Top Chef Season 6 "Vivre Las Vegas"

This week's episode of "Top Chef" started off with some really bad news for the still wide-eyed contestants. The top chef potentials were told that not only would they be cooking for celebrated French chef Daniel Boulud but they had to make a dish using escargot and, on top of that, the losing chef would be eliminated.

As the chefs scurried around in the kitchen, the camera caught some mixed reactions to the escargot challenge. French-born chef Mattin Noblia expressed an understandable confidence, (although it was perhaps over-confidence since he didn't end up even in the top three), while Latin cooking wiz Hector Santiago started sweating pretty early on, admitting to an inexperience with the protein.

The two-part judging panel, Boulud and host Tom Colicchio, deemed Mike V., Kevin, and Jennifer as the top three "escargoteurs"—so to speak—and Kevin, with his fricassee of snails accompanied by mushrooms, brussel sprouts, and bacon jam, won the quick fire competition. Quelle surprise.

The three losers—Jesse, Ashley, and Robin—were given the chance to battle it out with an amuse bouche that they had to create from the ingredients left over in the kitchen and in 20 minutes. Even though the Colicchio and Boulud seemed to like all three dishes, Jesse was eliminated for her not-spicy-enough tuna tartar and quail egg dish.

Colicchio told Kevin later, as the other chefs are drawing knives for the elimination challenge,that Kevin gets to sit the challenge out. Instead of competing, Kevin will sit at the table with the other illustrious guests that have been invited to the elimination challenge meal.

The other guests are all world-renown French chefs. Hubert Keller, Laurent Tourondel, Jean-Georges, Daniel Boulud, and Joel Robuchon for some reason all agreed to pool their French artistic prodigiouness to critique the lowly top chef wannabes. The contestants had to work in pairs to create a dish that included one popular French protein and one classic French sauce.

The winning side of the elimination challenge mirrored that of the quickfire challenge with Jennifer, Mike V., Mike and Bryan coming out on top. The judges chose Bryan as the winner because of his tasty trout and his prize was actually more work—he gets to help out in the kitchen at Joel Robuchon's Las Vegas restaurant for a week.

As a true "Top Chef" fan could easily expect, the one French chef was in the bottom group in a challenge about French cooking. Mattin and his partner Ashley were chastised for their veloute that went too heavy on the bacon. It turned out to be better than Hector and Ash's steak with peppercorn sauce because Hector was sent packing for butchering the meat (pardon the pun).

Scenes from next week show the chefs cooking in extreme weather and Colicchio throwing a meatball on the ground in disgust.