Discussion Series / CutthroatKitchen

Is it just me, or have the sabotages changed from forcing a chef to work with a substandard or unusual ingredient to stupid human tricks? Seriously, making the chefs sit in a car together, or ride a seesaw? They used to have more sabotages like making a chef make a turkey burger with sliced deli turkey, or making gnocchi from potato chips. Seems to me as though the show has gone downhill.

• Whammy Bid: Hoo, boy. One chef once bid $10,000 right off the bat to trade her opponent's utensils with foil wrap. This totally backfired and got that chef sent home for other reasons. Another did the same to avoid an ingredient swap-and-assign, with the same result. Another did likewise to replace his opponent's heat source with a clothes iron. The largest bid in the show's history, however, is a chef who paid $19,600 to make the other three chefs share a 'melted'-together ball of semi-random hand tools to make a tuna melt. It was the very first auction of the day.
  • Honorable mention goes to the Food Network Star crossover, where the cowboy chef, Chef Lenny, bid all the cash given him ($2,500) to avoid the infamous mini-kitchen. Not only did Lenny not win his heat, he made "sopapillas" that made Bobby Flay spit out his food, landing him in the bottom three. Ultimately, he survived and won his season.
  • Geoffrey Zakarian also bid high — $10,200 — during a "Meatball Sandwich" challenge on the "Meatball Lottery" sabotage to avoid getting his quality meats replaced with the choices in the "Meatball Lottery" (as he didn't want ANY of the three alternatives). He also hit Jet Tila with two more pricey sabotages: soaking his onion rolls in water (turning them to a starchy mush) and forcing Jet to wear periscope glasses (which would let you read or watch TV with your head flat on a pillow in a more natural position) while cooking for the rest of the challenge. Geoffrey wasn't eliminated that round, but as he spent nothing in Round 1, it left him with only $2,900 of his starting cash — and got him Hoist by His Own Petard when Antonia Lofaso hits him with a sabotage she spent $3,000 for.
  • One chef bid a total of $15,900 to give two of the worst sabotages (using equipment from a golf bag for cooking, and "Aunt Mae's Gloves" which barred the wearer from touching food) to one chef in hopes of getting that chef sent home. It totally backfired. Not only did the victim survive, but he got cut because he put bleu cheese and salmon together in a club sandwich. Even better, he's an Italian chef.
  • Alton loves the huge protracted bidding wars that happen during the show. In an interview, here's what he had to say about the most memorable bidding war for what was then the largest bid to date:
  Alton Brown: Oh, it’s definitely the pickled ginger for the gingersnap round – basically they bid, like, $16,500 for some pickled ginger that ended up not making any difference at all. It’s just when people fixate on winning an item that they don’t actually really need and then they go and spend all their money, which is really ridiculous, but it happens. So I would say definitely that.

The key detail of a Whammy Bid is that it ups the bid by an enormous amount in a single jump — an auction that ends up at an enormous total as a result of a "protracted bidding war" is not an example (unless, somewhere in there, one of the bids was a whammy bid).

The record largest bid is impressive, but is not an example of Whammy Bid because it was the end result of a long bidding war, not a single jump bid.

Some of the examples above do involve a single enormous bid, and I've left those in the trope list. Some of them might involve a single enormous bid, and if so should be rewritten to make that clear when being re-added to the trope list.