Gordon Ramsay's Bleep-O-Fucking-Meter: 13
Contestants' Bleep-O-Fucking-Meter: 15
Contestant Quote of the Night: "I'm not here for friendship." -- Jen (in the words of Walter O'Reilly, she certainly came to the right place!)
Last week: Corey tried to convince Jen to switch to the blue team. Jen, because she hates Corey, switched to the blue team. That'll show her! Then she annoyed Louross and Petrozza while Rosann set fire to some stuff and Christina panicked. Chef Ramsay shouted at Matt and shut down the red kitchen. The blue team finished up the red team's service and Jen cackled and called them bitches, apparently for that one time that someone muttered "great" in answer to Chef Ramsay. Corey nominated Rosann and Matt because it's fun to make people jump through hoops and then ignore the arbitrary rules. Rosann went home.
Back in the dorms, Matt tries to apologize to Corey for letting them down, but she seems too tired to care. Louross giggles that Matt's on thin ice, and I kind of approve of his enthusiastic schadenfreude. Bobby explains that he doesn't like to talk a lot in the kitchen and that he wants to let his cooking talk for him. That sounds okay, except that Gordon Ramsay is very much in favor of a talkative, communicative kitchen. Still, I imagine he'd rather have a quiet guy who doesn't serve raw food.
Bobby says he doesn't care for Jen. No surprise there, but he says it in both an interview and while sitting around with Corey, Christina, Matt, and Louross. So that's everyone but Jen and Petrozza, I think. It's hard to figure out the cliques from these short clips, especially when all the cooks are too tired to stand up, let alone sneak off into the corner to gossip about each other.
The morning, the challenge is to cook scallops, John Dory, and chicken. The gimmick is that it will be done as a relay, with only one cook from each team in the kitchen at a time. I wish it weren't food from the dinner service menu; this show is repetitive enough without having the challenges involve the same food they're already cooking on every episode. At any rate, the cooks get six minutes in and fifteen seconds of overlap to tell the cook what's up.
Jen forces through her plan of having Louross sit out because she thinks he moves fast but doesn't get anything done. In her interview where she explains this, she has no expression at all in her face. It's creepy and somewhat menacing. Oh, and I can see some crew members and a cameraman in the back of one of these shots, which happens surprisingly rarely. Louross accepts it, but he doesn't seem happy about it.
Bobby explains that after losing seven out of eight challenges, it's starting to hurt. Starting to? Sheesh.
The first round is between Petrozza and Matt. Matt runs into the kitchen while his team members shout "don't fall!" Is that supportive? It seems a little mean to me. "Don't rub the raw chicken in your eyes, Matt!"
We're told that each dish has a different cooking time and that they all have to come out together. Matt starts poaching his chicken (which takes about ten minutes, according to him) but Petrozza starts with putting his garnishes in the pan. After six minutes, Christina roars into the red kitchen. Matt quickly tells her "I got all the veg on, chicken's dropped, everything's mise en place." After cheerily telling Chef Ramsay everything's fine, Christina interviews that she didn't understand a word Matt said. I have to admit, it took me several tries to get it. Petrozza and Bobby spend a little more time together, which lets Bobby self-promote in an interview that his forte is "think, plan, and execute". I have a horrible feeling that this goes back to his "four-star general" thing.
When Christina takes the chicken out of the poach, which I am aware is probably not the correct way to describe it, it's supposedly raw inside. Corey, outside the kitchen, feels that it's going to be overcooked now. The first thing Christina says to Corey when the six minutes are up is that she should leave the chicken in the oven because it was pretty raw, so there's a chance that they've communicated their way past the disagreement. Jen and Bobby don't appear to say much to each other, but it's hard to tell.
Corey and Jen have to finish everything off and plate everything, which seems like it might be a more complicated task than the middle person had. There's some running around, and things get more or less finished.
Judging! First, the scallops. The red team's is missing the salad (Corey: "We just forgot it." Fair enough!) and the blue's team has something that Gordon affects not to be able to recognize as an overcooked egg. And a scallop that's raw in the center, so the red team wins. Jen continues her streak of unwise interview segments by insisting that the scallop was perfect and that Gordon Ramsay doesn't know what he's talking about. Red team, 1-0.
, John Dory. The red team's tastes okay, although the sauce is too thick and the presentation is deemed "dreadful". The blue team's has no sauce at all, because Jen says it burned. Chef Ramsay does not appreciate that, but it tastes all right and looks better than the other one. 1-1.
Chicken. The red team's is moist and everything is there except the baby leeks. The blue team's is also moist and missing the sauce. There is a dramatic music sting to fit some commercials in. The red team wins and appears happy. The blue team loses because Chef Ramsay refuses to eat two dishes without sauce, and Petrozza is of the opinion that Jen lost them the challenge. He feels that it's not that hard to pour on some sauce. Jen, unsurprisingly, is of a different opinion: "I feel that I did a great job back there. But it just came down to me missin' out on that sauce. I forgot. Simple as that. I'm not gonna say I'm sorry. I mean, hey. I'm gonna move on." That's a pretty harsh sentiment, although I feel honor-bound to point out that it sounds pretty heavily edited together.
The red team's reward, we're told, is phenomenal. They'll be going to the beach in convertibles. Meanwhile, the blue team will be the maintenance team and doing things like cleaning the carpet. Christina interviews that she hasn't seen the sun in a week, which I don't think matches up to the historical record. At the beach, they are given some surf lessons by a legendary surfer I've never heard of. Back at the kitchen, Louross clowns around in the white maintenance jumpsuity thing, but it does not lighten the mood for long. Bobby and Jen snipe at each other about who's in charge.
