Episode 402 (4/8/08)
Hell’s Kitchen 4, Episode 2: That’s a Halibut Fine Thing by William Ingram -- 04/10/2008 It’s the second episode of Hell’s Kitchen, and that means the con-*test*-('")ants will be digging through trash. But that’s not what has Chef Gordon Ramsay covering his eyes. Which team wins the night? Has the losing team’s nominee-picker learned any lessons from previous seasons? Welcome back to Hell, folks. Well, let’s just say that we are in its kitchen. This episode starts with a short recap of last week’s episode. We join the chefs shortly after Dominic’s eviction last week as they return to their dorms for the night. Matt says that he was surprised by the eviction, but other chefs like Bobby and Jason say that they saw it coming. Note that Bobby and Jason were the two chefs who were in serious danger last week. They obviously spent last week desperately looking hard for someone worse than they were. Lucky for them there was one. Bobby says that his days of laying back are over and he is now going to be a four-star general. Jason tells the cameras that he wasn’t expecting this game to be so hard. He also vows to try harder and not let the girls win again. The girls, however, are pumped up. Using almost as many expletives as Ramsay himself, they say they are gonna “kill it” again this week. All the chefs hit the sack for a good night’s sleep. Loyal viewers of this show know that in the second week, the chefs are woken up at an absurd hour to participate in some menial challenge. This season is no different as sous chefs Scott and Gloria enter the dorms at 5:43 a.m. armed with bullhorns. They wake the chefs who are then told to assemble outside in their underwear. They don’t look real happy about it, but they comply. Chef Ramsay is waiting for them with the same task from the last few seasons. He admonishes them about wasting food and invites them to hop into the nearby garbage truck and look at all the food they threw away yesterday. He tells them to tear open all the trash bags and put the food into two large cylinders. The bags and cylinders are color coded so that each team can see who wasted more food. It looks about even. Ramsay notes that it was probably thousands of dollars of perfectly good food thrown away. He demands that they be more careful. Now, in their defense, I should note that much of the food I saw them put in the cylinders was still in the original packing. This means that much of the food in the trash was not burned or improperly cooked, it was simply the food that they never got around to cooking or serving. The producers threw it all out at the end of the show. Of course in a real restaurant, the kitchen would rarely throw away uncooked and unused food at the end of the night (except seafood and maybe some fruits). Almost all of the food can safely be saved for a couple of days and served. But that is not an option on this show. Because it is a game show, all food must be prepared from scratch every day in order to demonstrate which team is the better team. Therefore leftover food is thrown away every day. So the food is not being wasted by the chefs, per se, it is being wasted because of the rules of the game. I’ll grant you that by being slow they do leave a lot of food in the refrigerator and that gets thrown away, but that is not normally wasted food. Then again, Gordon Ramsay’s shows always do contain a lot of misleading situations. Anyway, Chef Ramsay sends the stinking players off to clean up and then return to the kitchen for a real challenge. They run off and take showers. A bit later they gather in the kitchen in their clean uniforms. Chef Ramsay reaches under the table and brings out a giant halibut and slaps it on the table. He then demonstrates how to filet the fish. When he is done he has cut up 53 perfectly six-ounce sliced steaks from the fish. He then drops a halibut in front of each team and gives them twenty minutes to cut out as many perfect six-ounce steaks as possible. He waves his arm and they’re off! Chef Ramsay has selected this challenge to not only see how skilled the players are but to see how they can work as a team. Jason takes control for the blue team and they quickly slice off a good-looking filet. We then see a montage of the chefs chopping and slicing. The men finish in an amazing twelve minutes and spend the rest of the time cleaning up. They may be fast, but are they accurate with their measurement and will the steaks pass muster? We’ll see. But traditionally Ramsay favors the women’s team in challenges where his judgment is the sole deciding factor. The women slowly and surely plod through the task. They finish just under the buzzer. In reality they probably finished with about five minutes to go but the editors wanted to make one team look slow. Ramsay begins inspecting the fish. He starts with the red team. Most of them look good, but a few have gashes and other imperfections. He counts 41 good steaks. That’s pretty good if Ramsay himself can get 53 