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Beating out 12 of the country's best cooks, Chris Cosentino took the titleon "Top Chef Masters" in Wednesday's Season 4 finale. The last episode of the series brought some of the cycle's most consistently strong chef'testants, who were impressive on their own but had very distinctive culinary characteristics.
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Final challenge food critic Karen Brooks called the showdown between meat expert Cosentino and classically trained Kerry Heffernan "polars in the restaurant world today. One is 'I'm going to nurture your into a blissful coma', and one is a 'I dare you to eat this' bravado." In the end, the panel of some of the country's most acclaimed food critics decided to go with their guts and award Cosentino with $100,000 and an additional $41,000 from previous challenge winnings for his charity, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, and he was crowned the "Top Chef Master." In the last themed elimination challenge, Cosentino proved to create the best dishes in the form of letters.
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The first course was a love letter, which the San Francisco-based chef dedicated to his wife, creating a literal heart -- beef heart tartar with fois gras and puffed beef tendon. The second course was an apology letter, again dedicated to his wife and the rest of his family. Admittedly "married to the kitchen,"restaurant owner Cosentinodished up a scallop, pork, and uni dish that won over the judges, whocalled it "the sexiest dish ever served." Cosentino's third course was a "thank you" letter to his great-grandmother, who hailed from Naples, Italy. As a child, he ran out of the house when she made her famous tripe. His version of Trippa Napolitana helped him win it all. Lastly, Cosentino's final course was a "letter to yourself" -- a meal that received mixed reviews from the critics' table. He considered his plate of blood sausage, poached oysters, and fried egg as his last supper, quite literally. While critic John Curtas said the course was "embarrassingly bad ... he should have brought his A-game and this is a D-game," Francis Lam dubbed it the "best thing I've eaten in maybe the last 30 years of my life."
After the last course was served, Cosentino believed he had no chance of winning at all, so when host Curtis Stone announced him to be the winner, thechef was left stunned. He exclaimed, "I took a chance, and did what I did. I wouldn't have done it any other way. Guts prevailed. Winning is a big apology to my family -- for being away, for working, for never stopping. It's kind of my way of justifying I'm doing the right thing for once."