Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: D+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT More of the Same
By Monty Ashley | Season 4 | Episode 9 | Aired on 05.27.2008
But who am I to argue with the television? People are clearly filing into the restaurant. Customers will get to order from the red menu or the blue menu (menus which, I'll point out, have already been printed). I wonder if there's some sort of high-level gaming that could be done at the menu-selection stage, where you list a complicated dish that no one would order and a simple dish that sounds great, hoping to get more simple dishes. Or I guess you could just put together an awful-sounding menu on the assumption that the other team would then get all the orders and be swamped. Menu popularity is still going to be one of the factors in who the winner is, so maybe that's not a great plan.
The first dish we hear is risotto, so I guess it's not a completely new menu. Sigh. Matt's version of Corey's pasta is salty, which gives the blue team a head start. Petrozza puts unwashed lettuce in the shrimp cocktail, which angers Chef Ramsay. Man, how can you mess up a shrimp cocktail? The red team's in more trouble, though, because the pasta is coming back for being to al dente and also too salty. Chef Ramsay claims all the salt is due to Matt's sweat, and it does look plausible. Corey's advice is "Cook like a normal person." Nicely done.
More pasta comes back tasteless. Finally, Corey switches with Matt. The pasta is Corey's dish, so presumably she'll be able to do it. Matt interviews (with a little crack in his voice), "That hurt. You don't do that to a person. I wanted to keep trying and trying and trying." Yeah, this ain't a Little Golden Book, and you're not a plucky little steam engine. You tried and tried and tried, and failed and failed and failed, and you got moved to a different station where you'll do less damage. Suck it up.
Meanwhile, the blue team's first entrees are out -- and back in. The filet mignon is undercooked. Louross's meat is deemed raw, and Jen is almost as cruel in her interview as Chef Ramsay is in person.
Matt's now on the vegetable station, and his brussels sprouts aren't good enough. He flips into pouty mode and starts pounding his pans around until Corey kicks him off vegetables.
One of the customers supposedly has been waiting too long for food and decides to leave. It's staged, of course, but it's a valid representation of what would happen at an actual restaurant, I guess.
Two hours in, here's the entree count: the blue team has served 34 of 62 entrees, while the red team has done 47 of 58. And since Matt doesn't count, the blue team has twice as many people as the red team. Corey and Christina are working really well together for two people who kept interviewing how much they hate each other. Chef Ramsay notices how useless Matt is.