Dale Chihuly canopy at the Bellagio

As we return to “Top Chef” land after a special two-week palate-cleansing hiatus, we find our six remaining chefs showing signs of stress. At the McMansion, Robin roots through the drawer of Glad Flex bags with an untold purpose, possibly the intention to smash a piano into bits. Jen is sallow and wild haired. I mean really wild haired. She looks like she has just suffered a botched electroshock therapy session. Bryan pines for his wife and young son back home in Maryland. Everyone seems ready to get on with it.

Soon, the chefs find themselves in the bowels of the Venetian hotel, in a kind of kitchen catacomb. A phone rings, and a disembodied voice comes crackling through the line. Is it Charlie looking for his Angels? No, it’s Padma demanding food.

Cut to our hostess, who is upstairs splayed out in a guest room bed, and she’s not alone!

Padma is having a slumber party with erudite British food sensualist Nigella Lawson. These two recumbent gastro-beauties lie side by side in their beds wearing matching fluffy terry robes. What a sight! Fellas, this hotel room is a double queen, and it’s smoking!

Guess what? Our ladies are famished for breakfast, breakfast and yet more breakfast. Oh, chefs, it’s time for the:

QUICKFIRE CHALLENGE: Room Service Breakfast in Bed (or: Come On In, the Door’s Always Open)

Our stressed chefs have 20 minutes each to root through the kitchen for vittles, trays, cloches, flowers — all the niceties our ladies want for their six-course breakfast in bed. Then they have to run up to the room.

First up are Robin and Eli, whom I’m beginning to think of as the chef versions of Sharon and Jack Osbourne.

Robin makes a huge mess putting together her goat cheese blintzes with caramelized pineapple and blueberries, while Eli reimagines a Reuben sandwich as Eggs Benedict.

“This would be a great hangover breakfast,” says Nigella as Eli slides the gooey pile of eggs, toast, corned beef and hollandaise onto her tray.

As Nigella chews thoughtfully on Robin’s flavorless blintzes, Michael V. is storming through the kitchen cleaning up Robin’s mess. He’s in a state because he has only 20 minutes to make his huevos cubanas, which involve banana puree, crispy rice and bacon.

I think this qualifies as the “hangover nightmare” breakfast. You don’t want that awful feeling of eight shots of Jägermeister sitting in your stomach? How about some eggs piled on banana baby food?

Nigella and Padma, who are both as fresh as flowers after three breakfasts, actually seem to like it well enough, but they melt for Kevin’s smartly updated steak and eggs with green onions and crème fraîche.

How’s our girl, Jen, doing? No worries. “I work in a hotel and we do room service from our kitchen all the time.”

She decides to serve the ladies good old creamed chipped beef on toast, which she informs us no fewer than three times is properly called “bleep on a shingle.”

Nigella does turn up her nose with that typically British “Is this a plate full of excrement?” expression, but she gamely gives it a try. The oven-roasted tomatoes help.

Bryan serves the caboose of the breakfast train — a dish of eggs over polenta with King crab, asparagus and a vanilla beurre blanc that gives Nigella the vanilly-willies.

So Bryan gets singled out as a loser, while Eli earns the win for his witty Reuben eggs.

“The tang of the sauerkraut slapped the jet lag out of me,” says Nigella to a beaming Eli, bringing a blush to his cheek. His winning dish will be immortalized for all eternity in the Top Chef Quickfire Challenge cookbook.

Padma and Nigella, now dressed and upright, give Eli no time to savor his accomplishment before they announce the:

Elimination Challenge: Create a Dish Based on a Casino (or: Thighs a-quiver).

The chefs draw knives that send them on a romp through various casinos to inspired bite-size yummies for a big party. Before long, Jen is watching a jousting tournament at Excalibur and drinking a firkin of beer. Kevin pets trained dolphins at Mirage and gives a shout-out to Georgia Organics (that’s our boy!). Robin wanders through the Bellagio, her eyes as glassy as the Dale Chihuly canopy above.

Not one of the chefs chooses to hang out with dead-eyed tourists planted in front of nickel slots or visit the $2.99 buffets for inspiration. Funny, that.

