Cooking Under Fire Finale
Trust a New Yorker to fire someone for smiling too much.
Okay, that's an oversimplification. When celebrity chef Todd English 86d Seattleite Autumn Maddox on the penultimate episode of Cooking Under Fire, he also mentioned that she talked to herself while working and that her reasons for serving raspberries with steak sounded kind of weird. (We paraphrase.) Worst of all, in his and his co-judges' eyes, despite serving what was acknowledged as the best food overall for that episode, Autumn refused to state that she was a better chef than her two rivals, just that she was different.
Well, humble will get you a lot of things, but a job cooking in English's restaurant Olives isn't one of them. And, to be fair, Autumn was given two opportunities to make any kind of claim that she might be a better chef than her rivals, Katie Hagan-Whelchel and Sara Lawson. The second time, the judges did everything but erect a big neon sign reading "say that you're better!" to indicate the answer they wanted to hear. But she stuck to her guns, ultimately unable to even suggest why her differences might better match what English was looking for. It cost her a spot in the final two -- and dashed Seattlest's powers of reality show prediction. We picked Autumn to place.
We should point out, however, that we were correct in predicting that Hagan-Whelchel would triumph. She's clearly a talented chef, and judges English, Ming Tsai and Michael Ruhlman all admired her blunt, East Coast style. In the end, being 22 minutes late serving her dinner and omitting dessert due to a planning error didn't cost her the win. Lawson, after all, forgot to scrub her truffles -- no one likes a gritty truffle.
That said, congratulations to Autumn for taking 3rd place. We're sorry Todd English made you cry on national television (but if it makes you feel any better, it was just PBS). And if you ever want to dish out behind the scenes gossip -- although you strike us as too nice to even consider it -- drop us a line.
