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‘Hell’s Kitchen’: Mama mia! Chef Ramsay said what!?

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This is leadership? Sure, Benjamin went over to women’s team and immediately it was vastly improved. (If I didn’t know better, I’d say those women just needed a man to tell them what to do.) But there is a difference between leadership and bossing people around, being rude, telling them that they are worthless and announcing, loudly, that you’d rather kill yourself than deal with your teammates. And that’s exactly what Benjamin was doing.

Is this what chef Gordon Ramsay wants in his kitchen? Oh, wait ... maybe he does.

This night was largely about winnowing the herd and enjoying Ramsay’s own way of dressing people down. The challenge was a special one: celebrating a couple’s 50th wedding anniversary by updating the recipes served at their wedding, including trout almandine, steak Diane and chicken Kiev. Salvatore came up with chicken ... meatballs. Raw chicken meatballs.

So let’s recap, shall we? Salvatore the Italian cannot cook pasta or meatballs. Mama mia! No surprise, he was the first to go tonight. Ramsay dispatched him with a ‘Your time has run out.’

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Ciao, baby!

Later, there was a special field trip to Philippe’s in downtown Los Angeles and a terrific new challenge: Come up with your own gourmet sandwich a la the world-famous French dip. Because the red team has one more player, they had to pick someone to sit out the challenge. Benjamin chose, of course, Siobhan, because he was gunning for her. And you knew it was coming: Ramsay tried her sandwich and told the red team that if they had included hers instead of Fran’s, they’d be the winning team. (Best line of the night, when Ramsay told Fran that she’d been up for elimination so many times that her footprints had left an indentation in the carpet.)

Instead, victory went to the blue team, which took a private jet to the wine country and promptly got pickled, with Ed taking off his clothes in the hottub and practically screaming: ‘Look! Look at my penis! Please look!’ Isn’t this guy a high school cooking teacher in his ‘real’ life? Better lock up that cooking Sherry, folks.

But it turns out the sandwich challenge was Siobhan’s high point. She botched her scallops at the dinner service, earning her a ‘You donkey!’ from Ramsay, who then forced her to eat her mistake. And later he forced her to take off her jacket and leave Hell’s Kitchen.

But here’s my real question: The guy who confronted Ramsay about the undercooked steak. Was he for real? A plant? For a tough guy, he could barely form a sentence. But what was Ramsay saying in response? Between the quick patter, the bleeped-out bad words ... and the strangeness of it all, I could barely make it out. There was something from Ramsay about ‘go get a shave’ and ‘you look like a quail.’ Huh? You look like a quail?! And then, I swear I heard something about a bunny. Did anyone else get any more than that? Let me know.

And note to Fox: Can’t you subtitle these Ramsay rants? Pretty please?

— Rene Lynch
Twitter / renelynch

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