When they head back to the McMansion after a long day of Convention and Visitors Authority-approved activities, the chefs are all bubbling with ideas. Lying on their beds, they all share stories of their fun, fun days in the casinos.

Bryan, who visited the Shark Reef exhibit at Mandalay Bay, will cook sustainable seafood. Mike, who romped through New York New York, will dress like the Statue of Liberty, hold a torch filled with peanut sauce and wear a crown of chicken satay. Or, maybe he’ll just make some wings. New Yorkers love their wings, right?

Robin will transform the Chihuly glass flowers at the Bellagio into stained sugar glass decorations for a panna cotta. Except she’s never worked with sugar. And she’s never made panna cotta. And she doesn’t know how to stir. But, dagnabit, she’s giving this thing her all.

Only Eli remains verklempt. He visited the (strangely fitting!) Circus Circus casino, and found it no circus at all but rather a drab, depressing, neon-lit, room filled with clanging machines. (”He describes it like a really sad velvet painting,” says Kevin, our trippy poet.)

Think, Eli, think.

Well, okay, there was one stand selling circus treats, like peanuts, caramel apples and popcorn. I love this stuff. What if I mix it all together into a kind of beige, grainy, chalky, malodorous soup and cover it in a pink raspberry dome so that it looks like a scooped out chicken embryo? Surely the judges will stand up and notice that!

The chefs toast their perseverance with Korbel Brut (a wine-like substance), go to bed, and report to Top Chef kitchen the next morning. They have only 3 1/2 hours to get their yummies on the road.

Here’s where they stand:

• Kevin: Curing salmon, thinking dolphin, all cool.
• Robin: A typical mess, with drooping sugar glass everywhere.
• Bryan: Sustainability.
• Eli: Blenders full of clown vomit.
• Mike: Lots of boneless chicken wings. Gotta get ‘em crispy. Gotta get ‘em crispy. Gotta…
• Jen: Uh, oh. Wild hair alert! She is freak. Ing. Out. She cannot get her boring medieval steak dish together. It has, like, toothpicks sticking in it, so it’s the Sword in the Stone, get it?

Jen is still squirting one of her three wine sauces onto a plates when Padma arrives, looking ravenous in red. Her 175 guests line up behind her, demanding medieval meat chunks.

Jen’s meat is hard to swallow, but everyone digs Kevin’s cured salmon with compressed slaw and a juicy liquid that he calls “spicy cucumber broth” and Tom calls “tomato water.” Whatever it is, it’s fantastic, and everyone is tipping back their bowls to schlurp up every last drop.

Kevin is also quite the wit, and tells guests that he almost served bowls of sand along with a displayed picture of his dish. Mirage, get it?

Kevin, of course, gets called to judges’ table along with Bryan and his sustainable fish, which is yet more halibut. But Baby Volt, Mike, gets the win for his crispy boneless wings served with a witty disk of blue cheese frozen on a reverse plancha. His reward is a big bottle of wine and a “three night, two day vacation” at the Napa winery.

(Is it just me, or are these prizes seeming very circa-1982 “Let’s Make a Deal?”)

Jen, who is looking like she really wants to be done with this stupid business, has to hear Toby the Twit call her beef chunk “more Spamalot than Camelot.”

Not to be outquipped, Nigella informs Robin that good panna cotta shouldn’t bounce but rather “have the quiver of a 17th Century courtesan’s inner thigh.” (Preferably one with cellulite.)

As for Eli’s clown vomit, Nigella could barely bring it to her lips, Padma hated the flavor, and Tom called it a “total failure.”

Eli may have concocted the most vile item to date this season, but it’s — gulp….really? – Robin’s time to go.

Yes, folks, at precisely 10:59 Eastern Standard Time, an explosion of gleeful schadenfreude shot through the “Top Chef” universe as Padma told our plucky cancer survivor to pack her knives, her henna and her vast stores of gelatin, and hightail it out of town.

Robin wept, she hugged everyone (even Eli!), and she kicked herself for not preparing more of the comfort food she makes back home. Love her or hate her, she kept the show fun.