A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

ALL STEAK, NO SIZZLE: Had a very nice dinner at Craftsteak last night--exquisitely prepared roasted steak, roasted carrots, and a chocolate souffle. However, it reiterated my prior concerns that pan roasting steaks removes "sizzle" from a steak. That leads us, in a somewhat circuitous fashion, to Top Chef. As Alan expressed in a thread on this week's episode, this season has come off a bit bland. To draw an analogy to my meal, all the ingredients are there (solid chefs, good challenges--particularly this week's elimination challenge, which did a nice job of piling twist after twist on both the Cheftestants and the audience) and the ingredients are well-prepared, but it's just not crackling--maybe because there haven't been many (if any) spectacular failures or bizarre successes, and maybe because for all the bleeping and trash-talking, few of our Cheftestants have shown a distinctive personality thus far, or maybe just because of a lack of Bourdain.