Gordon Ramsay's Bleep-O-Fucking-Meter: 65
Best Ramsay Insult of the Night: "It's a fucking carrot, you donut."
New Tagline for the Show: "Too many chefs fuck the Wellingtons."
Best Contestant Quote: "I love to put things in my mouth." --Bonnie, during the blind taste test
When the episode opens, the contestants are still reeling from the night's dinner service. As Jen beats herself up for even thinking she could have served the binned spaghetti, Vinnie picks up a stick to join her. I don't know how many different ways he told her she made a stupid decision, but it was more than one and fairly unnecessary. Basically, Vinnie has never let me down in his dicktitude. Kudos, Vinnie! Given what happens later, though, it's pretty rich of Bonnie to hug Jen comfortingly and say, "There's no crying in the kitchen."
The day shows us that we've come to the part of the season when the contestants undergo their blind taste tests. Blindfolded and with headphones blocking out all sound -- something that Ramsay tests by calling Brad a "sack of shit," as if it wasn't something he'd yell directly in his ear -- each contestant has to taste three foods. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I swear that the foods in seasons were far more exotic and challenging. This year, they get boiled potato, American cheese, boiled carrot, lobster meat, fried chicken, stuff like that. The toughest item they chewed over was a piece of bok choy. Every week, Gordon Ramsay gives me many reasons to kiss him, but tonight was all about his torment of Melissa's obvious obsession with her looks, which began tonight during the tasting. He lifts up one of her headphones and asks, "Can you hear under all that hair?" Awesome. Guess we aren't the only ones who note Melissa's amber waves of ANNOYING! Bonnie, who at first can hear Ramsay through her headphones, nails all of her foods. She even goes so far as to identify the piece of bok choy as specifically coming from the end of the bok choy. After three Reds and three Blues have gone, the count stands at 5-3 in favor of the girly Reds. As he faces off against Jen, it's up to Vinnie to save it for the boys. Ramsay himself says, "Two to tie and three to win," before we go to commercial break. However, after the break, the announcer tells us that if Vinnie gets one wrong, it's all over, and that just doesn't make sense to me at all. First of all, there's what Ramsay said, and logically it stands to reason that if Vinnie got two correct and Jen got zero, it would be a tie, right? At any rate, Vinnie identifies seared tuna as pancetta and it's all over; the Reds win another day of Ramsay flirtation.
Reaching really high to pluck some sour grapes, Vinnie insists to the boys that Bonnie cheated. He bases this on the fact that she could initially hear Ramsay, and also because she identified the bok choy using the exact same words as Ramsay. I'm sorry, my man, but from what we saw, Ramsay just said "a slice of bok choy." He never said it was the stem. So shove it with some offal.
As the girls bounce off to eat at Opaque with Ramsay, the boys have to prep both kitchens for that night's dinner service. But first, they are forced to sit down to a tasty meal of tongue, trotters, pickled herring, kidney, creamed herring, liver, and that kind of stuff. Sous Chef Scott bangs down some barf bags and says, "In case your stomach can't handle it." As the boys chew through their offal plates, it's clear that Rock is having a really hard time of it. He's sweating and asking what each individual item is before he eats it. Just eat, Rock -- it's probably better to remain ignorant at this point. There's a point where it looks like Rock throws up in his mouth a little and then chews it some more, which has me groping for my own barf bag.
Opaque is a restaurant where you dine in complete darkness. You seriously can't see your hand in front of your face. I think this is such an awesome concept, but I also don't know if I could do it. The sad thing is, we don't see much of the actual dining experience. All we get is Ramsay and the girls tossing rolls at one another and the girls flirting their Red asses off. After Bonnie tells Ramsay he has the nicest voice "in the dark," Ramsay tells her to behave herself. But then Bonnie says, "I can't get fresh with you, Chef, I can't even see you."
Just before service starts that night, Ramsay tells them that the night's customers will be given comment cards to fill out, and their comments will decide the final eight's fates. Of course, this turns out to be a complete lie. The Blues immediately screw up with Josh's undercooked risotto, but on the other side, things aren't going much better. Julia overcooks her scallops and needs another two minutes and during those entire two minutes, Melissa keeps badgering her with time checks. Finally, Ramsay steps in and yells at Melissa for running ahead with her appetizer and leaving everyone on her team behind. He tells her she's not a team player and then imitates -- IMITATES! -- Melissa looking in a mirror, putting on makeup, and plumping her boobs. He calls her a "fucking bimbo." It was beyond awesome and after that, there was no way this episode wasn't getting an A. In her con-chef-ional, Melissa explains this behavior away by saying that Ramsay puts more pressure on the most experienced chefs and she's okay with that. Yeah, go give your hair another hundred strokes, Melissa; Ramsay's got your game.