from the same sized fish. Anyone want to bet that the men get exactly 40 and lose by the thinnest margin possible? But I am jumping the gun based on Ramsay’s previous shows. I know how the man runs a TV show. He begins counting the men’s fish. He rejects many of them but the count keeps going up. Despite the earlier failures, the men actually get credit for 41 good steaks. The score is a tie! The announcer tells us that this is the first ever tie during a challenge. Ramsay decides that he needs a tiebreaker. He is, of course, ignoring the most obvious tiebreaker in that the men finished long before the women and decides that one man and one woman should come to the front and select one steak. The closest one to weighing exactly six ounces will win the challenge for the team. Corey is selected for the women and Ben (he seems to have the nickname “Big Fin”) is selected for the men. They each step forward, look over the selection and pick one. Ben’s choice is weighed first. It weighs 5.9 ounces. That’s pretty darn good. Corey is next and she tells us that every single filet she cut measured exactly six ounces so she has tremendous confidence. Then, after a commercial break, we find that her steak weighs only 4.8 ounces. The men win! I cannot remember a subjective challenge ever in Hell’s Kitchen where Chef Ramsay allowed the men to win. I must withdraw my earlier prediction that the women would win a razor-thin victory. Ramsay congratulates the blue team and then announces the prizes and the penalties. The red team will now have to prep all the halibut for tonight’s service and make the fish stock. You know what though? That doesn’t sound like much of a penalty at all. Recall that there are about 100 customers to serve in the dining area and usually about three entrée choices. So they might have to prep about 40 halibut steaks. We know from the challenge that they can get about 40 steaks from one halibut in about 15 minutes. And what does it really take to make fish stock? Throw the leftover fishy bits into a pot and set it to simmer for a few hours. Strain away the mulch and you are done. This penalty takes less than a half hour of work. In previous seasons, Chef Ramsay has handed out penalties (mostly to the men) that take six hours of hard work. Anyway, the men’s reward is to join Chef Ramsay on a yacht for lunch. He sends them off to get ready. Later, as they walk through the kitchen, the women spray fish juice on their nice clean clothes. Gee, that’s really being a good sport. The men pile into the waiting Rolls Royces and soon find themselves at the pier. Chef Ramsay waves them onboard the yacht and invites them to sit down and dine on lobster and champagne. The men chat with Ramsay and seem to pick up some good tips. Back in the kitchen, Jen is harping on Corey for picking the wrong sized steak. The rest of the women try to protect Corey and tell Jen that they win or lose as a team but Jen won’t have any of that. She says that Corey lost and she is angry about it. But we get to fast forward to the next morning when all of the chefs begin preparing food for tonight’s dinner service. The red team once again seems disorganized and flat. The blue team feels confident that they can work as a unit. I get a bad feeling about this edit. Almost always when one team is shown to be this much better than the other, the bad team wins. Jason nails the edit to the wall when he tells the camera that they have this challenge in the bag because “without a man on their team, what can you expect? A room full of girls is useless.” Count on the men going down in flames this week. We then fast forward to Chef Ramsay giving the teams their weekly pep talk. He quizzes Petrozza on the five appetizers on the menu. He only gets two of them right. Chef Ramsay tells him to get out of the kitchen. For a moment there it looks like the men will be down a man for the day. But then Ramsay explains that Petrozza is supposed to go and study the manuals and not to return until he can list the appetizers. His station must remain unmanned until he completes the task. C’mon Ramsay, that will take about four minutes to finish. Ramsay chastises the rest of the group and asks if it is really that hard to remember a dozen or so dishes. He points out that he has over 3,000 dishes memorized. He then selects Craig from the blue team and Rosann from the red team. Both of them will work the dining room with JP as his assistants. Ramsay wants them to feel what it is like when the customers become unruly because they are not being fed decent food in a reasonable time period. Meanwhile Petrozza returns. Ramsay quizzes him on the menu and he is a bit closer, but has several details wrong. Ramsay sends him off to study some more. Back in the dorms Petrozza has a breakdown and sits down for a smoke. He says that he is done and doesn’t want to play this game anymore. Bobby is sent to find him and tries to slap some sense into him. Petrozza keep repeating that he is done. Bobby