Gordon Ramsay's Bleep-O-Fucking-Meter: 17
Contestants' Bleep-O-Fucking-Meter: 44!
Unnecessary shots of Robert's butt: Only one, but that's still more than I really needed.
Hey! You got your American Idol in my Hell's Kitchen! So we're starting five minutes late, which means we're ending five minutes late. I hope my Tivo holds together!
Previously: Teamwork was tested by cooking breakfast. Colleen flashed back to being a cheerleader. Danny and Ben both thought they were great and both got shouted at by Chef Ramsay. So did J and Seth. Chef Ramsay continued to hate Colleen and neither team won. Ben continued to think highly of himself. Seth got sent home. Then Lacey got switched to the men's team.
The chefs go back to the dorms as the remaining members of the red team openly celebrate the loss of Lacey. Andrea is positively squealing with joy. Lacey asks the blue team if they hate her already. Ben tells her to her face that they don't want another Seth and are hoping she won't just be more dead weight. Robert tells her that he'll help her out, but he interviews that she's a cancer. Lacey says she was only crying so much because of "all the drama on the red team." Well, all that drama largely consisted of people telling Lacey how awful she was, and I can see how that could wear on a person.
Hey! It's another full moon tonight! I'm working on a joke about a werewolf on a reality show. You know, because the moon is apparently always full on reality shows. I don't think the joke is quite ready yet, so I'll work on it for a couple of weeks. I'm sure I'll be given another full moon to comment on. So watch for that!
The morning, the chefs are loaded into cars (without the usual wake-up noise) and taken to "Marukai", an Asian market. We see mysterious treats from the east, like "Candy Snacks" and "Shrimp Chips". Chef Ramsay explains the challenge: Asian-fusion. Robert alleges that he is all about fusion. Each team will make one poultry, one meat, and one seafood dish, all with "a strong Asian influence". They'll have 25 minutes and $100 to run around Marukai.
It seems like it would be difficult to plan a menu and also wrangle a six person team through a market. The men race off. The women stop and plan, led by Andrea who interviews that she has "a loud voice and loud thoughts". Carol is dubious. Meanwhile, the men just grab stuff at random. At the beef section, Lacey has trouble getting anyone to listen to her ideas. And those ideas aren't even very complicated: she just wants to make sure they grab some sort of beef.
With the food purchased and the teams back at the kitchen, each team has an hour to make three dishes. We're told that Chef Ramsay has the teams split into pairs, so two chefs will work on each dish. Lacey is teamed with Ben, who immediately sets in to micromanaging her, telling her how to set up her station, fold a towel, and so on. In an interview, it appears that Lacey doesn't need any instructions on how to roll her eyes in exasperation. She's got that one pretty much down. The other two blue pairs seem to go okay, with Robert dubbing himself and Danny "Fatman Slim".
On the red side, Andrea explains to Chef Ramsay that their seafood dish is "tuna wrapped in seaweed". Chef Ramsay seems to think that that's not "Asian-fusion" so much as it is "Asian Entirely Traditional". He tells them to make it not boring, which Paula seems to think will be difficult. The tuna does look pretty good. LA tells Paula to make a lemon aioli to bring some non-Asian influence.
Lacey is given no work to do on the blue side. So she's chopping onions and crying about it. I mean, metaphorically she's whining a bit, but I figure, you know, with the onion-chopping and all. Crying. Look, never mind, okay? I try to make a cute little joke and you all just stare blankly at me. Let's just move on.
The chefs present their dishes to Chef Ramsay. He will be helped out by Tanya Steel, Editor-in-Chief of epicurious.com. Andrea enthuses about this, saying "Who doesn't know who this is?" Answer: Giovanni, for one. The winning team's dishes will be featured on the website I already mentioned once.
For the red team, Carol and Coi have a pomegranate-cinnamon-glazed chicken breast. Carol chose pomegranate because "it's a nice, fruity ... fruit?" It's boring and dry, but nice. Robert and Danny have a Pad Thai BBQ Chicken and they win. Sounds nice and fusiony. And it was on a stupid plate, which always helps. Paula and LA have Ahi Tuna Tempura, which we're told is perfectly cooked. Ben and Lacey have pan-seared scallops, which we're told is mushy. The red team wins.
Andrea and Colleen have a Kobe Beef Sashimi with a Korean sauce. Yum! Apparently it has too much red pepper flakes in it, to which I again say Yum! J and Giovanni has "A beef, uh, uh, uhh, uhh...." Finally, Giovanni has to tell J it's a Beef Pizzaioka. It has undercooked rice. Tanya (and her cleavage) select the red team as the winners. They are happy. Robert blames the decision on the secret brotherhood of women. On reflection, he changes that to "sisterhood", which you'll have to admit makes more sense. For their prize, the women will be packing something.