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As the night goes on, Rock makes sure that his team's appetizers are finally reaching their customers. However, when they get to the mains, Vinnie screws the hell out of those damn Wellingtons. On the Red side, Bonnie can't handle cooking her chicken breasts and is treated to an extended Ramsay tirade. To my intense delight, a fairly attractive and dolled-up customer gets sick of waiting for her food and asks to talk to the chef. Positioning herself at the window, she tries to speak to Chef Ramsay, who asks her to hold on for two seconds. Of course she can't follow directions and starts babbling on about her food. This is the point when I start jumping up and down in gleeful anticipation. Without addressing her directly, Ramsay finds out from JP which team is responsible for the customer's food and then directs JP to "take the giraffe back to the table, please." The Giraffe's jaw drops into her cleavage, and she turns to someone offscreen for help, saying, "He's being rude to me." Lady, did you watch the last two seasons before you came to the freaking restaurant? Ramsay instructs the Giraffe to "move [her] fucking ass," and sadly that's the last we see of her.
Vinnie continues to screw up the Wellingtons in every way imaginable -- overcooked, raw pastry, untrimmed pastry, et cetera -- and Ramsay discovers a binful of trashed food at his station. Bonnie can't handle her Wellingtons either, and when Melissa steps in, it just seems to mess Bonnie up even more. The good news comes when we hear that the Blues have served a bunch of their mains, but the bad news is that a lot of them are being sent back for being too salty or undercooked. With a big red face, Ramsay gathers the teams together and reminds them with floods of bleeps that the customers are deciding which team wins that night, so if they don't get their shit together, he's shutting down the kitchen. , Ramsay bellows at Bonnie for botching the timing of her chicken and Wellington, telling her she's so incompetent that he needs to dumb down and "nannify" everything he says to her.
When JP brings a chicken dish back for being too cold, Ramsay says some variant of "fuck" seven times and shuts the kitchen down. As they wait for the final decree, Bonnie cries both to her teammates and in the con-chef-ional about how she shouldn't be there. Um, Bonnie? There's no crying in the kitchen. During clean-up, Rock tells us, "I was able to channel my anger and not take it out on my team. They should have performed better and I think I should have performed better." See, that's why I like Rock -- there's no attitude, no blame. The only stats Ramsay reveals from the customer comment cards are: one, the majority of the diners who actually got their food liked it; and two, sixty-five percent of them would not eat there again. That's all. They don't decide the winning or losing team at all, because Ramsay tears up the comment cards and announces that, once again, there is no winning team. However, he thinks Rock was solid and orders him to nominate one teammate for the chopping block. Turning to the Reds, Ramsay picks out Melissa to tell her, "You will NOT be nominating anyone. Because you were bad. You were just...you were pathetic!" Hee. Bonnie won't be picking anyone either because, as Ramsay explains while dancing around in imitation of Bonnie, she never knew where her chicken was. Telling Jen she "wasn't brilliant" but also wasn't bad, Ramsay tells her to pick a teammate to get rid of.
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Jen struggles over her decision, but Rock doesn't have that problem. He tells Jen, "I knew what I was going to do before service if I had the opportunity." Back in front of Ramsay, Rock announces Josh as his choice. We did see a lot of Josh screwing up, but thinking back to Episode 2, I can't help but wonder if Rock is playing the game here and attempting to get rid of his biggest threat. Jen sacrifices Melissa. Ramsay disagrees with both of their decisions and overrules them completely. He pulls out Bonnie and Vinnie as the worst performers that night. Ramsay asks Vinnie why Rock nominated Josh and for once, Vinnie is humble. "Chef, I had my head so far up my ass during service, I don't know if Josh did good or bad during service," he admits. Ramsay agrees completely: "Good answer." Bonnie admits to being surprised that Jen didn't nominate her because she knows she performed poorly. Ramsay asks Vinnie why he should be kept on at Hell's Kitchen and Vinnie completely negates his karma by saying, "Well, Chef, when you decide to put your name behind somebody's name for this hotel in Las Vegas, I'm the most qualified chef here." Ramsay slams him for his lack of humility and inability to accept how much he screwed up. I don't know if that's completely fair given what Vinnie said about his ass just seconds earlier.
When Ramsay turns to Bonnie, she tells him she's learning from her mistakes and believes she'll improve. She even ventures, "I'm sure when you started out you made a lot mistakes, too." Ramsay snaps a quick shrug. Just ask Marco Pierre White -- he'll be breathless to tell you how he made Ramsay cry years before Ramsay was doing it to anyone else. Ramsay sends Vinnie home, saying, "I can't go any further with you -- you've peaked." Vinnie hands over his jacket and leaves.
A few of the remaining contestants reflect on their futures in Hell's Kitchen. Bonnie doesn't know if she's cut out for this kind of career, Josh knows that Rock wants him gone but doesn't care because Ramsay is his only judge, and Rock is again talking about himself in the third person: "None of them are a threat to Rock, the only threat to Rock is Rock." In his voice-over, Ramsay condemns Vinnie to further damnation: "The bottom line with Vinnie is, he's a crap cook."
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