Coming off a win in last week’s episode of Food Network Star, Chef Jernard Wells kept the momentum going with another win in the first challenge of Sunday night‘s show before falling into the bottom three in the elimination challenge.
The competing chefs were first divided into three teams of three for a live remote TV taping with “Entertainment Tonight” hosts Nancy O’Dell and Kevin Frazier. Wells, a former Chattanooga restaurateur, was paired with Monterey Salk and Yaku Spruill. Each team was assigned a food-trends theme for which they had to cook an example and describe it in their live interviews.
Wells’ team was assigned sheet pan meals using recycled kitchen leftovers. Wells took the leftover tops of cut carrots and made a caprese salad with rainbow chard and carrot stem pesto.
Once Wells’ trio was named challenge winners, each of the three became a team captain for the next challenge.
Each captain chose his cooking team, then they learned they would be filling room service orders for a celebrity client at the Park Plaza Hotel. Wells’ team was charged with preparing a three-course menu for afternoon tea. While cooking their dishes, they received a phone call from celebrity client Jesse Tyler Ferguson of “Modern Family,” making changes to each chef’s dish.
The team didn’t know who they were cooking for until they came in to serve their dishes to Ferguson and the judges. Ferguson’s presence made all three chefs nervous to the point Judge Bobby Flay jokingly told Ferguson he was the “kryptonite to celebrity chefs.”
Wells was in the midst of describing his orange liqueur rangoon when he drew a blank and froze. It didn’t leave him much time to hype his dish once he recovered. Ferguson and Flay both told Wells his dish had too many flavors competing. Judge Giada DeLaurentiis commented that the filling had leaked out.
After all three team presentations, Flay told the chefs they had all struggled so there was no winner. The judges named chefs who were safe, leaving Wells, Spruill and Rob Burmeister in the bottom three. DeLaurentiis told Wells that she didn’t feel a lot of his personality in this presentation and there was no sense of elegance to his dish. Even so, he was one of the last two standing after Spruill was eliminated.