does manage to talk him down by pointing out that Chef Ramsay seems to like him. He returns, passes Ramsay’s -*test*-('"), and is sent back to his station. Anyway, the limos and Rolls Royces (hey aren’t those the ones from earlier in the show?) soon begin arriving at the restaurant and depositing the beautiful people of California onto Hell’s doorstep. The patrons are quickly seated and the orders start pouring into the kitchen. Craig seems on top of the orders and brings them right to his team. The blue team jump into their work and progress is happening. Meanwhile Rosann is nowhere to be found. Chef Ramsay has to send out the Marines to find her. The red team is standing idle for 37 minutes as they wait for her to bring in the orders. She finally does and the women can get started. The blue team is already sending up appetizers, but they are not doing well. Bobby, it seems, cannot cook an egg properly. It looks all splashy like someone dropped it into the frying pan from ten feet above. And then Bobby tries to blame it on everyone else. I think I am starting to see a pattern here. Bobby puts in minimal effort for whatever he does and then won’t accept the blame when someone notices that he has done a half-assed job. Despite Bobby’s “Who me?” attitude, the blue team serves up satisfactory appetizers before the red team even starts on their first order. Luckily, the red team scores well with their first attempt at the appetizers. Alas, it is not good enough as the men have served all 48 of their appetizers and are starting on the entrées. Unfortunately, the entrées are tougher than the appetizers and Jason undercooks some of the Beef Wellingtons. Petrozza also undercooks his beef dish. Chef Ramsay is very upset. The red team finally moves onto entrées and almost immediately Sharon screws up. She is allowing cooked meat to touch raw meat, contaminating the cooked portion. This delays the whole order since all items must be ready and hot at the same time. In the blue kitchen, Petrozza cooks the lamb perfectly and gets high praise from Chef Ramsay. The blue kitchen is in the clear lead. Disaster strikes the red kitchen as Chef Ramsay discovers a red ticket that Rosann has just turned in that is over an hour old. He tells her that this is unacceptable. Rosann then drop a bombshell and says that she actually has a whole bunch more and that she didn’t turn them in because she didn’t want the kitchen falling behind. Some tables’ tickets are more than two hours behind. In the blue kitchen, things are not so rosy anymore. The team is having a hard time cooking food at the right pace to be able to serve it all at the same time. Petrozza seems to be taking the lion’s share of abuse for that. Bobby takes the opportunity to point out that it is everyone else’s fault. One table sends back an order and both kitchens seem in complete disarray. Ramsay tells everyone to stop and gather around. He says that he is disappointed with everyone and he shuts down both kitchens. Obviously the time limit has been reached. After the customers leave, Ramsay dresses down the teams. He notes that the blue team served all of their appetizers and half of their entrées. That is very poor. But is a damn sight better than the red team. He declares the blue team as the winning team. On the red team, he declares that Corey is the best of the worst and tells her to go back to the dorms and nominate two of her worst teammates. Everyone then leaves. The most suggested names are Sharon and Rosann. But Corey has other plans. She thinks that for strategic reasons she should nominate the strong players. She has obviously never seen the show before and doesn’t realize that Chef Ramsay will not like that. She nominates Christina and Jen. She tells Chef Ramsay that they are for personal reasons. Ramsay swears at her and we break for a commercial. Corey is in deep trouble in the future. When we return, Ramsay asks the two nominated ladies to step forward and defend themselves. Christina says that she should stay because she is intelligent and that if she offended Corey she should have said something before this. Jen says that she works hard and that Chef Ramsay never gets to see her shine, which is often during food preparation. She blathers on and on and the editors ram this point home with a montage of people yawning and looking away while she goes on and on. At the end, Ramsay tells that she should breathe once in a while when she talks. Ramsay thinks about it for a while and says that he will not award this game to someone that he just doesn’t believe in. And that person is Sharon. He tells her to take off her jacket and leave Hell’s Kitchen. Ha! Take that, Corey. Ramsay doesn’t respect you or your strategic choices. You better learn a lesson or two. He tells Sharon that she has not demonstrated an ability to cook. Ramsay then grabs her by the scruff of the neck and tosses her out the back door onto the huge pile of rubber chicken from last week, used scallops, and broken dreams.
