Medium Raw

15 “I Lost on Top Chef”

Erik hopfinger at thirty-eight, twenty years in the business, stood in front of the pass, a stack of dupes in his right hand, expediting to his cooks. It was Sunday morning in San Francisco’s Marina District and Circa restaurant was full up with brunchers. The bar was crowded with them, sucking down all-you-can-drink mimosas.

He’d made a tactical error putting the “Benedict sampler” on the menu, he realized. Though wildly popular and a successful exercise in marketing, the dish had quickly become his nemesis. Customers could choose two of six different eggs Bennie preparations per order, allowing for over twenty different combinations of poached egg varietals and interchangeable components. The outcome was predictable: a simple four-top led easily to a dupe as long as your fucking arm. By the time the customer at position one had finished pairing the “Nova Benedict” with a “Mexi-Benedict” and substituted tenderloin from the “Bernaise” for the chorizo—and then swapped out regular hollandaise for the saffron hollandaise and asked for the eggs well done—and the doofus across the table at position three has done the same—but different—well, multiply this times four at one table and extrapolate for the whole main-floor dining room and mezzanine, and you’ve got yourself the kind of morning that any cook who’s ever worked a busy Saturday-night shift, and followed that with an injudicious number of Fernet-Branca-and-ginger-ale shots, hates and fears in their bones.

The rest of the brunch menu was filled with slightly tweaked conventional-wisdom classics, a savvy but unimaginative variation on the standard document that experience tells you you absolutely need in order to fill your restaurant on a Sunday morning and afternoon. In addition to the obligatory eggs, there was a club sandwich of turkey and avocado, an equally inevitable “veggie club,” skewers of tomato and mozzarella, French toast, roast beef hash, huevos rancheros—and sliders (albeit with black truffle and Brie)—and there was fried calamari and a lobster mac ’n’ cheese and a fruit platter and the tragically inescapable “classic” Caesar salad. The addition of chicken to the Caesar being, of course, an option.

It says something about a person when you put chicken Caesar on the menu. You’ve crossed a line and you know it. It’s the chef version of sucking Ron Jeremy’s cock. If you do it late in your career, any notions of future stardom are usually pretty much out the window.

But Erik Hopfinger was already a star.

Arms crossed, front and center of a group of shorter, less menacing-looking chefs, his giant-size, bald, bullet-headed, heavily pierced, and tattooed image glowered at the world from buses, billboards, and the pages of glossy magazines everywhere. His was the principal face of season four of Top Chef, the best and most watched of the competitive cooking shows. Of the contestants, Erik had obviously been designated the “bad-ass.” He was older, more experienced (in years, anyway), and with an imposing—if not threateningly transgressive—look; so much, one would imagine, had been expected of him on the show. You could tell that from how they’d photographed him for the posters: like the lead singer of a band—or a top-billed professional wrestler. (In fact, Erik looks like a bit of both.) The producers, I think it is safe to suppose, anticipated much drama from Chef Hopfinger over the course of a long and closely contested competition.

Unhappily for everybody, he barely made it through episode one.

I know this because I was a judge on that episode.

And he got sent home from the field of battle by episode three. Today, though, he was still famous and, at the very least, among friends. In between the smart-looking couples at the large, oblong bar, heavily inked young men drank in groups of two and three. Fellow cooks. The home team. You could tell the cooks from the civilians by what they drank. Civilians drank the free mimosas. The industry types were deep into the Fernet shots. Somewhere in the dining room were Erik’s best friend, his girlfriend—and his mom. He was getting paid good money for a five-day workweek (almost unheard of in the industry). And dinner service ended at the unbelievably early hour of ten p.m. so Circa could make the changeover to its principal business, which was the club/lounge thing.

“I couldn’t get into auto mechanics,” he said later, at the bar across the street, a pint of beer in his hand, watching the dust motes float over the beer taps in the late-afternoon light. He fell into a vocational cooking class instead.

Perhaps now is the time to picture him, an imposingly tall, wide, barrel-chested guy, silver hoop earrings in both ears, multiple rings, the goatee, the tats. He cultivates a shave-headed piratical look. But what doesn’t come across in the photos is his sweetness. The voice doesn’t really fit the appearance; his eyes dart away from you when he talks. He seems…shy. From within the hulking body and the designed-to-intimidate look—half pirate, half Aryan Brother—there’s a vibe of a scared and damaged little boy, someone who might burst into tears at any moment. Which is to say he’s a very likeable guy. You want—shortly after meeting him—to give him a hug.

At seventeen, he answered an ad in the local penny-saver and began washing dishes at the Chateau Continental in Briarcliff, New York.

