Well, it was a nice couple of weeks. The Olympic break had almost convinced me that I'd just imagined these awful people who make up the contestant ranks of Hell's Kitchen, but they're all too real. So instead of "Swifter, Higher, Stronger," we're back to "Dumber, Angrier, Shoutier."
Well, at least the Black jackets have been handed out. No more Crips versus Bloods, so there's that. And thank god for the title sequence, given I may have blissfully forgotten everyone's names.
At any rate, we're down to six black-clad jackets. The survivors are all ready to party, and that's before they see the nice carving knife awaiting each of them back in the dorms. It's really only a matter of time before one of those gets used on a person instead of a roast. The mood is so jovial right now, though, that Robyn and Dana are dancing together in front of a mirror instead of stabbing each other to death, so enjoy that while it lasts.
The day, Ramsay has invited two chefs, Ludo Lefebvre of Ludobites, and Quinn Hatfield of Hatfield's (not Quinnbites? Too bad), for the challenge. The three chefs (including Ramsay) have prepared "a great take on a modern classic," according to Ramsay.
Ludo's got a caprese salad made of red bell peppers and a feta cheese mousse. The contestants bomb out trying to guess the ingredients after they taste it and don't get anything right. Quinn's got a seafood pasta made with salsify instead of pasta, with salsify being something I needed the closed-captioning to be able to identify. Unlike the contestants, I'm not supposedly a talented chef vying for a head chef job at one of Ramsay's restaurants.
Then Ramsay reveals that the first two dishes were warm-ups, and that they're really doing a Taste It, Then Make It challenge. Well, their tasting is terrible, so I've got high hopes for this challenge. Ramsay pairs Dana with Clemenza, Justin with Barbie and Christina with Robyn. The pair that comes the closest will win the challenge.
They're trying to recreate a Ramsay signature dish, which they plow into (Clemenza needs to be admonished for hogging the whole thing).
All three teams decide it's veal, and two of them think it's wrapped in Serrano ham, although Dana and Clemenza think it's prosciutto. Dana says she eats half a pound of prosciutto a day (?!) and Clemenza is Clemenza, so if they're wrong about it, they deserve to lose. As usual, she is shouting all of this at us.
As for the puree, all of them decide it's a white bean puree, but Dana and Clemenza season theirs with horseradish instead of smoked bacon like the other teams do.
The final element of the dish is the sauce. Once again, Dana and Clemenza buck what the other teams are doing, opting for a Madeira-flavored sauce over the broth fortified with port that the other teams are using. And given how bad everyone flunked the taste test, I'm willing to bet the fact that two teams came up with identical dishes is more due to eavesdropping and peeking than any kind of culinary consensus.
Ingredients determined, the teams now have to plate it to look as much like Ramsay's dish as possible.
That done, Dana and Clemenza go first. They list the ingredients as Ramsay chows down, but he doesn't reveal if they're right or not. He does the same with Barbie and Justin and then Christina and Robyn. He's complimentary about the taste of all the dishes, and then reveals that they're right about the use of veal, but only Dana and Clemenza were right about the prosciutto. "Isn't Serrano ham the prosciutto of Spain?" Barbie grumpily asks us. Well, maybe. But prosciutto is also the prosciutto of prosciutto, and that's what Ramsay used.
The white bean puree is likewise right for all of them, but Dana and Clemenza were wrong in their choice of horseradish. It was, in fact, smoked bacon. So it's going to come down to the wine, he says, and we're going to commercial.
When we come back, Ramsay reveals Dana and Clemenza were right about the Madeira-based sauce, so they're going to Silverwood Lake for a gourmet picnic, and each of them will get their own Jet Skis. For keepsies? That's not bad! Dana and Clemenza race upstairs to change for their romantic picnic date (with Dana saying the only way it could be better is if it were with her boyfriend instead of Clemenza) so that's why it seems odd and sloppy when, while Ramsay tells the losers about what a terrible day they're in for, that DANA IS STILL THERE.
Anyway, he's given the dining room staff the day off, so they'll have to redo the tabletops, iron and fold the linen, and polish the flatware. James skips gleefully in to the dining room as Ramsay warns them about meticulous he is. The already grumpy losers are made even grouchier by the traditional taunting of the winners as they make their way outside...
...And it's not long before Clemenza and Dana are trading wakes on the water, and hopefully not ruining things for anyone else trying to swim or boat or fish. Then they dismount for the picnic, with Clemenza getting all horndog at his first glance at Dana in a bikini (and he doesn't even get to see the slow-motion Pervcam complete with skronky sax music), and the two of them settle in for an afternoon of drinking, not cleaning.