Hell’s Kitchen 4, Episode 2: That’s a Halibut Fine Thing by William Ingram -- 04/10/2008 It’s the second episode of Hell’s Kitchen, and that means the con-*test*-('")ants will be digging through trash. But that’s not what has Chef Gordon Ramsay covering his eyes. Which team wins the night? Has the losing team’s nominee-picker learned any lessons from previous seasons? Welcome back to Hell, folks. Well, let’s just say that we are in its kitchen. This episode starts with a short recap of last week’s episode. We join the chefs shortly after Dominic’s eviction last week as they return to their dorms for the night. Matt says that he was surprised by the eviction, but other chefs like Bobby and Jason say that they saw it coming. Note that Bobby and Jason were the two chefs who were in serious danger last week. They obviously spent last week desperately looking hard for someone worse than they were. Lucky for them there was one. Bobby says that his days of laying back are over and he is now going to be a four-star general. Jason tells the cameras that he wasn’t expecting this game to be so hard. He also vows to try harder and not let the girls win again. The girls, however, are pumped up. Using almost as many expletives as Ramsay himself, they say they are gonna “kill it” again this week. All the chefs hit the sack for a good night’s sleep. Loyal viewers of this show know that in the second week, the chefs are woken up at an absurd hour to participate in some menial challenge. This season is no different as sous chefs Scott and Gloria enter the dorms at 5:43 a.m. armed with bullhorns. They wake the chefs who are then told to assemble outside in their underwear. They don’t look real happy about it, but they comply. Chef Ramsay is waiting for them with the same task from the last few seasons. He admonishes them about wasting food and invites them to hop into the nearby garbage truck and look at all the food they threw away yesterday. He tells them to tear open all the trash bags and put the food into two large cylinders. The bags and cylinders are color coded so that each team can see who wasted more food. It looks about even. Ramsay notes that it was probably thousands of dollars of perfectly good food thrown away. He demands that they be more careful. Now, in their defense, I should note that much of the food I saw them put in the cylinders was still in the original packing. This means that much of the food in the trash was not burned or improperly cooked, it was simply the food that they never got around to cooking or serving. The producers threw it all out at the end of the show. Of course in a real restaurant, the kitchen would rarely throw away uncooked and unused food at the end of the night (except seafood and maybe some fruits). Almost all of the food can safely be saved for a couple of days and served. But that is not an option on this show. Because it is a game show, all food must be prepared from scratch every day in order to demonstrate which team is the better team. Therefore leftover food is thrown away every day. So the food is not being wasted by the chefs, per se, it is being wasted because of the rules of the game. I’ll grant you that by being slow they do leave a lot of food in the refrigerator and that gets thrown away, but that is not normally wasted food. Then again, Gordon Ramsay’s shows always do contain a lot of misleading situations. Anyway, Chef Ramsay sends the stinking players off to clean up and then return to the kitchen for a real challenge. They run off and take showers. A bit later they gather in the kitchen in their clean uniforms. Chef Ramsay reaches under the table and brings out a giant halibut and slaps it on the table. He then demonstrates how to filet the fish. When he is done he has cut up 53 perfectly six-ounce sliced steaks from the fish. He then drops a halibut in front of each team and gives them twenty minutes to cut out as many perfect six-ounce steaks as possible. He waves his arm and they’re off! Chef Ramsay has selected this challenge to not only see how skilled the players are but to see how they can work as a team. Jason takes control for the blue team and they quickly slice off a good-looking filet. We then see a montage of the chefs chopping and slicing. The men finish in an amazing twelve minutes and spend the rest of the time cleaning up. They may be fast, but are they accurate with their measurement and will the steaks pass muster? We’ll see. But traditionally Ramsay favors the women’s team in challenges where his judgment is the sole deciding factor. The women slowly and surely plod through the task. They finish just under the buzzer. In reality they probably finished with about five minutes to go but the editors wanted to make one team look slow. Ramsay begins inspecting the fish. He starts with the red team. Most of them look good, but a few have gashes and other imperfections. He counts 41 good steaks. That’s pretty good if Ramsay himself can get 53 from the