotto was undercooked and overwhelmed by huge chunks of vegetables laid over the top. And poor Isabella, who was told that using dry pasta wasn't a sin, soldiered ahead with his fresh pasta and undercooked it woefully. Lucky for him, Tre's risotto was worse; Isabella stays, Tre goes.

Tony couldn't believe Tre had never eaten a good risotto; my first thought was back to Stephen and Tre, dining at Marea in the third episode of the season. Tre refuses Stephen's good natured but pedantic insistence on trying the sea urchin, saying "my palate is my own" to the confessional. That kind of bullish self-assurance couldn't have served Tre very well this week.

So that's about it. Next week (I like to call it "tonight") we'll have to tolerate Jimmy Fallon mugging to the camera for the latter half of the episode. I hope we all make it through without breaking anything.

So, I totally didn't watch Top Chef last night. No biggie--I'll just do it when today rolls around again tomorrow.

What's this? Groundhog Day isn't really real? I'm going to be a day late with my recap? Well, dang.

It dawned on me right around the turn of the year that, if I'm serious about food writing (and I am), I should be a little more conscious of my dining choices. Slow my brain down on the nights I'm not "working," and take note of the things kitchens are doing well, things I ordered, things I noticed. That kind of thing.

Thus, at the start of every month, I'll be giving you the summary of where I ate the previous month, what was remarkable, what was new, and what was the best. I'm not including places sampled in the course of a review; you'll just have to read the reviews to find out my thoughts there. I'm also not counting the occasional Junior Bacon Cheeseburger from Wendy's, or a #5 on French from Milio's. Those are pretty standardized, and not really worth mentioning.

I also didn't include the handful of stops I made at Greenbush Bakery, because A) it's not a meal there, and B) I think I didn't want you to know how often we actually went there this last month. But I'll point out that in all three trips, their maple glazed doughnut was conspicuously absent. What gives, Greenbush?

Anyway, on with the show.


New spots

The year started well, with a New Year's Day trip with friends to Underground Kitchen. Standouts from my meal (and my wife's) include the kale salad, a meatless delicata squash dish, and a remarkable (and remarkably huge) salmon rillette platter. The cocktails were all fantastic, though some are advanced-level courses on mixology; I'm thinking in particular of the rye/sasparilla/cherry bark/vanilla concoction, served in a little aperitif glass.

Bub's Burger Joint shows promise, but criminally overcooked my bison burger. Their fries have an almost French toasty quality, which is interesting but not as delicious as a crisp exterior. Of note: their service. It was perfect. Pan and Pan, a little taqueria on Milwaukee Street, needs someone to come in and barter some interior decorating. Their overhead budget is nonexistent, I'm sure, but their food is good enough to merit attention. A wonderfully greasy chorizo taco paired excellently with a custard-filled croissant somethingorother from the bakery case.


Old favorites

The wife and I met for a lunch date at Bonfyre, a spot I reviewed back in January 2010. The food is still solid, and the place fills up as fast as ever for the lunch rush. But the service level was set to WHOA NELLIE and locked there, and a December visit showed that the lovely little desserts have given way to generic, middling shooter-style offerings. Bummer.

Brasserie V just doesn't stop being the most enjoyable joint in town. This visit, near the end of the month, showed a few chinks in the armor, sometimes literally. My water glass had a big crack, and the V Burger was as rare a burger as I've ever eaten. (It was ordered medium.) I'll always trust them, but it was an unusual mistake. Still, they continue to win me over with beers like the rare(-ish) Liefman's Cuvee Brut--a delicious alternative to Belgian Red or Monk's Cafe Sour Flemish.


The best thing I ate

Tough call. That kale salad at Underground Kitchen was pretty remarkable. So too was the triumphantly-returned Gyro Topper from Topper's Pizza. And the breakfast sandwich at Crema Cafe continues to be one of the best in town. But I'm going to give the first A+ to the chicken francaise at the irritatingly-capitalized jacs Dining and Taphouse. Isthmus contributor Ben Reiser has been singing its praises for months, and I finally veered away from the sandwich menu to give it a shot. Rich and eggy, but set off with zingy lemon-Chardonnay cream sauce. The kale and spinach are ideal foils to the chicken. It's worth all of its very reasonable $17 price tag.