Top Chef Smack Talk: The Ousted vs. Antonia

If you haven't watched this week's Top Chef animal episode yet, you might want to skip this for spoilage reasons, or just read our recap. The gist: LA's Antonia Lofaso and her Team Gorilla had two of the three worst dishes in the elmination challenge, and the ejected chef faults Antonia on Grub Street:

You seemed unhappy when Antonia said she hypothetically would hire Stephanie over you based on your dishes, even though she hadn’t tasted yours.
It was completely unfair. At the event, one of the first things she said to me when our time was over was, “I didn’t get a chance to taste your dish.” She literally said those words. I think she just got along with Stephanie better. It was a personal thing. She liked Stephanie better, so she said she would have picked her dish. I was definitely not happy about that at all.

Why did you make the blinis in advance?
That wasn’t even my idea, initially. It was Antonia’s. And it was her recipe, in fact. She said, “I’ve got this great recipe for these blinis.” I felt like I got thrown under the bus for it.

So it was a team decision?
Not at one point did we stop and say, “Wait, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Wait, what are we doing? Maybe this isn’t going to hold up.” Watching the show last night, I felt like, maybe [Antonia] did that on purpose. But then again, I should have realized that that wasn’t such a good idea.

You'll hear it over and over and over again all season long: It's a competition, Valerie. Survival of the fittest, baby. Although...like an 800-pound gorilla in the room, even we noted that Antonia didn't say anything to Valerie about the blinis, didn't taste them, didn't try to help fix them. It could've been editing, we thought, or perhaps strategy. Is Antonia that sneaky? Oh, we hope so. We really, really do.
· Ejected Top Chef, "That Wasn't Even My Idea!" [Grub Street]
· Top Chef Local Debriefing: Anotnia and The Gorillas [~ELA~]