same sized fish. Anyone want to bet that the men get exactly 40 and lose by the thinnest margin possible? But I am jumping the gun based on Ramsay’s previous shows. I know how the man runs a TV show. He begins counting the men’s fish. He rejects many of them but the count keeps going up. Despite the earlier failures, the men actually get credit for 41 good steaks. The score is a tie! The announcer tells us that this is the first ever tie during a challenge. Ramsay decides that he needs a tiebreaker. He is, of course, ignoring the most obvious tiebreaker in that the men finished long before the women and decides that one man and one woman should come to the front and select one steak. The closest one to weighing exactly six ounces will win the challenge for the team. Corey is selected for the women and Ben (he seems to have the nickname “Big Fin”) is selected for the men. They each step forward, look over the selection and pick one. Ben’s choice is weighed first. It weighs 5.9 ounces. That’s pretty darn good. Corey is next and she tells us that every single filet she cut measured exactly six ounces so she has tremendous confidence. Then, after a commercial break, we find that her steak weighs only 4.8 ounces. The men win! I cannot remember a subjective challenge ever in Hell’s Kitchen where Chef Ramsay allowed the men to win. I must withdraw my earlier prediction that the women would win a razor-thin victory. Ramsay congratulates the blue team and then announces the prizes and the penalties. The red team will now have to prep all the halibut for tonight’s service and make the fish stock. You know what though? That doesn’t sound like much of a penalty at all. Recall that there are about 100 customers to serve in the dining area and usually about three entrée choices. So they might have to prep about 40 halibut steaks. We know from the challenge that they can get about 40 steaks from one halibut in about 15 minutes. And what does it really take to make fish stock? Throw the leftover fishy bits into a pot and set it to simmer for a few hours. Strain away the mulch and you are done. This penalty takes less than a half hour of work. In previous seasons, Chef Ramsay has handed out penalties (mostly to the men) that take six hours of hard work. Anyway, the men’s reward is to join Chef Ramsay on a yacht for lunch. He sends them off to get ready. Later, as they walk through the kitchen, the women spray fish juice on their nice clean clothes. Gee, that’s really being a good sport. The men pile into the waiting Rolls Royces and soon find themselves at the pier. Chef Ramsay waves them onboard the yacht and invites them to sit down and dine on lobster and champagne. The men chat with Ramsay and seem to pick up some good tips. Back in the kitchen, Jen is harping on Corey for picking the wrong sized steak. The rest of the women try to protect Corey and tell Jen that they win or lose as a team but Jen won’t have any of that. She says that Corey lost and she is angry about it. But we get to fast forward to the next morning when all of the chefs begin preparing food for tonight’s dinner service. The red team once again seems disorganized and flat. The blue team feels confident that they can work as a unit. I get a bad feeling about this edit. Almost always when one team is shown to be this much better than the other, the bad team wins. Jason nails the edit to the wall when he tells the camera that they have this challenge in the bag because “without a man on their team, what can you expect? A room full of girls is useless.” Count on the men going down in flames this week. We then fast forward to Chef Ramsay giving the teams their weekly pep talk. He quizzes Petrozza on the five appetizers on the menu. He only gets two of them right. Chef Ramsay tells him to get out of the kitchen. For a moment there it looks like the men will be down a man for the day. But then Ramsay explains that Petrozza is supposed to go and study the manuals and not to return until he can list the appetizers. His station must remain unmanned until he completes the task. C’mon Ramsay, that will take about four minutes to finish. Ramsay chastises the rest of the group and asks if it is really that hard to remember a dozen or so dishes. He points out that he has over 3,000 dishes memorized. He then selects Craig from the blue team and Rosann from the red team. Both of them will work the dining room with JP as his assistants. Ramsay wants them to feel what it is like when the customers become unruly because they are not being fed decent food in a reasonable time period. Meanwhile Petrozza returns. Ramsay quizzes him on the menu and he is a bit closer, but has several details wrong. Ramsay sends him off to study some more. Back in the dorms Petrozza has a breakdown and sits down for a smoke. He says that he is done and doesn’t want to play this game anymore. Bobby is sent to find him and tries to slap some sense into him. Petrozza keep repeating that he is done. Bobby does manage