The judges didn’t seem to know about Tristan’s dad until he told them at the end. Maybe production crew decided to keep the information from the judges so it wouldn’t sway their judging? I was kind of surprised they didn’t know.
Maybe, but our house think they did! In any case, I liked the way they all handled it. They
didn’t “milk it”
I have been sort of driven to learn more about Tristan.
From the link "From there he moved onto restaurants throughout the U.S., eventually finding his way onto a competitive cooking show, ABC’s The Taste, in 2014. There, celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson became his on- and off-screen mentor, 
I think I watched that!
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I don’t think they knew. The spontaneous tears seemed genuine.
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Yes, they seemed genuinely shocked.
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I do believe this is the first Restaurant Wars without any chef yelling at fellow chefs and with no major meltdown or dish failure. What a relief. And how nice to see Nina Compton again–she was one of my favorites on her season.
But Tristan, . . . 
He’s still my favorite to win. As Tom noted, he has a real range of styles at his command.
Massimo? His food looked good and he seemed to cope well with the mistake by the serving crew. But that squatting down at table level trying to be charming is a restaurant pet peeve of mine. He’s not a villain, just annoying IMO.
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Oh, and I don’t like what I saw in the preview for next week. I really hope they aren’t going to fall back on gimmicks.
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Nina is one of my favorites from the entire series!!!
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I was a bit disappointed by LCK this time — the scallop dish seemed like a bit of a stretch for the theme.
Is anyone watching “Dish With Kish”? She and Gregory have so much chemistry, but with Joe Flamm, not so much.
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I watched the first episode and didn’t like it much, so haven’t watched the rest yet. Might go back.
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One of the things I found odd in this episode was that Paula’s dessert was a flourless walnut cake – torta ni noci – served with tres leches, but was presented just as a tres leches cake by Shuai
So the judges were thrown by the texture of the cake – except it was intentionally a flourless nut meal cake, not a sponge cake, which they should have known from the dish name on the menu they had next to them, no?
How did this not come up at all even at judges table?
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Shuai really did a poor job as FOH, right down to explaining the menu well, not just to the judges, but also just communicating how they intended the family-style service to work.
I may be misremembering. but wasn’t their complaint that the cake was too damp, more than that it was flourless?
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Interesting question; I hadn’t thought of that. I remember her pointing out it was flourless and vegan.
Would a cake like that make sense identified as tres leches? Or maybe it was not supposed to be identified as tres leches, and instead something with a tres leches sauce.
I think it was that it was a dense cake so didn’t soak up the milks, so the outside and the inside were different textures, or the inside was too dense, or something.
But of course a flourless nut cake would be dense. That’s why I’m surprised that one of the judges didn’t look down at the menu and read that it was torta di noci, or that Paula didn’t say it at judges table.
Exactly this. And it was a mistake to put tres leches sauce with a dense flourless cake, but still.
(I’ve done it with a ricotta cake and regretted it because it didn’t soak through, but I was going for something specific in that case, and the recipients liked the density, and asked that I not switch the cake recipe the next time I made it 
That’s why the tres leches with a dense cake made a particular impression.)
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I seem to recall in the past reading/seeing that judges’ table could take hours. So what we see is heavily edited. I miss the good old days when the Bravo site had multiple blogs that gave some more insight into each episode.
Who knows, we get a tiny sliver of what actually goes on at JT, so she might have said something but what we saw in the final edit didn’t include it because there were so many other issues with that team’s performance to cover. It feels as if not as much of JT is making it into what we’ve seen in past seasons, too.
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Yes, but they commented on the cake, and she got eliminated for her dishes and overall exec cheffing, so I would think it would have come in
True. And BTW, I thought she made a good exec (and that may have been her downfall).
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I want to be grandma sheik.
#NewGoal
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