‘The Chopping Block’: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’
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Um, who’s going to be the one to tell chef Gordon Ramsay that he’s got some serious competition?
Meet Marco Pierre White, the hulking, intimidating apparition starring in NBC’s new reality cooking show, “The Chopping Block.” The show pits eight couples -– some are siblings, mother-daughter, a husband-and-wife, a divorced couple –- in a race to win $250,000 and a shot at owning their own restaurant.
But the true star is White.
As fans of “Hell’s Kitchen” know, Ramsay keeps the contestants in line by yelling, cajoling and punishing his underlings with demeaning tasks. (Ramsay, it turns out, famously trained under White, a three-star Michelin chef.)
By contrast, White strikes fear of a different sort without ever raising his voice. That wild shock of unkempt hair, the dark sunken eyes, the way he drops his chin so he can stare into a contestant’s soul –- it all builds to an unnerving sense of foreboding or looming danger.
Take the first episode, with a challenge that has now become de rigueur for cooking shows: The contestants were asked to make their signature dish, to be judged by White.
The scene unfolds like a horror film without all the schlock. It wouldn’t surprise you one bit if White leapt up at any point, grabbed a cleaver and lopped off the hand of anyone who displeased him.
When White begins tasting the meals, he’s clearly disappointed. Yet he speaks so softly, so gently, you have to lean in to listen. It soon becomes clear that cutting comments hurt so much more when they’re purred instead of hurled.
‘Where do you take your inspiration from,’ White asks one contestant, as he samples her jambalaya. My grandmother, she answers. ‘That’s romantic. I like you for that. If I went down to your house tonight and you gave me this I would be very happy, because it’s from your heart,’ White says. And then, in the very same voice, he lowers the boom: ‘If I went to a restaurant and got this I’d be pissed off.’
And then he adds: ‘No disrespect.’
The two teams are divided up into two competing restaurants. The first-night dinner services goes as might be expected. Chicken is sent out undercooked. Desserts are badly handled. Teammates turn on each other. A plate still has the price tag on it. Another plate is dashed on the ground. A food critic, undercover, takes it all in and reports back to White. As White puts it, the critic ‘loaded the gun. My job is the dirty job -- to pull the trigger.’
Tonight, though, he was spared that job.
Brothers Zan and Than were about to be sent home for their poor performance, including undercooked chicken. But cousins Khoa and Denise interrupted. ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ Khoa explained, adding that the pressure, the cursing -- it had all taken its toll.
After the pair had left the restaurant, White turned those dark, piercing eyes back on the brothers and explains how close they were to being sent home. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ White tells them. ‘You were going. You’re still here because of them.’
In the weeks ahead, they might wish that it were otherwise.
--Rene Lynch