to talk him down by pointing out that Chef Ramsay seems to like him. He returns, passes Ramsay’s -*test*-('"), and is sent back to his station. Anyway, the limos and Rolls Royces (hey aren’t those the ones from earlier in the show?) soon begin arriving at the restaurant and depositing the beautiful people of California onto Hell’s doorstep. The patrons are quickly seated and the orders start pouring into the kitchen. Craig seems on top of the orders and brings them right to his team. The blue team jump into their work and progress is happening. Meanwhile Rosann is nowhere to be found. Chef Ramsay has to send out the Marines to find her. The red team is standing idle for 37 minutes as they wait for her to bring in the orders. She finally does and the women can get started. The blue team is already sending up appetizers, but they are not doing well. Bobby, it seems, cannot cook an egg properly. It looks all splashy like someone dropped it into the frying pan from ten feet above. And then Bobby tries to blame it on everyone else. I think I am starting to see a pattern here. Bobby puts in minimal effort for whatever he does and then won’t accept the blame when someone notices that he has done a half-assed job. Despite Bobby’s “Who me?” attitude, the blue team serves up satisfactory appetizers before the red team even starts on their first order. Luckily, the red team scores well with their first attempt at the appetizers. Alas, it is not good enough as the men have served all 48 of their appetizers and are starting on the entrées. Unfortunately, the entrées are tougher than the appetizers and Jason undercooks some of the Beef Wellingtons. Petrozza also undercooks his beef dish. Chef Ramsay is very upset. The red team finally moves onto entrées and almost immediately Sharon screws up. She is allowing cooked meat to touch raw meat, contaminating the cooked portion. This delays the whole order since all items must be ready and hot at the same time. In the blue kitchen, Petrozza cooks the lamb perfectly and gets high praise from Chef Ramsay. The blue kitchen is in the clear lead. Disaster strikes the red kitchen as Chef Ramsay discovers a red ticket that Rosann has just turned in that is over an hour old. He tells her that this is unacceptable. Rosann then drop a bombshell and says that she actually has a whole bunch more and that she didn’t turn them in because she didn’t want the kitchen falling behind. Some tables’ tickets are more than two hours behind. In the blue kitchen, things are not so rosy anymore. The team is having a hard time cooking food at the right pace to be able to serve it all at the same time. Petrozza seems to be taking the lion’s share of abuse for that. Bobby takes the opportunity to point out that it is everyone else’s fault. One table sends back an order and both kitchens seem in complete disarray. Ramsay tells everyone to stop and gather around. He says that he is disappointed with everyone and he shuts down both kitchens. Obviously the time limit has been reached. After the customers leave, Ramsay dresses down the teams. He notes that the blue team served all of their appetizers and half of their entrées. That is very poor. But is a damn sight better than the red team. He declares the blue team as the winning team. On the red team, he declares that Corey is the best of the worst and tells her to go back to the dorms and nominate two of her worst teammates. Everyone then leaves. The most suggested names are Sharon and Rosann. But Corey has other plans. She thinks that for strategic reasons she should nominate the strong players. She has obviously never seen the show before and doesn’t realize that Chef Ramsay will not like that. She nominates Christina and Jen. She tells Chef Ramsay that they are for personal reasons. Ramsay swears at her and we break for a commercial. Corey is in deep trouble in the future. When we return, Ramsay asks the two nominated ladies to step forward and defend themselves. Christina says that she should stay because she is intelligent and that if she offended Corey she should have said something before this. Jen says that she works hard and that Chef Ramsay never gets to see her shine, which is often during food preparation. She blathers on and on and the editors ram this point home with a montage of people yawning and looking away while she goes on and on. At the end, Ramsay tells that she should breathe once in a while when she talks. Ramsay thinks about it for a while and says that he will not award this game to someone that he just doesn’t believe in. And that person is Sharon. He tells her to take off her jacket and leave Hell’s Kitchen. Ha! Take that, Corey. Ramsay doesn’t respect you or your strategic choices. You better learn a lesson or two. He tells Sharon that she has not demonstrated an ability to cook. Ramsay then grabs her by the scruff of the neck and tosses her out the back door onto the huge pile of rubber chicken from last week, used scallops, and broken dreams.