Top Chef Season 17 All Stars LA Episode 2 Recap and Thoughts

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Top Chef Season 17 All Stars Episode 2 saw our chefs jump straight into another elimination challenge. We also had our first show down in Last Chance Kitchen of the season and our first contestant sent home.

Today was all about celebrating the life of renowned food critic Johnathan Gold. Our chefs visited several restaurants on Gold's best 101 restaurants in LA list for inspiration. It was amazing to see just how much of an impact Gold had on the lives of so many restaurants across LA. His reviews were life changing for many people and Gold never restricting himself to fine dining but instead experienced everything LA had to offer.

Our chefs were very disappointing today. We went from cooking on a fire pit last week to having free reign over the kitchen today and the results were significantly worse. Very few chefs rose to the occasion and many more failed to meet expectations.

Kevin, Nini and Brian ended up as our top 3 today with Kevin taking home the crown. I felt he was the clear winner today, all the judges raved about his food, it was unique and totally set him apart from the rest of the crowd.

The bottom three ended up being Angelo, Eric and Stephanie. All three dishes failed miserably today but Angelo stood head and shoulders above our other two in terms of failure. His dish was a mess right from the start. He didn't have all the spices he needed in the grocery store and his broth was so sweet the judges had no idea why it was ever served. Angelo heads to Last Chance Kitchen.

In Last Chance Kitchen, Joe and Angelo get a shot at redemption. Seafood is the name of the game and both chefs delivered at a much higher level than they did over the past two weeks on the show. I think this really ended up being a coin flip and since Tom seems like a huge fan of Joe's, he lives to fight another day. Angelo is our first chef sent home on this season of Top Chef.