BravoLet's make one thing perfectly clear: Spike shouldn't have been booted from Top Chef: All-Stars last night. Jamie was the one who deserved to go home.
How bad was her dish? It was so bad even she admitted she was relieved she never had to serve her chickpeas concoction to the judges.
What does Spike have to say about all this? We caught up with the Washington, D.C.-based chef earlier today to talk Jamie, Angelo's maybe-shady intentions and more…
What happened last night? Shouldn't Jamie have gone home?
I know. It's a sham, isn't it? [Laughs.] Of course Jamie should have gone home. I think she spent more of her time in the bleachers than she did cooking.
Were the other contestants pissed, too?
You're being asked to come on a show titled Top Chef: All-Stars and you know how strong the brand Top Chef is so it's an honor to go there. But then you dip out for a little splinter in your finger and get stitches instead of cooking and then one of your teammates goes home who is way more talented than you are? It's like, what's going on? And then we have a game plan that the worst dish would go out no matter what. It doesn't matter if you're not prepared or it's not ready or this or that. Ya gotta have a little dignity.
Do you think Angelo tried to screw you over on purpose?
I still haven't figured him out. I've seen him after the show. We're buddies now. We text back and forth, but I will go ahead and say he kind of screwed my dish up. Was it 100 percent intentional? We'll never know. It probably was…[but] it's my fault because I didn't have that competitive spirit I had the first time around. I didn't feel that need to become an ass on the show or really confrontational like the Spike you knew before.
Would you do it again?
Yeah. It's more than winning $100,000 or whatever the prize is. It's more about can I do it? Can I make it to the end? Can I endure it?