The punishment for the men is to make fortune cookies and to decorate the restaurant with origami. Lacey interviews that she's sick of the punishments and appears to claim that it's not fair that she keeps losing because after all "I can't win challenges." Or something. I realize that doesn't make a lot of sense. Take it up with her.
In the dorms, Lacey is going on about how she's going home and Giovanni is shouting at her to stop assuming their team is going to lose. So Lacey starts complaining about how she's in a room with eleven people that hate her. That's not counting me, I guess. Ben tries to give her a pep talk. Lacey's reaction: "Ben's trying to blow smoke up my ass. Whatever."
As the red team goes on a limo ride, they also talk about Lacey.
In the kitchen, the blue team does their thing. Lacey gets on everyone's nerves by talking nonstop. She does sort of a Gordon Ramsay impression and talks to the origami swans and gets compared to a tack-hammer to the eye. Well, her voice is compared to a tack-hammer to the eye. You'd think the hammer would he hitting an ear, but Robert has not thought out this metaphor any better than he did with that line about the brotherhood of women.
The women are in a dojo, and Gordon Ramsay comes out in one of those inflatable sumo suits. And then so does Jean-Phillipe! JP does not look delighted by this. The two of them fight, and I don't know if you know this, but Chef Ramsay is incredibly competitive. So he wins. Then the women put on the suits and bonk into each other for a while. Before he leaves, Gordon says, "Have a great day, yes? Well done, ladies, yes? Well done." If you're working on your own Gordon Ramsay impression, note that he says "...yes?" at the end of almost every sentence. It's a compulsion.
In the kitchen, the men have finished their fortune cookies and are trying to fold cranes by following the instructions. One of them claims that "this will piss me off to no avail," which is not how the saying goes. I think they should set up an assembly line, so one person can be in charge of the first two folds, etc. Couldn't go any worse than their current plan. Lacey finishes one and takes the opportunity to ingratiate herself with her new teammates by crowing "In your face, I'm done. Bee-atch!" That's some good smack talk right there.
The red team's reward is not over: they are learning about sake. It appears that what most of them learn is that they like to drink a lot of it. The blue team claims that origami brings them together as a team, when the red team staggers in. LA in particular is completely drunk.
The day, both teams are doing prep and still talking about Lacey. Chef Ramsay rounds them up for a pep talk. He specifically praises Paula's tuna dish and says that it's on the menu that night. JP, open Hell's Kitchen!
There appear to be a lot of orders for the tuna. We get a shot of the menu, and it's actually called "Paula's Ahi Tuna Tempura with Wild Mushroom Confit, Lemon Aioli". That's pretty cool that she got her name in the menu like that. The rest of the menu looks about standard and I think (without checking) that it's the same stuff as last season. I can't see the starters, but one of the items includes "poached hen's egg". That's good, because rooster eggs taste terrible.
Chef Ramsay tells Giovanni to stop cooking risotto "in mid-air", which means that Giovanni's always got the pan held a few inches above the flame. But the risotto is deemed "very nice". LA also has "very nice" risotto. LA says, "Gettin' compliments from Chef Ramsay, it's like my dad tellin' me he's proud of me, you know what I mean? Doesn't get any better than that." Opinion is divided on my couch: I think that's creepy, but my girlfriend thinks it's sweet.
Thirty minutes in, appetizers are going well. But then in walks a gimmick. A table of six sumo wrestlers, who each order one of everything on the menu. The voiceover guy explains that Chef Ramsay decides to split the table between the two kitchens. Well, obviously.
On the blue side, we see Lacey talking up a storm in the proper Ramsay-approved way. She's telling everyone how long her dishes will be and ensuring that she's in sync with everyone. There's a cute shot of her waving at Coi in the other kitchen. Coi waves back. Giovanni and Ben praise her and tell her to keep it up. Positive reinforcement is key!
Andrea hides two burned Beef Wellingtons and tells Coi she needs eight minutes. That's the way to do it. On the blue side, J has some Wellingtons that are cold. He tells Chef Ramsay that he doesn't know what happened, and Sous Chef Scott walks past and says "Fan's on low. It should be on high." Chef Ramsay does some shouting.
On the red side, Colleen is caught leaving an oven door open. And then Chef Ramsay notices the three or four burnt Wellingtons that Andrea has been hiding, which makes him very angry indeed. Andrea interviews that she's in trouble. I think she's right.
On the blue side, Chef Ramsay is calling Robert "Bobby". Robert does not like that. "My father's name is Bobby. And I had a [bleep]ed-up childhood," he explains. He's increasingly unresponsive to Chef Ramsay, and it doesn't help that he's also screwing up the John Dory. Chef Ramsay objects to the amount of food that is being thrown away. Robert starts to explain that he didn't want to send up unacceptable food, but gives up partway through the explanation. "Why can't you look at me when I talk to you," asks Chef Ramsay. He sounds a little concerned. He sounds less concerned when he follows that up with "Robert. Get out!"