Back at Hell's Kitchen, the ironing boards have come out. "Is my mother here?" says Justin. Probably not something a grown man should say in relation to basic household duties, unless he wants to look like a lazy arsehole. "Your mother is not here, so you will be doing it," says James. "I don't iron," says Justin. He feels that it's DEGRADING to iron. Which, if you'll excuse me, means that this guy has no problem with degrading his mom to do such a job, but he won't do it himself. So basically fuck Justin, who goes off to polish the aquarium, so James brings him some of his own shirts as well as chef's jackets to iron, and Justin now appears to be worried that ironing another man's shirts will turn him gay.
Anyway, Dana and Clemenza return, taunt Justin for ironing (and also now being James's gay boyfriend) and then when all six chefs are dressed in their black jackets, Ramsay assembles them by the bar to pep them up for the first time they work as a single time, and to warn them they're competing against someone else. He draws their attention to the balcony...
...And when we come back from commercial (and get the last couple minutes rehashed), Ramsay explains that they're all contestants who not only earned a black jacket but were all runners-up. So the last losers of their respective seasons, then. There's Season 8's Russell. Christina knows him as a "[bleeping] ass." I don't remember him at all, so I guess I didn't watch/recap that season? She hopes he goes down harder than anyone, and also appears to hope he dies in a fire, like, literally.
Then there's the blue-haired Jay from Season 7, who wanted to a) win the competition and b) sleep with eventual winner Holli, so he's a loser on a couple of fronts here. Ramsay's really breaking out the All-Class All-Stars, isn't he? Dana shouts at us that she doesn't like Jay, and her chief complaint seems to be that his blue hair doesn't look good. However, she doesn't hope he burn to death, so there's that.
Season 6 runner-up Kevin is the self-described "cripple" who no one else can keep up with. Clemenza calls him a force to be reckoned with, and says they'll have to step up their game. up is Season 5's Paula. Robyn is all, "Good to see you, Paula!" all suck-uppy because she wants Paula to give her a job if things don't work out in Hell's Kitchen.
From Hell's Kitchen 3: Bonnie, and we're going so far back that these might as well be the old newsreels that they used to show in movie theatres during the war, like you half-expect to see clips of Bonnie dancing the Charleston.
From Hell's Kitchen 2: Virginia, with a palate that you can't buy. And am I nuts or do the contestants get progressively better-looking the farther back we go? Like maybe in early seasons of Hell's Kitchen the priority was competent chefs who looked good for television, instead of people who will scream at each other at the slightest provocation?
Ramsay starts in with how everyone better be on the top of their game, and Russell immediately starts running his mouth about whipping their asses and how someone's going home, and the best a very peeved Justin can muster in response is basically, "Yeah, YOU are."
As is usually the case, Team Runner-Up is full of people who think that beating the Top 6 means some form of redemption. Or, as Bonnie puts it, "Nobody wants to be the No. 2." I don't think she meant "No. 2" as "shit," but that's how I choose to understand her.
Meanwhile, Team Top Six is choosing the "You had your time!" narrative and start bigging-up each other while they prep for that night's service, and they kick things off with a cheer of "Let's kick some runner-up ass!"
Kevin compares getting back into Hell's Kitchen to riding a bike, and Team Runner-Up starts off strong with some perfect scallops to launch their appetizer service, so there's pressure on Robyn, on cold apps, to deliver good Caesar salads, but she doesn't put enough dressing on them and Ramsay sends them back. Not a perfect start but hardly an unconquerable setback, either. Christina's mad at the misstep, and it does seem to have been Ramsay into a bit of a grouchy mood too.
Fortunately, Team Runner-Up is making him happy. "I've never seen food this immaculate leave the Red kitchen," he says. Team Runner-Up can also hear Ramsay yelling at the Team Top Six, because Robyn has got Clemenza making a spaghetti and lobster that, crucially, HASN'T EVEN BEEN ORDERED. "Big man out of control," yells Ramsay. "How can both of you be doing something that's not on the fucking order!" He screams at them to focus.
An hour into dinner service, though, and both teams are steadily sending out apps. Ones that people actually ordered and everything! Then they make it to the entrees, with Barbie leading the charge. Team Runner-Up is also moving on, with Jay on fish, but he's peppered one of the bass he's sent out. Plus, he's sweating like Patrick Ewing, which is always attractive in a kitchen. Kevin jumps in to help out, and saves the fish.