“It was a two-man kitchen,” he said. “Ugly Albanian dudes.” They did about forty depressing covers a night, a mixed bag of delusionally transatlantic fare like Greek salad, beef bourguignon, and stuffed veal chop. He washed dishes, scrubbed pots, peeled potatoes, and did general scut work there for a year and a half before decamping for greener fields and more elevated social status at T.G.I. Friday’s in Tarrytown.

“I started getting laid at Friday’s,” he said, by way of explanation. He made eleven dollars an hour, worked the grill station, drank for free—and by age eighteen had been rewarded for his high standards of burgerdom with a promotion to what would appear on later résumés alternately as “sous chef” and “kitchen manager.”

Around this time, he fell into the professional orbit of friend and hockey buddy, Scott.

Scott was living a relatively high life over at Huckleberry’s in Yorktown, which put even the sybaritic delights of T.G.I. Friday’s to shame.

He had “a cool car and hot chicks,” Erik remembered, an observation that led him to abandon Friday’s for his friend’s kitchen. He enthusiastically took the less prestigious but presumably more rewarding position of “fry monkey” at Huckleberry’s. Asked to remember the menu, he foggily recalls chicken potpie, shepherd’s pie, and tempura. With somewhat more clarity, he recalls being fired twice during the year and a half he worked there—and that he “fucked the whole staff.”

Young Erik was now twenty years old. Examining the murk of his résumé, one would likely find one of those mysteriously soft, gray spots—all too common to cooks of his generation (and mine). What was actually a yearlong “hiatus” as a landscaper disappears, no doubt in between the happy days of wine and frolic at Huckleberry’s and his next restaurant gig at the Thataway Cafe in Greenwich, Connecticut. Departure date at Huckleberry’s moved forward a bit. Start day at Thataway pulled back. In my case, whole years disappear in this way. One’s younger years now a seamless record of full and (as important) steady employment. Or, depending on who’s going to be looking at your résumé, T.G.I. Friday’s or Thataway Cafe can be replaced by “traveling in France.”

Unless—like Erik—you spend three years at the Thataway, “drinking and snorting” and cooking an unchallenging menu of burgers, chicken sandwiches, and flank steaks.

Sometime in the early ’90s (the exact dates being characteristically hazy), Erik Hopfinger answered an ad and found himself working the pantry and grill stations at Eros on First Avenue in Manhattan. He describes it as the first good restaurant he’d ever worked in. The chef had worked at the Quilted Giraffe (a still important restaurant). They made their own charcuterie, roasted fish whole, on the bone, and grilled fresh sardines. Small things, one would think now—but relatively advanced thinking back then—and definitely a big deal for Erik. Nearly two decades later, he puts down his pint glass with a five-mile stare and remembers. It’s the first time since we’ve started talking that he seems genuinely excited talking about food.

“Eros was super-new. I had never worked in the city and was totally overwhelmed. With the spices, the brines, the butchering—and the city itself. I think I took the challenge balls to the wall, you know? Putting in my first real shifts, arriving at two p.m. and working until two a.m. I never asked so many questions in my life.”

“But, soon after this, you bugged out for fucking California,” I challenge him. “You’re learning stuff. It’s just started getting tough, the first good food you’ve cooked in your life. Okay, maybe it’s not the majors yet…but at least you’ve got a foot on the fucking ladder. And then you’re gone? You screw the pooch for California? Why?”

“Scott,” he answered. As if that explained everything.

“When I left for San Francisco, I felt a little shitty. But I was determined to be a chef and thought by being a New Yorker, I’d have a leg up on all those laid-back Cali dudes,” he added in a statement I found unconvincing. The more likely explanation is simply that his bestest buddy was in San Francisco and said he should come out, that it was fun. So he did.

What is a reasonably certain matter of record is that Erik Hopfinger arrived in San Francisco in 1996 and became the sous chef at City Tavern. Not too long after, when the chef didn’t show up on a Friday night, he says, he found himself in charge.

Two years later, he was the chef at Backflip, a hipster bar in a retro-cool motel in the Tenderloin District, where he started to get some attention—a nod for best bar food from the San Francisco Chronicle—and where he began to establish a career pattern of working fairly high-profile places that were as much bars (or lounges) as they were restaurants. It’s also—and I’m guessing this on the basis of almost nothing—where he started to learn how to hustle, how to manage expectations, work the press, shape the beginnings of a public image of sorts.

Then there was Butterfly, a more ambitious venture into Asian fusion—and also a big bar scene.

Which is where I met him for the first time—an occasion I describe pseudonymously in A Cook’s Tour.

I remember him, in 2001, with hair. Blond, at the time, I think. Comping me and my crew a meal and then inviting me back into his kitchen, where he unburdened himself of some staffing problems he was having. I believe I advised him to fire his sous chef. Was it Scott? My recollection is that he appeared to agree with my suggested course of action—before offering me a bump.

