Imagine the horror of waking up from a deep slumber to find tragically soul-patched Tom Colicchio in your bedroom, demanding you get up and follow him to the kitchen. Apparently, the remaining six chefs find this morning alarm just as frightening: They appear to be near-catatonic and puffy-faced from lack of sleep (Richard, in particular, looks like balls) as they stand in the kitchen waiting to be told the details of their next Quickfire Challenge. Surprise: They get to work the egg station during the morning rush at Lou Mitchell’s! Helene, the owner, will watch each chef as they take turns manning the grill—frying up eggs, butterflying sausage (Wtf? What kind of asshole asks for his sausage to be butterflied?) and executing various other breakfast-cooking tricks—and she’ll determine who’s the best under pressure.

Richard seems pretty flustered, Lisa creates another hole in the ozone layer by burning a Styrofoam box and Dale rocks it out easily. But it’s Antonia and her awesome “Yo Biotch” shirt that wins this challenge, her fourth Quickfire victory. Tom’s gotta run to attend the Unfortunate Facial Hair charity ball, so he hands Antonia the address of their next stop before he jets. Cue the product placement: The chefs must use their GPS system to figure out how to get to this somehow remote and confusing building.

The group arrives at a giant empty loft/warehouse space, where Padma tells them they will be engaging in the much-loved Restaurant Wars. Lisa momentarily stops scowling to tell us how excited she is to participate in said battle. Here’s how it works: The chefs break up into two teams of three, and each team takes over half the loft to create their own restaurant (of course, they must share kitchen space). Each team gets $1,500 for food at Whole Foods and $5,000 for décor at Pier 1 (Do they really need that much? How much can chintzy plastic bamboo really cost?).

Because she won the Quickfire, Antonia gets to choose her team, and she picks wisely: Stephanie and Richard. The three jags—Lisa, Dale and Spike—make up the other team. To the surprise of no one, Dale decides he will be executive chef of his team’s Asian restaurant, Mai Buddha, with Lisa as chef de cuisine and Spike as front of house, thus allowing us to see Spike in a suit (which, despite his douchebaggery, is not a bad sight at all). Antonia takes on the role of exec chef for her team’s gastropub, Warehouse Kitchen; Richard is chef de cuisine and Stephanie is front of house, since she’s had the experience of opening her own restaurant.

[Dear Bravo, here’s a tip: Maybe while you’re broadcasting a food show, you don’t want to run a commercial for genital herpes. I’m just sayin’. Kisses, Laura]

The WK team quickly picks its menu. First course: Beet salad with goat cheese, and linguine with clam sauce and pork sausage, topped with a horseradish crème fraiche. Second course: Trout with a cauliflower puree and braised lamb shank and loin. Third: Gorgonzola cheesecake with sweet-potato puree and banana “scallops.”

Because everyone on the MB team claims an Asian-cooking backgrond, an Asian restaurant concept seems like a no-brainer, though their menu choices end up using the literal definition of no-brainer. First course: Laksa (a shrimp soup) and dumplings. Second: Butterscotch-miso scallops (my teeth hurt just thinking about this dish) and braised short rib. Third: mango sticky rice and halo-halo with cantaloupe, avocado and kiwi.

With the menus set, the teams head to Pier 1 to buy $10,000 worth of cheap, tacky crap with which they will decorate their restaurants. Back at the loft, the teams start hastily executing the menu while the FOH folks set up their spaces. But, yay, help comes in the form of kicked-off chefs: MB picks Jen and WK picks Nikki. Guest head judge Anthony Bourdain lankily lumbers into the kitchen looking like the agent of death as he discusses the menus. Yikes, he knows laksa really well, and tells Lisa and Dale he expects great things from that soup.

As if team MB needed more pressure: Dale and Lisa are bickering like world’s most miserable married couple, with Dale telling Lisa that her laksa is smoky as hell (Spike concurs). But the show must go on, for the diners are starting to file in to each restaurant. Things continue to go downhill for MB when the judges shit all over the laksa, as expected, but half-lidded Padma calls the dumplings “slammin’.” (Seriously, is she high?) Ted Allen declares Dale’s butterscotch scallops “Willy Wonka scallops,” but Spike’s braised short ribs get fairly good reviews. Holy crap, do they hate Lisa’s mango sticky rice with toasted coconut; Bourdain says it’s “baby food with wood chips.”

Team WK fares much better, with the judges falling over themselves to praise Stephanie’s linguine with clam sauce and Antonia’s lamb dish. And though Allen likened the chocolate smear on the banana scallops plate to what he’d see on a New York City sidewalk (nothing like a little scat humor on a cooking show!), they all dug the dish. But the most compliments were saved for Stephanie’s Gorgonzola cheesecake, which made Padma’s eyes roll back into her head.

It came as no surprise, then, that Team WK walked away with a big win, with Stephanie’s cheesecake and linguine making her the overall winner, and the winner of a trip to Barcelona. Burn on you, Dale: Last week you only got a damn bottle of wine for winning.

And now for the losers: Team Dysfunctional gets a beating by the judges. Bourdain says the laksa was like “putting his face in a campfire,” and the scallops tasted like a “melted candy bar.” But even though Lisa’s dishes (laksa, mango sticky rice) were declared the worst, and she acted like a straight-up ass during the judging, Dale got the boot. And then Dale blows my damn mind by crying—sobbing even—about getting kicked off. This coming from the aggro dude who grabbed his crotch in Lisa’s general direction a few episodes ago. I gotta say, I prefer the junk-clutching Dale over the waterworks Dale.