Episode Report Card Daniel: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I'm Kind of A Big Deal
By Daniel | Season 9 | Episode 15/16 | Aired on 09.19.2011
Anyway, they toast some champagne, make love (I assume) and then work on their menus well into the night. Then Paul starts talking about how he's doing this for his mother, who died just a few months before he came out to be on Hell's Kitchen. I can't recall if he's mentioned his mother's death before now, so if I'm grateful that he and/or Hell's Kitchen spared us the overdone doing-it-for-a-dead-relative sympathy ploy that a lot of reality-show contestants use. Too bad for Will that he hasn't had anyone close to him die recently, so I guess he'll just have to do this for himself. Of course, his mother is in town, so it might not be too late to cut the brakes on her rental car.
The next day, Will and Paul go over their menus with Andi and Scott respectively, and spend the day working in the kitchens getting ready, until Ramsay comes in around 4:20 and tells them it's time to relax so he's taking them out to dinner.
They get changed and then head outside where James has two limousines awaiting them, and then when the doors are opened their family members climb out for more hugging and back-slapping, and then they're off to the Belasco for dinner.
Ramsay's already there waiting for them, and he explains that the restaurant just opened four weeks ago. He says the chef would really like to meet them, but something seems fishy because the kitchen appears to be down some hallway and through a pair of ornate double-doors ... that open into the Belasco Theatre, where hundreds of screaming people are applauding. So what, no fuckin' ziti now?
Doesn't matter because Paul now thinks he has "arrived" and he feels like a culinary rock star, and I hate to burst Paul's bubble but maybe he'd like to ask any of the paid screaming extras if they can name any finalists from any past season of Hell's Kitchen. Then you can talk about "arriving."
Anyway, it's the for-real moment where Ramsay tells them that unlike when he punked them by having them show up in an empty theatre, now they really are stars. The final challenge is preparing five dishes that could be on the menu at BLT Steak. They have one hour to come up with a salad, a seafood appetizer, a seafood entrée, a bone-in ribeye, and a filet of beef.
The cooking is shown on big screens in the theatre, and this show would have you believe that the audience cheered and clapped the entire time. There are individual judges for each dish, and they're all different BLT chefs and bigwigs.