I saw him again a year or so later. At the House of Prime Rib. We got pretty drunk together and ate a lot of beef.

After Butterfly, there was something called Spoon. He alludes to a brief spell in a Mexican jail. (The name “Scott” appears again in this episode.) Then Cozmo’s Corner Grill…before finally landing at Circa.

I hadn’t heard anything more from him or about him until the producers of Top Chef called. Since I was an occasional guest judge, they wanted to know how well I knew this guy Hopfinger—as I would likely be facing him across the table in the coming season. They wanted to know if I could exercise my critical duties without any personal considerations coming into play.

I assured them that I could.

According to Erik, he’d attracted the notice of the Top Chef casting people at a “Battle of the Chefs” event held at a department store—one of those silly promotional clusterfucks much loved by restaurant publicists, as it makes them look like they’re actually doing something. The chef gets to bust his ass giving away a lot of free food—and, presumably, the masses, having noticed his fine work, form a herd and gang-rush his restaurant. Usually, this kind of thing attracts a bunch of freeloading types. The kind of people who hang around department stores for free food, or because they have nothing better to do, are very rarely the kind of customer to come into your restaurant with friends and spend profligately on wine. But in this case, says Erik, it attracted two television producers. “One dude was kind of geeky. The other was a hot blonde. It was their first Fernet experience.”

Curiously, he never had to cook for them.

They wanted to know: “What do you think of Tom Colicchio?” (Correct answer: “I see him as the walking Buddha of chefdom.”)

“What are your passions?” (Correct answer: “Cooking! And being a ‘character’ with a good backstory—prone to dramatic confrontations with fellow contestants!”)

After he was told he’d made the cut, he went to the Horseshoe and got loaded, dreaming of his future fame.

Not too long after, Erik Hopfinger found himself boarded up and under guard with fifteen other contestants at an undisclosed location in Chicago, deprived of television, Internet, unsupervised telephone calls, and subject to a secret agreement so draconian as to be the envy of the NSA.

Now, I haven’t read my copy of this agreement. But I seem to remember the figure “million” mentioned—along with “dollars” and vows of absolute confidentiality. And I’m guessing that both Erik and I are still somehow constrained from talking about specifics of security; any on-set instances of the use of controlled substances; which judges might or might not be smarter than the others; whether or not there are tumblers of gin and tonic under the judges’ table—and so on. To speculate on such things would be irresponsible.

What I can assure you—without hesitation or qualification—is that the judging I’ve been witness to or part of, in five appearances as a judge, has always been straight. Meaning, no matter how much the producers of the show may want the contestant with the heartbreakingly tragic personal story (and amazing chesticles) to survive until next week, the worst cook that particular week goes home. On Top Chef—as long as Tom Colicchio is head judge—the best food that week gets you the win. The worst gets you the loss. It’s the “what have you done for me lately” criterion at judges’ table. Due to the fact that guest judges can’t and haven’t been witness to a contestant’s previous efforts, past works do NOT factor into the final judgment. I feel sorry for the producers sometimes, imagining their silent screams as Tom reluctantly decides that the all-around better contestant, with the movie-star looks and the huge popularity with viewers, just fucked up too bad to make it to next week and has to go home.

Their lips mouthing, “Nooooooo! Not Trey!!! NOT TREYYY!!!” impotently in the control room as another beloved fan-favorite gets sent packing.

Judging is taken seriously by the permanent judges and guest judges alike. I’ve spent hours arguing with Tom, Padma, and guest judges—trying to reach a consensus on winners and losers. It is a thoughtful and considered process.

What should be stressed here is that what the contestants on Top Chef are asked to do is really, really difficult. Confined to quarters with strangers, separated from family and friends, they are asked to execute—on short notice—a bizarre progression of cooking challenges without benefit of recipes or cookbooks. Anything from “create a snack from this crap vending machine” to “make a traditional Hawaiian meal with unfamiliar ingredients” to “create a four-course high-end menu for Eric Ripert.” And do it in the rain. Over portable field-ranges. The rigors of Top Chef ’s unpredictable, high-pressure, occasionally loony, product-placement-driven challenges (“be sure to use X brand frozen pasta dinners in your final dish”) would be brutal for any seasoned professional.

I’ll tell you honestly that if I were a contestant? I might, maybe—if I was lucky, and only through a combination of years of experience, stealth, strategy, and guile—duck and dodge my way through a few weeks. I’d never make the finals.

