Chang's latest restaurant is located in a sprawling strip mall heavy on big American chains. (Tim Carman/The Washington Post) Cult figures aren’t supposed to send invitations. They’re supposed to hole up in ratty motels, reading their esoteric tracts on the full symbiosis of being and knowing while disdaining the the very pigeons who dare to hover in their smoke-filled airspace. Cult figures don’t use Evite.

But after years of reading about, and salivating over, the cooking of Peter Chang, never once finding my palate and his plates in the same space, I found an unlikely note in my inbox: an invitation to the grand opening party of Peter Chang Cafe, his second restaurant in central Virginia and possibly the prototype of things to come from the chef.

It was not supposed to be like this. My first experience with the Great Chang should have required more suffering on my part. It should have required phone calls, voyeuristic pawing through other people’s posts on food blogs, maybe even FBI triangulation. It should have been more like John Binkley’s experience. It should not, under any circumstances, have come via electronic invitation.

Nothing could keep John Nucci out of the kitchen — not even a pair of paralyzed legs from a 1989 shooting. (Family photo) As a concept, the “celebrity chef” is a relatively new one and therefore prone to overuse and misuse. The status accorded some chefs can be based on the flimsiest of reasons. They may, for example, have done little more than host a TV show, from which they have spun off enough cookbooks to wipe out all the trees in Jefferson National Forest.

Then there’s a chef like John Nucci.

You probably have never heard of him. The Silver Spring native, whose death last month was ruled a homicide, couldn’t imagine doing anything but cooking for a living, even after a soulless cipher of a human being shot Nucci in the spine in 1989 and paralyzed him from the waist down.

With a customized stand-up wheelchair, Nucci continued to cook, at his own restaurant in St. Mary’s County. He called himself “Robo-Chef.”

Staff writer Emily Langer tells the story of Nucci's fateful night in her excellent obit from Sunday:

Hill Country is the largest retailer of Shiner east of the Mississippi, says one distributor. (Hill Country Barbecue Market) For a small-town Texas lad transplanted 1,300 miles to the big city, Jimmy Mauric seems very much at home conducting a beer dinner at Hill Country in bustling Penn Quarter.

And why shouldn’t he? Mauric has spent 34 of his 51 years working for the Spoetzl Brewery in the one-stoplight burg of Shiner, rising from bottle washer to brewmaster. And Hill Country (so says one local distributor) is the largest retailer of Shiner east of the Mississippi, draining about 115 kegs per month.

Founded in 1909, Spoetzl is named after Kosmos Spoetzl, a German immigrant who made his living slaking the thirsts of local cotton farmers. It’s one of a handful of older regional breweries that survived the mass consolidation of the post-World War II era to find a new lease on life once Americans discovered the joys of craft beer.

Built like tortelli, cooked like potstickers. (Edward Schneider) One of the things I like to do with leftover braised beef (in our house it is likely to be brisket or short ribs) is to chop it up, mix it with Parmesan and cooked greens and make ravioli or some other filled pasta shape. These are served with a little of the sauce/gravy from the original braise. If the stew has been flavored with, say, thyme and orange and maybe some olives, this can be passed off as a terrific kind of ravioli they make in Nice.

I did this recently, using brisket and Swiss chard stems (saved when I used the leaves in another dish. And this time, I got myself into trouble (and, happily, out of it again).

Normally, I roll pasta to the second-from-finest setting on my 40-year-old hand-cranked machine, but that day I got it into my head that I wanted it thinner and more delicate. There are dangers with very thin wrappers:They are fragile, and moreover a too-moist stuffing can dissolve them into goo unless you cook or freeze them right away. (And if they’re kept frozen for any length of time, the pasta/wrappers can fracture.)

If I’d been paying attention, I’d have noticed that the chard, though quite dry on the surface, was very wet when chopped. I should have squeezed it to wring out as much of this moisture as I could, but I just scooped it right into the bowl with the meat and cheese, seasoned and mixed this well and spooned it into a disposable plastic pastry bag (by far the easiest way to deposit ravioli and other fillings onto pasta sheets).

So, when I started piping the mixture onto my circles of dough I saw liquid oozing out of the filling. I could have remedied this by piping the portions of filling onto paper towels, then transferring them to the pasta disks. Perhaps I should have. But I didn’t. I just soldiered on, folding the circles over the filling to form half moons, then bringing the ends around to make tortellini-like shapes, but a little bigger.

On this week’s episode, the four remaining chefs — Paul, Ed, Sarah and Lindsay — walk into the San Antonio Top Chef kitchen and are soon joined by Beverly, the winner of Top Chef’s online losers-bracket competition.

Before them are five silver cloches, under which blindfolds are hidden. They cheftestants are told they’ll be doing a pantry raid with 30 minutes to cook their dishes, but they must be blindfolded when choosing their ingredients. And, they have to use every ingredient they select.

The winner will be given either a Prius (ask former “Top Chef” finalist Mike Isabella what he did with his when he finally got his a year after he won it) or a guaranteed spot in the finals — and won’t have to compete in the Elimination Challenge. The chefs meander around the kitchen and eventually find the pantry and refrigerators. For some reason, Beverly doesn’t quite make her way there, but Padma steps in to guide her.

I call shenanigans. If I were at this stage, I think I’d be picking random things and dropping them in the other chefs’ baskets just to mess with them. Sarah and Lindsay start cooking with 23 minutes to go. Ed is the last to start cooking and realizes he grabbed sausage casings when he thought he was picking pancetta, but that’s the only real whoopsie moment of this challenge.

Here’s what they made:

Beverly: striped bass with avocado, lime and jalapeno.

Paul: sauteed prawn with Thai-style tomato salad.

Ed: “udon” with ribbons of zucchini, mushrooms and scallions.

Sarah: corn soup with onion, red chili, roasted mushrooms and peaches.

Lindsay: fish with bulgur, mascarpone and broccoli rabe.

Tom lauds Ed’s ingenuity in boiling the heck out of the casings to make a soup base. He also liked the sweet-salt-bitter balance in Paul’s dish but said the prawn was slightly undercooked. Tom tells Beverly he liked her diced avocado on the side, but that her fish was undercooked. He tells Lindsay her fish was perfectly cooked and that the bulgur was a nice touch and that he liked the char on her greens. Last, Tom tells Sarah hers was definitely a case of having to force an ingredient (the peaches) into a dish, but that it worked.

Tom tells the chefs it’s between Ed and Sarah. And the winner is . . . Sarah. She chooses the guaranteed spot in the finale. Ed and Paul grouse a bit about her choice, and Ed says he thinks Sarah isn’t confident enough to compete for the spot. I say that’s sour grapes. I’d take the guaranteed spot, too.

For the Elimination Challenge, Padma and Tom bring in the finalists’ mentors/bosses:

For Sarah: Tony Mantuano, owner of Spiaggia.

For Lindsay: Michelle Bernstein, owner of Michy’s.

For Beverly: Sarah Stegner, owner of Prairie Grass Cafe, and Beverly’s first boss when the cheftestant was 16.

For Paul: Tyson Cole, owner of Uchi, and really easy on the eyes.

For Ed: Frank Crispo, owner of Crispo, and Ed’s first boss.

Beverly had hoped they’d be bringing in her 2-year-old son. Whatever, Beverly. Paul cries and cries and cries. The mentors shed a few tears, too. I just don’t get it. They must be exhausted, right? Is that why the waterworks switched on?