Hey, I thought Top Chef was the Vegas-themed cooking competition this season! And yet here’s a makeshift craps table in the dining room at the start of this week’s Hell’s Kitchen, and a pair of custom-made oversized dice, covered with letters. The challenge? Each member of the team has to roll the dice once, and come up with an ingredient to match the letter they roll. Have a lucky day, cheftestants!
The Red Team rolls R(abbit), H(aricots vert), P(otatoes), G(arlic) and H(amhock). The Blue Team rolls H(addock), F(igs), A(ngel hair pasta), A(pples) and T(omatoes). Despite handicapping themselves with an odd batch of ingredients, the Blues impress Chef Ramsay, while the Reds fall short due to a garlic puree that tastes too much like… well, garlic. So the boys are off to their reward in Vegas, where Van rubes it up a little but otherwise nothing especially memorable happens. The girls, meanwhile, are stuck with the always-crushing Delivery Day punishment, which has them running to the loading bay all day and all night. (“Night!” bitches Tennille.)
The women are worn to a frazzle, exacerbated by the bossiness of Suzanne, whose “fake-busy” ways are driving her teammates nuts. The men, on the other hand, have become a cohesive unit, though their bonds are tested when Robert (a.k.a. “Bigguns,” according to Dave) gets back from the hospital. (What the hell, he’s just a heart patient. Surely working in Hell’s Kitchen can’t be that stressful.) Robert immediately returns to getting on his teammates' nerves, shirking work so that he can chow down on what looks to be some kind of Eggo sandwich, then heading into the confessional to insist that even at 75% strength, he’s better than half the people on the show. (I crunched the numbers and the math checks out.)
For dinner service, Ramsay introduces a twist: chef’s tables in each kitchen, at which executive chefs from Ramsay’s restaurants sit and eat. That is, if they get served. In the Red kitchen, Ariel forgets to take the chefs’ order, then serves them appetizers they find overcooked and bland. (“Needs more salt… the simple things are the hardest to get right, I suppose.”) Dave does better in the Blue kitchen by just ordering risotto on his customers’ behalf, then cooking the best damned risotto of his life. But Van fails to take the baton from Dave. He has to be reminded to go get the chefs’ fish order, and then when he rushes over there, he thrusts his sweaty head at them and grunts, “What do you want?”