Team Top Six's first entrée order is beautiful, says Ramsay, but then they hit a snag when Dana finds herself slammed by the fish orders. Ramsay yells at her to get Clemenza and Robyn to help her. She doesn't think either of them has the skills or finesse the rest of them do, fears that are borne out when Clemenza screws up the scallops and Ramsay tears Dana a new one over it.
So while Robyn gets a crack at the scallops, but Team Runner-Up has jelled and is churning out the orders like an assembly line, so I guess we've got to look elsewhere for drama? Russell is calling all the women "sweetheart," and someone joshingly gets on his case about it, but he explains that he's from the South and is therefore a gentleman, and if you don't like it, [bleep-bleep] [mimes shooting a gun]. Glad we got that "gentleman" question settled!
So with even that non-story storyline petering out, we go back to Team Top Six, where Robyn has seasoned the scallops beyond edibility. Robyn seems to think that because she was making the scallops for Dana, that it's Dana's fault, spinning some bullshit about how she just left them because Dana likes to finish them off or whatever. Obviously it's nonsense, but Robyn seems to believe her own nonsense. "That's my fault?" she asks, about the scallops she dried out and overcooked because she seasoned them too soon. Robyn gets a little too mouthy with Ramsay, to his great non-amusement, and he threatens to throw her across the kitchen. Then he roars at her for smirking, and she says there are too many people there and she's trying to help out. Ramsay couldn't agree more, and yells for Dana to come with him, and leads her out of the kitchen. We go to commercial, but come on, he'd just throw Dana out if he were going to, so nice try on the cliffhanger.
Outside the kitchen, he yells at her to find a voice on her station and that if anyone is touching something on her station, she's got to command it. He's right, and she accepts it, and they head back into the kitchen. Despite just screwing things up, Robyn STILL has the nerve to give Dana the stinkeye when Dana overrides her on a scallop order to go with spaghetti. So fish gets back on track, and both teams finish dinner service solidly.
But there's not much way to spin the performance as anything other than a victory for Team Runner-Up, so they can now stop living in shame, I guess. Still, Ramsay says Team Top Six didn't do badly, considering it was their first time as a unit. But there were still careless mistakes, he points out, which was frustrating because if not for that they would have been toe-to-toe with Team Runner-Up.
He orders them upstairs to come up with the nominees for elimination. Dana starts in with her frustration over the quote-unquote "help" she received in her fish station, with Christina calling Robyn on her bullshit with just leaving the scallops lying there. Dana's less annoyed with Clemenza, but Barbie still thinks it's not cool for Dana to blame anyone else, and Clemenza thinks Dana should go home because the fish station was slow as shit and he was just trying to help.
However, Barbie thinks Robyn should go home. As does everyone, pretty much, except for Robyn herself. "I didn't fuck up tonight. Y'all did." By this point, she should just print that on business cards.
The team files back into the kitchen, where Barbie announces Robyn as the first nominee, for being all over the place and accomplishing nothing. The team's second nominee -- behind a commercial break -- is Clemenza. "The team felt Clemenza was responsible for Dana's scallops," says Barbie, distancing herself from the opinion, and Ramsay does seem a little surprised at that selection, but brings the two forward anyway.
Robyn's self-defense involves babbling about teamwork, throwing elbows in a basketball game and helping out. She says Dana should be up there instead for not communicating well enough.
Clemenza says he's not ready to go, and Ramsay asks him how many times he's been up for elimination. Clemenza says "too many" and thinks it's three or four. Ramsay reveals that it's six, and tells him to step forward. But it's a "back in line" fakeout, and he brings Robyn forward instead, telling her the passion is there, but she's not ready right now to be head chef. She shakes his hand and thanks him. "I thought that I was going to be the Season 10 winner of Hell's Kitchen," she says, while we watch the Robyn Montage, and she intends to show everyone left that she's better than all of them and they can go fuck themselves, which is a healthy attitude.
Back in the dining room, Ramsay says he still doesn't know who his head chef is going to be. Clemenza puts up his hand to say something, and Ramsay is all, "Fuuuuck," and then Clemenza babbles on about how he needs to step it up. "I look at you and I don't see Vegas," says Ramsay, dismissively. Meanwhile, Dana shouts at us that she's going to win this [bleep].
"Making it to the Black Jackets was a dream come true for Robyn, but cooking against the runners-up was a reality check for her and me," he says.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. Robyn's gone, meaning Hell's Kitchen is once again more fun to watch than synchronized swimming! Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.