Top Chef Exit Interview: Episode 4

Things are getting seriously hot in Le Vegas this week. After the jump, our interview with the latest chef-testant asked to pack their knives and leave.

Surprise! Boy these Bravo folks love their surprises, eh? Turns out Jessie got sucker punched and kicked off after the quickfire, without even a chance to prove herself in the elimination challenge. Hector, meanwhile, probably wishes he didn’t make it to the elimination round either, after Gail Simmons and company ripped apart his hack job of a steak au poivre. ES caught up with the doubly eliminated chefs.

Jessie, how surprised were you by that sneak attack quickfire/elimination?
Fucking super-surprised. You get in that mentality of thinking, ‘well at least I’m not gonna get eliminated in this one,’ and then fucking Tom Colicchio is like, ‘ps you’re gonna get kicked off.’ It sucked.

You said last night that you were never yourself on the show. What do you wish people could have seen?
Just who I am and that I can cook. I was thrown off the whole time. It’s really hard to be yourself when you’re thrown in with these people you don’t know, and it’s in fucking Vegas, which is just fucking creepy, and you’re always under pressure. The isolation is hard too — no TV, no newspapers, no books, no Internet — I’m not that good with authority so I just didn’t deal well.

What about you, Hector? Did you think the judges’ criticism of your dish was fair?
I think that mostly they were fair. I even said myself what my mistakes were. I just ran out of time and had no other option, so the dish did get a little bit sloppy, because my goal was just to finish. The only thing I didn’t agree with was what Tom Colicchio said at the end — that Ash was getting the mentality of the assignment and I wasn’t. I didn’t know what that was all about, because I cooked what I was supposed to.

So did you think Ash should have gone home instead?
Definitely. The sauce was not on the plate. He kept using the excuse that the meat was not cooked, but the sauce was not there at all. Also, I think that our dish had a lot fewer flaws than the other dish.

Jessie, how hard was it to watch the other chef-testants cooking for all those great French chefs. Did you wish you could get in there and cook something in particular?
Yeah, of course, dude. I tell you what — I can cook a fucking…nevermind, I’m not gonna say that. I’ll just say I wish I could have cooked more. I didn’t want to go home. Balls.