Team Eat Out asked TONY staffer and guest food journo Ashlea Halpern (of Lisa Fernandes-cooks-for-our- readers fame) what it was like to come face to face with a chef that’s so feared and loathed throughout the land. She, unlike most of you in the blogosphere, had some positive things to say about the Top Chef contestant…eventually. Take it away, Ashlea…

When bloggers started demanding that Lisa Fernandes, the so-called gorgon of Top Chef’s season four, "pack her knives and slit her wrists," any sympathy I might’ve otherwise had had indubitably been depleted.

Here this chick was, final three, though she was repeatedly in the bottom tier. Her rice-cooker conspiracy theories were absurd; she thought nothing of flinging lovable freaktestant Andrew D’Ambrosi to the wolves; and then she had the audacity to demand that fellow finalists Stephanie Izard and Richard Blais congratulate her for their shared triumph.

I hated her like I’d never hated a TV personality before. Not even Bill O’Reilly.

Then along came Cheap Eats. For our "Judge’s Table" story, I spent the afternoon trailing Lisa through a Flushing supermarket and asking her inane prep questions in the Mai House kitchen. I was never under the illusion that what I was seeing was anything more than a well-rehearsed dog-and-pony show, but as we rode in the back of her publicist’s car from Queens to Tribeca, trading stories of eating and shopping and life off the airwaves, I honest-to-God, pit-of-my-stomach thought, Hey, she’s okay.

Had I been foiled by a cunning PR machine? Possibly. But can a woman who delights in taking her girlfriend’s kid out to Asian buffets and explaining the myriad strange foods on offer really be "rotted to the core"? Can a chef who oohs and ahhs over cutesy products like Kewpie mayo, or who can make a fishmonger at a Flushing supermarket chuckle despite the language barrier really be "the culinary Antichrist"?

Removed from the pressure cooker of reality TV (and under the careful watch of a publicity guardian), Lisa Fernandes in the flesh wasn’t half bad. And I’m the first to admit I hate admitting that.—Ashlea Halpern