Marcel Fights Back
It’s no secret that pretty much everyone on the Top Chef Season 2 disliked Marcel, but the controversy surrounding this chef is still hot. TiVo back with me a minute to a post I wrote here that talked about Marcel’s feature in Wired magazine. One of the dishes he created was called the Cyber egg, and featured and egg-looking creation, but made with different ingredients and chemicals instead of actually egg.
When the chefs at the fame wd-50 restaurant read the article, they were enraged. It seems as though they serve something with a similar concept (an egg not made from egg) and similar flavors, as created by the famous chef Wylie Dufresne, self-admittedly one of Marcel’s muses. Marcel has also ordered this dish when he’s been to the restaurant.
You can read his full statement to the accusations of plagiarism here, but the overview is that he uses a totally different technique to create his product and that the flavors found in both dishes can also be found elsewhere in the culinary world. He also never claimed the dish as his own, although he believes that he has full rights to do so.
However, the most interesting part of this response comes at the end, when he goes on record as saying that Ilan cheated in the finale of Top Chef by using recipes that were purely created by the chef at the restaurant back home where he works. In other words, while Marcel took the ingredients and made new dishes, Ilan just recreated dishes that had been developed by someone else over weeks or even months.
He also goes on the record as calling Sam a liar for taking credit for one of Marcel’s dishes, although I guess we’ll never know if that’s true unless we see the kitchen footage that was cut out. I do think that Sam told Marcel to not worry about the fish when Marcel was in a panic about it, and I do think that Sam made suggestions (as did all the sous chefs), but my gut tells me that Marcel did in fact create that dish and those flavors. I mean, it was his idea before they even forgot the fish…
In any case, this is interesting considering that Marcel is competing with Ian, Elia, and Sam in the 4 on 4 challenge with Season 1’s Dave, Tifani, Harold, and Steven…although, I guess the other team has Tif and Dave, who also hate one another!!
Marcel, Top Chef, food, recipes
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