Alex Guarnaschelli Doubles Down and Faces Restaurant Teams of Two

In Season 5, Episode 7 of Alex vs. America, everything starts out as expected. Host Eric Adjepong presents her with three accomplished restaurant chefs: Michael Reed of Poppy + Rose in Los Angeles, Kevin Tien of Moon Rabbit in Washington, DC, and David Viana of Lita in New Jersey as her competition.

Just as Alex assesses the three with a dubious but doable look, Eric reveals that each of the other chefs will be joined by their sous-chefs, so Alex will actually be competing against teams of two. What??!!

“This is the craziest thing you’ve ever done,” Alex tells Eric. “How am I supposed to do this?”

“Work twice as hard,” Eric tells her.

Chef Michael Reed is a James Beard Award nominee and his Los Angeles area restaurant, Poppy & Seed, is featured in the Michelin Guide. Eric makes a point to remind Alex that chef Michael is a previous Alex vs. America competitor who already beat her in Season 2’s brunch challenge. “Starting off strong with this nightmare,” she replies.

But when Michael’s wife, restaurant partner and sous-chef for the competition, Kwini Reed, waltzes in, Alex looks on in astonishment. “As if he wasn’t enough!”

Kwini is also a force in the food world, known for her involvement in several organizations, such as James Beard’s Women Entrepreneurial Leadership. Not only that, but these two are partners in life, which is sure to give them a huge advantage over Alex.

Kevin Tien is the owner of acclaimed Vietnamese-American restaurant Moon Rabbit in Washington, DC. Chef Kevin has earned numerous accolades during his career, including five James Beard Award nominations, Food & Wine’s Best New Chef award and Esquire’s Best Restaurant of the Year. He is joined by his Michelin-trained sous-chef, Paola Serrano. That’s right. This pair also works in the kitchen together regularly in their daily lives. This is not looking good for Alex.

The third restaurant team pairing is headed up by chef David Viana, another James Beard Award nominee. His modern Iberian New Jersey restaurant, Lita, also boasts multiple James Beard Award nominations and was named on Esquire’s 50 Best New Restaurants in America list.

Helping him out today will be his chef de cuisine, Brian Lopes, who works alongside him at Lita. Brian tells the cameras, “There’s no way Alex has a chance in beating us.”

If this were Vegas, the odds would not be good for Alex.

Who better to judge a roster of duos than lifelong teammates, brothers Bryan and Michael Voltaggio? In a show filled with dynamic duos, these two certainly stack up.

Many remember Michael and Bryan from when they competed — and won, with Michael in first place and Bryan as a runner-up — on Top Chef in 2009. Michael is best known for earning a Michelin star when he was head chef at California’s Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen. He is also a regular competitor on Food Network, appearing on Bobby’s Triple Threat, Tournament of Champions and Beat Bobby Flay. Big brother Bryan has earned multiple James Beard Award nominations and has appeared on Food Network's 24 in 24: Last Chef Standing, Tournament of Champions, Beat Bobby Flay and more.

They co-own Voltaggio Brothers Steakhouse and have also co-authored a cookbook.

In the survival round, only the top three dishes will advance in the competition. As the chefs all step up to take a look at the first mystery basket for this round, Alex can’t help but notice how much bigger the crowd is than she is used to. “There’s so many people, it’s like the subway!”

Per usual, the three — ahem, make that six — visiting chefs will have the advantage of deciding what to pick; of course, the strategy will be to make this as hard as possible for Alex. Eric opens the cloche to reveal their choices: brunch, lunch or dinner. They unanimously decide that preparing a gourmet dinner with a 2:1 ratio of chefs to Alex is the move.

Only one should never underestimate Alex, even when the math says that she is pretty obviously outnumbered here. “Dinner is my wheelhouse. Bring it on,” she taunts.

The next cloche reveals a few tongue-in-cheek options: classic food duos of chicken and waffles, steak and potatoes, or surf and turf; but the ingredients range from bad to worse, including frozen chicken nuggets, canned potatoes and beef jerky.

The classically trained chefs are visibly shaken. Eric goes on to explain that they won’t have to replicate the duos, but they do have to use both ingredients in their dinner.

Once again, the visiting chefs are unanimous in their decision. “Surf and turf,” Michael says.

“No doubt,” David agrees, explaining that the salty flavors of the dried shrimp and beef jerky can "become a flavor profile.”

