Last night (in sad but true news), Top Chef viewers bid farewell to cheftestant Stacy Cogswell. The “hometown girl” (as many called her) and well-known Boston chef packed her knives and headed back to Coolidge Corner’s Regal Beagle kitchen, where she currently works as executive chef.

The Top Chef episode, dubbed “The First Thanksgiving,” centered around an elimination challenge at the historic Plimouth Plantation. Cheftestants were asked to prepare a Thanksgiving feast with tools and ingredients from the 1600s. Not an easy task – to say the least.

And unfortunately for Stacy, her dish of ramp-smoked clams just did not make the cut. The judges, which also included guest judge Chef Ken Oringer, claimed it tasted like “dirt.” Ouch.

To Stacy’s credit though, ramps aren’t exactly the easiest ingredient to incorporate into a dish, especially when you’re working with colonial cooking tools. Grubstreet even declared ramps “as divisive an ingredient as you’ll find” in an earlier article.

Chef Stacy Cogswell had a good run, though, and certainly gave Boston a good name during Top Chef Season 12. She avoided any catty drama and created plenty of great dishes. In the end, she admitted on TV that she was “relieved” because the pressure of being from Boston was keeping her up at night.

Check out the local chef’s “After the Knife” interview with Richard Blaise, here.

Images via Shutterstock, Regal Beagle