This week, Gronk is in the house. Padma asks if she can call the Patriots tight end "Rob," and he's down with that. She tells him he can call her honey. The challenge involves making a Gronk-worthy sausage. Flirting and off-color jokes ensue.
Gronk is large and hungry and his muscles need feeding, so the six remaining contestants get to work. They've got just an hour to make an awesome sausage, and stuffing those links is tricky.
Everyone turns to the flavors they favor -- Gregory does a Chiang Mai-style sausage, Katsuji spicy Peruvian chorizo. George is out of luck without lamb, so he does breakfast, the universal language.
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Doug's links are beauties. Melissa's, let's be frank, look like little turds. George gives up and makes patties. It's kind of a copout.
Well, guess what. Gronk doesn't really like highly spiced Thai or Peruvian sausage, and he certainly doesn't like little sausage. He likes Doug's sausage, but what Gronk really likes is breakfast. It's his favorite meal. George wins, even though he's a Redskins fan.
Then Tony Maws arrives with a giant bookshelf. It's stocked with books by New England literary figures, from Thoreau to Seuss. Each chef must choose a writer and create a dish inspired by his or her work. Katsuji picks Stephen King. "I really want to take his crazy mind and then take my anger and my craziness in my food and create something super-cool," he says. OK then! Mei picks Thoreau, and the former wife of Salman Rushdie somewhat condescendingly asks if she is familiar with his work. Doug winds up with Emily Dickinson, whom he calls "the depressed chick poet," which doesn't bode very well.
Everyone heads to Steel & Rye, in Milton. By this point in the season, if one believes the rumors, the Teamsters have made life difficult for the crew. We may not be seeing much more of Boston proper.
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Katsuji makes a plate that looks like blood spatter and involves a lot of sauces thick enough to be called purees. It's his interpretation of "Carrie." "I want to make people say '[expletive!],'" he says. "In a good way." Gregory has Poe, and the meat he serves Maws is overcooked. George, who has sausage-transmitted immunity, makes "one fish two fish red fish blue fish" inspired by Dr. Seuss. Mei plays off Thoreau's vegetarianism with roasted vegetables, charred onion soil, and tom kha snow. Melissa riffs on Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance," interpreting changing seasons on a farm. And Doug serves Dickinson's sunset in a cup, except his is in a bowl and it's carrot soup.
It's the best food of the season. The judges are so happy. Tom looks like he might cry. Praise pours forth: Mei could get away with calling her dish "roasted vegetables, Walden Pond" on a menu, he says. It would be nice to see her win one. "Everybody feels good?," she says while they await the verdict. "That's no good."
Mei wins. Gail says it's the most satisfying plate of vegetables she's ever had.
Katsuji (thick, messy sauces) and Gregory (overcooked meat and less-clear tie-in to his literary inspiration) are up for elimination. It really seems as though it will, and should be, Gregory. But there's no shocking upset. Katsuji is leaving -- in retrospect foreshadowed earlier in the episode by Doug's ruminations on how they will be friends for life, and the photos we see of his sweet family back at home. Viewers can now feel both relieved and cheated. Gregory is obviously the stronger contestant, but that's not the game.
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There's always Last Chance Kitchen, coming up soon.
"Please keep cooking like this," says Padma.
Spoiler alert, via the coming attractions: They don't, and it appears to be Julia Child's fault.
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