The surfing seems to go okay. If I might be pardoned a brief personal aside, I grew up in San Diego, and I never once went surfing. Did you know that surfers are always waking up at dawn to go rush down to the beach? That is not my scene. My hobbies do not involve the word "dawn." End of personal aside. Moving on!
After the usual balloon juice about how it's a "once in a lifetime experience" (which I don't think it is; the waves are there pretty much around the clock), we see some hijinx with Jean-Philippe. I assume he's decided it's more fun to hang out with the winning team than to wave crabs at the losing team, because he's handing out brightly-colored beach towels. Then Gordon picks him up and dumps him in the ocean, which kind of says a lot about Gordon Ramsay.
Before the dinner service, Chef Ramsay brings the chefs together in the dining room. Then he tears up the menu and says that they'll be making up their own menu. Louross is into it! So am I, because I am so sick of typing the word "risotto". I keep wanting to put an extra "s" in there. Anyway, each team needs to do three appetizers, three entrees, and three desserts.
Running up to the dorms, Corey breathlessly tells Matt and Corey that she'll be the one who writes things down and they'll be verbalizing. That's the word she used, "verbalizing". It makes me think she's run corporate brainstorming sessions. Matt wants pan-seared lobster, and Christina wants a big steak. Then Matt adds a pork chop. That sounds pretty good. Meanwhile, the blue team's brainstorming is intercut with Jen shouting "BORING!" and "Bzzt! Wrong!" and generally bulldozing her team. Cut to a smiling red team, enjoying their teamwork. Cut back to a sulking Louross looking hate rays at their menu. He feels that it's more a "Jen menu" than a "blue team menu". I understand his point, but hasn't the blue team lost an awful lot so far? I mean, why would a real "blue team" menu be so great? I think both teams should have tried for a "Chef Ramsay menu".
The red team lists a bunch of food (sorry for the lack of transcription, but the words don't quite match the sheet of paper, so I'm punting), ending with a single dessert: "a strawberry shortcake with a chocolate martini shooter on the side." Chef Ramsay thinks it "reads very clever", and that if they can pull it off, it will be good. Matt goes into soppy mode, interviewing that he wishes the three of them were opening a restaurant together and adds, "I'm so happy we're teammates." That's a sentence I cannot say without it sounding sarcastic.
Louross describes the blue menu to Chef Ramsay, and he sounds reasonably enthusiastic, even while saying things like "halibut wrapped with zucchini and squash". Chef Ramsay thinks it sounds ghastly and Louross pretty much agrees with him. Jen looks like she wants to turn around and slap him. Chef Ramsay feels that the blue menu is 70% Jen and 100% hideous. He insists on the blue menu being redone right there, and I can see a lot more dishes on it than we were told about. The red team is conferring during this, so it's good that they're not just standing there gloating the whole time. Not the whole time.
Jen reads out the new menu, and I discover that she pronounces the "L" in "salmon". If I liked her, I could overlook something like that, but she has acted obnoxiously, so now it infuriates me. I never claimed to be fair. The new menu works for Chef Ramsay, and everyone goes into prep. The red team can hear Louross and Jen and generally roll their eyes. And it's time to open Hell's Kitchen!
Wait, what? Already? The teams just settled on their menus! Shouldn't there be a great deal of prep to do? I mean, the old prep won't work, and they have to portion out whole new dishes, but the show is making it look like ten minutes of prep and we're off to the races. That can't be right.
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.
The blue team is onto desserts, and Bobby makes the mistake of calling Jen "honey". Her response is lengthy, well thought-out, hits all the salient points, and includes a "hell" that has at least four syllables in it. Her name, she would like to emphasize, is "Jen". Or "Jennifer". Not "honey." It's a good interview. Unfortunately, her righteous anger is a bit undercut by the fact that her pineapple upside-down cake isn't fully cooked. It's actually liquid in there. She's thrown off her oven; she's done. She interviews that it's not fair for her to be blamed, although it did appear to be her job.
On red entrees, Matt is on crème brulee, and I think they look pretty good. Both teams finish service (Matt to Bobby: "Good job, bitch. Way to go." I think he means it... affectionately?) Does it count as finishing service if some of your customers walk out before they get served?
The customers chose about evenly between the two kitchens. Chef Ramsay makes Matt take off his bandana, likening him to Homer Simpson for no reason I can tell. The blue team loses, which means that Matt is the luckiest person ever. Petrozza comes in for some dirty-lettuce-related abuse, but he's still the one who will select two people for elimination. Jen interviews that she feels she's a million times better than Louross. Louross interviews that he hates Jen. Bobby interviews that he's better than both of them at life and cooking. We didn't see Bobby screw anything up, so you'd think it would be Jen and Louross, right?
Down in the dining room, Petrozza's first nominee is Louross ("I believe Louross lacks the skills to compete at this level") and Jen ("Jen has more to learn than she has to teach"). Chef Ramsay announces that "I'm going to do something now that I've never done before." What, follow the alleged rules of the competition? Zing! No, he's asking Petrozza who he should send home. Oh, that's mean!
Petrozza says that Louross should be sent home. Chef Ramsay agrees. Goodbye, Louross! It's fairly amicable, at least. But we're not done! Matt, step forward. Now it's between Matt and Jen. Both of them are told to take off their jackets, dramatic pause, and go back to their original teams. We're back to Corey, Christina, and Jen on the red side; and Bobby, Petrozza, and Matt on the blue side. Starting over!
week: blindfolds, driving, briefcases full of cash, plotting, gloating, Las Vegas, and dinner with Rock. And Matt "goes crazy" in a way that looks suspiciously similar to Mel Gibson's Curly imitation in Lethal Weapon. Be there!
Montykins occasionally forgets to do these blurbs. It must be awful for you to miss this deathless prose. Monty also watches a lot of movies, which he writes about on Monty on Movies. You can email him at montykins@gmail.com if that's your idea of a good time.