What’s fascinating to a professional watching the show is how other talented professional cooks and chefs are pushed to the limits of their ability. You can actually see them hit the ceiling, the place beyond which they just aren’t prepared to—just can’t go. And exactly why: a failure of the imagination, a failure of technique or strategy, maturity or experience. And yet—many times, you see contestants go beyond their previous abilities. You can see them dig down—or pull from left field and go higher than they’ve ever been before. This leads—all by itself—to fascinating drama for food nerds. The “best” chef—or the best all-around talent—doesn’t necessarily win. The most technically skilled cook, or the most creative, often overreaches, chokes, makes a crucial and inexplicable error of judgment. Just like real life. That’s what makes the show worth watching (to me, anyway)—that the chef left standing after all others have fallen represents the qualities you’d want of a chef in the real world: a combination of creativity, technical skill, leadership abilities, flexibility, maturity, grace under pressure, sense of humor, and sheer strength and endurance.

Erik Hopfinger came one thin hair away from getting snuffed right out of the box.

I was guest judge, along with Rocco DiSpirito and regulars Padma and Tom. The challenge was to re-create one of a list of midrange-restaurant cliché classics, like shrimp scampi, lasagna, steak au poivre, and duck à l’orange. The contestants drew knives to determine who got what. Erik got the soufflé.

Now, a soufflé can be a tricky thing under the best of circumstances. Most cooks learn to make them in school—and, unless they move on to become pastry chefs, are seldom called on to make them again. Ever. Because of their delicacy and time concerns, and ’cause they just haven’t been in fashion, you rarely see a soufflé of any kind in a restaurant these days. Which means very few cooks—if suddenly called upon to make one without a recipe—could do so. Hell, even with a recipe, I’d guess the greater part of the cooking population would fuck the job up. Me? Maybe. And that’s only because I spent six months doing almost nothing but making soufflés at the Rainbow Room early in my career (and they were a pretty leathery, unimpressive version, made from cement-like bechamel, cheap flavorings, and meringue). Even if you do everything right before you get your soufflé in the oven, there’s still a whole lot of ways to fuck up: pull it out too soon, it deflates by service. Too late? It burns and hollows. Slam the oven door? Forget to correctly grease and sugar the mold? Thermostat fucked? Uneven heat in the oven? Or will the thing just sit too long while they reset the cameras or apply powder to a shiny judge? The soufflé is fraught with peril. And in a competitive, high-pressure situation like Top Chef—where even shit you know how to do in your bones can suddenly sense fear and go south on you—well…a soufflé is a death sentence.

From the relative comfort of my judge’s chair, a freshly poured gin close at hand, I saw Erik draw the soufflé and knew the poor bastard had walked right into the grinder. He looked like he’d been punched in the stomach before he even started cooking.

In retrospect, he says now, Top Chef “looks a lot easier sittin’ on the couch with a joint in your mouth.”

What he came up with was a soufflé only in the most liberal interpretation of the word. It did come in a soufflé mold—intended, I could only guess, as an airier version of cornbread or corn pudding. But like a dog trying to cover its shit with leaves or dirt, Erik had literally piled on every trick—or trope—in the faux-Mex, Southwestern cookbook. The plate looked like the last shot of a bukakke video—filmed at Chili’s. There was some kind of awful avocado jiz squirted all over the plate. Some other squeeze-bottled madness…and, worst of all, the “soufflé” itself had been buried under a fried garnish either crushing the fucking thing or ineptly concealing the fact that it had never risen in the first place. Looking down with no small amount of sadness at what he’d put in front of me, I could only compare it to the work of a first-time serial killer, hurriedly and inadequately trying to dispose of his victim under twigs and brush—inevitably to be discovered by the first passing dogwalker.

What saved him that week was another contestant’s shrimp scampi. While Erik had thoroughly fucked up a hard task, she’d managed to make a hideous botch of a very simple one. Her twist on scampi involved three very basic, very simple elements—all of which she’d botched indefensibly. The shrimp was overcooked. The accompanying “flan” had curdled into an unappetizing, smegma-like substance. And she’d criminally oversalted the dish.

As happens sometime on the show, someone who failed utterly was saved solely by the fact that someone else sucked worse.

Two weeks later, the ax fell. He was sent home over a soggy corn dog.

“Did you ever belong on the show in the first place?” I ask him.

“No. I knew it all along.” He stopped watching the show after he was thrown off.

Was he ever scared? “What scares me,” he says, “is growing up. Having kids. I’m deathly afraid of having kids. Probably ’cause I am a big kid.” He drains his beer, examines the empty pint glass thoughtfully, and offers, “But that would probably make me a good father. I love Disneyland. The whole pirate thing. I love Disneyland. That makes me want to procreate.”

Of his Top Chef experience, he has no complaints. “They didn’t turn me into something I wasn’t.” And of his life and career in general? The good, the bad?

“I’m pretty happy with the way I’ve done things, where I’m at. I’m going down a good path. The quality of life is good. Hanging out…my friends, eating great food.

“Look,” he says, “I love cooking food. I’m not pressing any culinary envelopes. I know that. There’s a few sick fuckers like us who were actually meant to do this.”