It turns out he's not actually throwing Robert out of the kitchen. He just wants to give him a little pep talk. You know, make sure that Robert's got his head in the game and isn't freaking out. Unfortunately, Robert is completely freaking out, and being shouted at by Gordon Ramsay doesn't seem to be helping. In an interview, Robert claims that it took great self-control not to go off on Chef Ramsay. And then he moons the camera, telling Ramsay to kiss his ass. Great. Thanks for that. In the kitchen, Ramsay is up in Robert's face, telling him (accurately) that "you look like one sulky, pissed-off cook."
On the red side, Andrea is falling behind on the meat station and is apparently just calling out "four minutes!" whenever anyone asks for anything, no matter how long it will actually take. When she's pressed by Carol, she says six minutes, but immediately says two minutes to Chef Ramsay. And the thing is, she knows she's screwing up.
A couple hours into dinner service, there's a lull in entrees. J gets yelled at when it's been 14 minutes since an entree has left. Other members of the blue team are begging J to tell them it's okay to bring their stuff to the pass, but he seems to have forgotten to cook the lamb. So it's not. Lacey is in control right here, by the way; her station is up-to-date and she's communicating with the other people. The breakdown is J's.
The red team has moved onto desserts (the first time we've seen desserts served this season, although I think they were just editing them out before), and there's a pear dish that's served rock hard. And the customer is Tanya Steel, whom you might remember from earlier this episode. Apparently, Colleen just didn't notice that she was serving raw pear inside raw pasta. Chef Ramsay starts cursing, but it's sort of a bleak, despairing kind of profanity, like he can't believe it's come to this. He can't even work up the energy for invective. He shuts down the kitchens as JP tries to bring more food back.
The chefs are assembled in the kitchen for a postgame shouting. Chef Ramsay asks Robert why he can't look Gordon in the eye, and Robert asks to talk to him about it privately. Ramsay brushes that off and says that due to the terrible meat stations on both teams, there will be no winning team. Giovanni and LA did well, so they are to nominate one person each.
In the dorms, Robert talks about his reaction to Gordon calling him "Bobby." "It's like another male figure in your life that you're supposed to respect that treats you like [bleep]. I know he had the same kinda childhood." Yeah, but he kind of channeled that into a crazy competitive drive to succeed, right? There's a phone call and Robert is called to Gordon's office.
In the office, Gordon calls Robert "Bobby" before asking him to sit down. Robert explains his issues with being called by his father's name and says that in the instant he's being told to look Gordon in the eye, he's reliving his whole childhood. Ramsay apologizes for calling him "Bobby" and says he wishes he'd had that brought to his attention earlier. They shake hands and Robert leaves, presumably feeling relieved.
The red team is confabbing and Andrea admits that she [bleep]ed up. She promises not to hold it against LA if she goes up. It seems like LA likes Andrea more than Colleen, who is her other option.
J is sitting alone [bleep]ing up a storm. He feels that he did a very poor job and wouldn't be surprised to be put up. Giovanni knows only one thing: he can't put up Lacey, because she kicked ass. Robert thinks it's either him or J.
Down in the dining room, LA puts up Andrea because neither the cooking nor the communication was good. Giovanni puts up J for being lousy the whole night. Chef Ramsay asks who else he had, and Giovanni admits that Robert was just a fraction better, but "that fraction saved him." "Does it?" muses Ramsay as we go to commercial.
This is where my Tivo cuts off. Or it would be, if I hadn't noticed that Idol was cutting into the timeslot.
J and Andrea are called forward. J, why should you stay? "I have the skills and I've got the talent." Wow, both at once? Andrea? "I want the opportunity to be back on that meat station and I want to nail it from beginning to end." That sounds vaguely dirty, doesn't it?
The person who leaves is J. Damn. I liked him because he had a nice short name that was easy to spell. No, wait. They're both being sent back to their teams. And we see a shocked reaction shot from Lacey that they've already used at least once tonight. So who's leaving? Chef Ramsay calls on Robert... to focus better. Then he calls on Colleen... to go home! Again we see that Gordon Ramsay doesn't care who you nominate; he will send home whoever he feels like.
Chef Ramsay praises Colleen's tenacity a little, while not saying anything about her cooking ability. Various chefs act relieved to still be in the competition.
week: a bar mitzvah. And fire!
Montykins thinks it's cheating to say "The person going home... is... J... get back in line." You wouldn't see Seacrest changing sentences in the middle like that. Monty also has a blog devoted to Movie Novelizations, cleverly entitled Monty on Movie Novelizations. You can email him at montykins@gmail.com if that's your idea of a good time.
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