The last cloche requires the chefs to decide on how much time they will give themselves, with 30 minutes being the maximum allowed. Eric tries to persuade them to use as little time as possible. “It’s two of you here, please think about it,” he tells them not so subtly, but ultimately, the teams want to have every advantage and, therefore, every minute available, so they choose 30 minutes.

“You guys are just playing right into her hands!” Eric warns them.

You can throw a lot of things at Alex Guarnaschelli, but one thing is for sure: She won’t go down without a fight. This is evident immediately as the timer starts and the restaurant teams start racing frantically around the arena. Meanwhile, Alex calmly slices and seasons tomatoes at her station. As the reigning queen of this kitchen, she knows that the smart move is to get something cooking and then, and only then, go grab the rest of her ingredients. “Shopping is for suckers,” she quips, making it clear that even though she may be outnumbered, she won’t be outsmarted.

Husband-and-wife team Michael and Kwini begin work on a pork and scallop dish that will incorporate the beef jerky and dried shrimp by turning them into a powder for the dish’s sauce. They plan to plate this along with a potato espuma, a technique that uses nitrous oxide to turn potatoes into a light and airy foam.

While the complete dish is complicated and tedious, the couple seems calm and collected; it is clear they are very used to working side by side. “We work very well with each other,” Kwini explains. “I let Michael drive the bus … but at the same time, I am a fantastic taster,” she says before tasting a spoonful of whatever Michael hands her and instructing, “it needs salt,” to one, and happily dancing her approval to another.

David and Brian lean into what they know best: Portuguese cooking, the same cuisine they specialize in at Lita. They start with alhinho shrimp, shrimp cooked in a traditional Portuguese garlic sauce. Like Michael and Kwini, they are also going to incorporate the jerky and shrimp into the sauce. They’ll serve this alongside a cauliflower puree shaped into perfect dollops that only those who went to culinary school seem to be able to master. This will all be paired with perfectly seared duck breast, creating a beautiful and colorful plate.

The two chefs gracefully race around their station in a dance that probably feels as familiar as it looks. “We’re just a great dynamic duo,” Brian says.

The Moon Rabbit team also stays true to what they know, choosing to turn the challenge ingredients into an inventive Vietnamese fish curry with shrimp-salt hamachi and jerky papaya salad. Growing up in a Vietnamese household, Kevin is familiar with beef jerky papaya salad, and so he plans to re-create a version of that for the judges. He uses a mandoline slicer to turn the papaya into thin, ribbonlike strips and dresses them with fish sauce, toasted peanuts and minced beef jerky.

Paola works on the curry sauce, which she offers to David to taste. “That’s delicious,” he approves.

For a chef who is typically unflappable, Alex seems a little flapped. And who could blame her? “It’s not just the two sets of hands, it's people that work together every day in the restaurant,” she says.

So it’s no surprise that when Eric stops by her station to check on her, she dismisses him with uncharacteristic annoyance. “Guys, come on. I can’t do this,” she says, waving him and the cameras away and making it clear that nothing is going to interrupt her laser-sharp focus.

For her dish, Alex makes seared steaks with a beef jerky gremolata, an Italian-style sauce typically made with parsley, garlic and lemon zest. She’ll serve this alongside broiled tomatoes topped with more of the beef jerky and dried shrimp, which she microplanes and adds to a panko mixture that browns up to crunchy perfection just before she plates them.

“I want to keep it super simple since everything is a duo tonight, except me,” she says of her dish, which ironically looks anything but simple.

The Voltaggio brothers walk into the arena with high hopes. “It smells good in here,” Michael says, smiling. Alex’s plate is put in front of them first, which the brothers compliment as “delicious” and “beautiful” and note that the steak is "cooked perfectly.”

Next up is team Michael and Kwini’s take on surf and turf made with a crusted pork tenderloin and seared scallops. Michael says he “loves the crust on the outside” of the pork and calls this “a well-executed dish,” but struggles to taste the shrimp and jerky. Big brother Bryan agrees, which both agree is unusual … that is, the fact that they agree on something, not the missing ingredients.

Team Kevin and Paola’s dish is next. The plate barely hits the table before Bryan picks up his fork and says, “This looks great,” clearly ready to dive into the Vietnamese fish curry. Michael loves the papaya salad, noting “what a cool idea” it was to add the beef jerky. However, they wonder if the papaya should have been served in a way that “would have been easier to eat.”

