'Top Chef: Boston' Episode 5 Recap: Chefs Battle While Favorites For The Crown Emerge!

In this week's Top Chef, titled "It's War', everyone is still reeling from James and Rebecca going home. While everyone is scared, Katsuji is making jokes and playing around.

The chefs come to the kitchen for their quickfire challenge and see Padma will be judging alongside Chef Jamie Bissonnette. The challenge is a head-to-head using Reynolds Wrap products (product placement anyone?). When each chef's name is called, they choose a chef they want to compete against. The best overall dish wins $10,000, but no immunity for the next challenge. Mei Lin and Gregory are chosen last because they're big threats. (And I just realized while watching this challenge that I find all of the chefs really annoying this year; they're too full of themselves for my taste - no pun intended).

Katsuji beats Aaron, Doug beats Adam, Keriann beats Stacy, Katie beats Melissa, Gregory beats Mei, and the overall winner and the money is Gregory. He's on quite a roll and is probably the chef to beat.

For the elimination challenge, the quickfire winners will battle the losers. Each chef will battle another chef on the opposite team. Each winning chef gets a point, and three points wins. Three out of the five head-to-heads are rematches from the quickfire. Each team has a $1,000 budget for food that will feed 500 people; meaning that at $2 a head, rationing will be very important.

During the cooking, Katsuji delivers the quote of the episode, saying "One Mexican minute left, which is like five American minutes."

When the chefs get outside for their cooking the next day, Aaron's broth for his meatballs falls over, but Mei has a replacement to save the dish. This lead's Keriann to repeat the good-ol' saying, "Karma's a bitch!"

 #TopChef

A photo posted by Padma Lakshmi (@padmalakshmi) on Nov 11, 2014 at 3:24pm PST

In the first battle Adam beats Doug in their rematch, the second battle goes to Katsuji (over the more "refined" Melissa), and the third battle is won by Gregory over Mei (but they put out two very strong dishes).

During the show's break from the action (that every Bravo show does) the other chefs talk about how much they either love or hate Katsuji. We, of course, love him... but if you take yourself too seriously you're going to hate him.

The fourth battle was given to Stacy over Keriann, which makes the teams now tied 2-2. It now comes down to the last battle. Katie's cake beat out Aaron's Asian meatball, so team blue won the war!

In deliberations, the judges say it's the best food they've had all season. Adam and Mei did very well, so elimination is down to Stacy, Melissa, and Aaron.

At judges' table, they tell Melissa her dish was too watery, while Aaron is told his noodles were mushy. When Padma asks the rest of the team if anyone spoke up about Aaron's dish being too ambitious, Adam says Aaron's confidence in it made him not say anything. Gregory raises his hand and says if it was his team, he would've said something. Very shady, Gregory.... Even though Stacy won her battle, her dish was still not to the judges' liking since she went up against Keriann's very weak dish.

In the end, Padma tells Aaron to "please pack your knives and go." Tom gets one last dig in and tells him he let himself and his team down. Aaron goes out very classy, telling the audience he came from nothing to make something out of himself, which if he can do, then anyone can.

We definitely now have Gregory and Mei as the chefs to beat this season so if they don't make the final, it will be very surprising. Stranger things have happened...