...is that it gets really, really old after a while.
Dish No. 2 comes from Lee. It's a Dungeness crab salad with fresh avocado and gazpacho andalouse. Graham may well be talking about the entire problem with this show when he notes of Lee that his "dishes haven't been the worst. They haven't been the greatest. They've just kind of been in the middle somewhere." And that's MasterChef in a nutshell to this point, isn't it? An indistinct mass that neither impresses nor repels. Anyhow, Lee knocked this one out of the park, according to Graham. So there's that.
The third dish the judges want to taste is Sheetal's. "I'm shocked when they called my name," she says. That makes two of us -- her tomato and crab curry doesn't look that particularly appetizing, so this selection has the whiff of made-for-TV drama about it. Joe praises the dish for excelling in its simplicity. "I'm sure that crab is very, very happy to have given its life for this dish," Joe tells her. I'm going to guess the crab would have preferred to have more of a say in the matter, but that's just me.
So who's cuisine reigns supreme? After a brief judges huddle -- and less brief commercial break -- Gordon announces that the winner made the best dish thus far in the storied history of MasterChef. Your winner is Lee. "You're a force to be reckoned with," Gordon tells him. Now that we know who the hell you are, he doesn't add. So Lee gets a leg up in the challenge -- hopefully, it doesn't involve having an Iron Chef wipe the floor with you when you try to recreate one of her recipes.
Instead, Lee gets to pick the main ingredient that everyone will be cooking with in the Invention test. The one that makes the worst dish gets sent packing. The theme of the dish, by the way, will be romance. "You're tall, you're good-looking," Gordon says, in what sounds more like a come-on than a description of a cooking challenge. "You know how to woo a lady. You know how to seduce a lady." Lee does not deny this is so. He just hopes that the ingredient isn't chocolate, since his girlfriend hates it and he's not much of a fan of it himself. As it happens, that is one of his choices, which would be totally devastating if there weren't two other choices -- passion fruit and a mozzarella cheese that has ricotta and buttermilk on the inside whose proper Italian name I didn't quite catch. (It's burrata, according to Chef Wikipedia.) But it's no matter, because Lee picked passion fruit. So let's start grabbing ingredients, people.