The last plate belongs to team David and Brian. The brothers are immediately impressed. “There’s a lot of work on this plate,” Michael says. They gush over the meal, agreeing that the duck is “cooked perfectly” and that this is “a really great tasting menu.”

Before Eric announces the results, Alex holds her arm around her imaginary sous-chef and jokes, “We’re ready.”

David and Brian are announced as the winners, calling their dish “a perfect cook,” while team Michael and Kwini are unfortunately eliminated.

Team David and Brian earn the privilege of picking the ingredients for the next round. If the restaurant teams beat out Alex, cash prizes will be awarded to each of them, but if Alex wins, everyone goes home empty-handed.

They quickly choose Iberico pork presa, a premium cut of pork shoulder that comes from the region of Spain that they are familiar with at their restaurant. However, the next cloche reveals ingredients that none of the chefs want anything to do with: coleslaw, macaroni and cheese, and creamed spinach.

“Are these already prepared?” David asks Eric, frowning.

Eric confirms that they are all premade, and David ultimately decides on the coleslaw: “I like the crunchiness of it.”

Their last decisions are to choose the formality of the meal (David chooses “linen napkin,” aka high-end) and how much time they’ll have. As with Round 1, David chooses the full 30 minutes, which Eric calls “crazy,” clearly believing the best shot they’ll have in beating Alex would be to make her cook even faster.

Cue the Céline Dion. Alex looks rather lonely over at her station, all by herself. It’s at this point in the episode that you start to feel a real pang of sympathy for Alex. “One is the loneliest number,” she laments.

While the restaurant teams huddle up to formulate their menus, utilizing the two-brains-are-better-than-one strategy, Alex struggles to make sense of the ingredients. “I gotta be honest, I’m drawing a blank,” she confesses.

David and Brian do what anyone with four capable hands would do: divide and conquer. They make seared pork with a fennel coleslaw salad topped with crispy potatoes. David focuses on cooking the pork to perfection, while David transforms the slaw into an upscale salad to pair with it. Being able to focus on their singular dishes is a huge advantage over Alex.

Kevin and Paola feel cautiously optimistic after seeing Alex be defeated in Round 1, but they know this really just means the competition is fierce. “Chef David's team was … a really big threat as well.”

They know they have to go big or they will — say it with me — go home. So, they take a big swing and cook up a seasoned pork loin with bulgogi au jus, a Korean-style barbecue sauce, served with a miso apple coleslaw puree.

“I thought it was crazy at first,” Paola confesses, “but I feel like it’s going to work out.”

Their game plan is the same as David and Brian’s: Paola will focus on cooking the meat perfectly while Kevin handles the sides. Noticing a trend here?

After scrapping some potato cakes, Eric asks Alex what happened.

“You know, it’s like my ex-husband … started out good,” she jokes.

Suddenly, as though trolling her ex was just the inspiration she needed, Alex lands on an idea to make coleslaw-stuffed cabbage served with Iberico pork and chanterelle mushrooms. “We have a dish,” she says with obvious relief because she only has 15 minutes left to cook said dish.

She manages to pull it off, of course. Even her competitors can’t deny that she deserves a lot of credit for putting out a “beautiful, amazing dish by herself.”

The judges think using the coleslaw inside the cabbage was a “smart play,” but while Michael agrees that the dish is certainly deserving of a linen napkin, he takes issue with the pork, saying “it’s definitely undercooked.”

“We have a cumin Szechuan, five-spice grilled Iberico pork with a miso apple coleslaw puree,” says Eric, and just when you think he's done, he continues: “We have charred radicchio with a pickled coleslaw, cured cucumbers with a black pepper bulgogi jus.”

“There’s a lot going on in this plate,” Bryan says in astonishment.

“There’s a lot of work,” Michael agrees.

While the complicated dish is clearly extremely well-executed, the judges express some concern that perhaps there are too many flavors going on. “The pork is such a great and incredible piece of meat that to layer more flavors onto it takes away from the detail of the cookery of that piece of meat,” Bryan explains.

David and Brian’s plate is simply beautiful. In addition to the fennel coleslaw, they added pomegranates, snap peas and crispy potatoes. The judges agree that “texturally, it’s fun,” and that there are “a lot of good flavors on this plate.”

However, there are some questions about how formal this plate of food feels, and they are a little disappointed that the coleslaw wasn’t used more creatively. “I’m seeing coleslaw being used as literal coleslaw,” Bryan says.