You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
OK, I am pulling up my skirt a bit to say this, but I do watch a few cooking shows on the tube. For what it’s worth, my wife is addicted and I’m just a passenger in the back of the bus. With nothing better to vegetate on, I watch. But you know what; some of these programs are pretty damn appetizing.
Hell’s Kitchen is the cooking show I like the most. It’s like Survivor in a restaurant. Instead of an island they duke it out in a kitchen. Instead of eating worm guts they cook Filet Mignon. Instead of bug scabies they get scalded with Onion Soup. Like Survivor, eventually everyone is voted out of the kitchen until a lone chef outwits outlasts and out-cooks the others.
I try not to watch, but it’s like turning away from two women fighting in wet t-shirts. I find it difficult to look away.
This show is everything that is wrong in society. It’s food being thrown on the floor in fits of rage. It’s fires erupting in frying pans and people burning flesh. It’s raw fish sent to tables occupied by pregnant women, and those angry pregnant women sending the raw fish back.
You want conflict? All you have to do is return an entrée to Hell’s Kitchen and things are going to boil over like pasta on a high heat.
Hell’s Kitchen is ¼ cooking, ¼ game show, ¼ weirdo contestants, and ¼ wacky host.
The show is combustible like a crock pot with the top off. It’s a culinary train wreck. They bring in a bunch of chef-contestants from all over the country. Men and women. Black and white. They are tattooed and pierced. They all have bad attitudes and varying degrees of cooking prowess. They smoke cigarettes, use bad grammar, and claim they cook better than anyone else. They are basically kind of disgusting and I would hate to think any of them would scramble my eggs, but here they are none the less.
And the motivation that brings out their inner pirate? the winner gets an executive chef job at a primo restaurant pulling in $250,000 a year. It’s the reason they come close to physically bludgeoning each other with meat cleavers. Like the million dollar prize in Survivor, there’s a lot on the line.
If the contestants are the nitro, then the show’s host is the Glycerin.
His name; Gordon Ramsey. This fibrous bundle of nerves is a good looking Scotsman who knows his food. He is a world class chef who curses like a sanitation worker wading through sewage. He is angrier than a castrated pit bull. He barks out cooking instructions like a Paris Island Drill Sergeant.
With a pencil behind one ear and a testicle pulled too tight in his drawers, Ramsey bounces off the kitchen‘s walls. He is mad all the time. He is angry 24/7. There is no dish that is properly prepared. There is no contestant who isn‘t a moron. And he gets in their face, so close; he inhales their breath, and licks their sweat. He yells till their eye brows are singed.
The idea of the show is to try and make them quit or cry; preferably both.
It‘s a cooking show that reminds me of the powerful conflict in an Officer and a Gentlemen.
Remember Luis Gossett Jr. as the tough ass Navy drill sergeant. His goal is to get all the fighter pilot trainees to quit.
D.O.R. Dropped On Request.
Richard Gear has personal issues and Louis Gossett Jr. is hell bent to make him turn in his wings.
“I want your D.O.R. Mayonnaise.”
“You can’t have it,” Richard Gear will cry while scrubbing a bathroom with a toothbrush.
That’s kind of what Hell’s Kitchen is all about. Gordon Ramsey and the frustrated cooks never strip down to their tighty whities and fight each other in the blimp hanger, but the season is only half over and it could happen.
The show pits 6 women against 6 men. They get tasks like tasting food blind folded and deciphering the ingredients.
“I think there are sprinkles and paprika and Jell-O pudding in that one chef.”
“It’s an egg roll you twerp,” he hollers. Ramsey’s eyes spin like tops and his head opens up like a steam engine pumping out insanity with the intensity of a rushing fire hose of crazy.
I mean how often do you have to eat food blind folded and then guess what’s in it? But that’s part of the show. Like standing on one foot in a pool of lava in Survivor. It only makes sense in the context of the game.
And like Survivor, that always ends with Tribal Council, Hell’s Kitchen always climaxes in the kitchen. The final segment begins with the two teams serving entrees to real dinner patrons.
The rookie chefs are shell shocked and afraid as Gordon Ramsey screams at them like an oil Derek blowing oil.
“This is raw!” He’ll scream throwing a hunk of lamb at a wall.
“Who sent a piece of plastic to the table?” He explodes, shoving the plastic wrap in the young chef’s face.
“I want an explanation” He yells to nobody in particular.
“Is that the best you can do?” He hollers as diners stare at him in surprised horror.
“Get the F*** out of my kitchen!” he demands throwing someone out by the scruff of their apron.
Ramsey is shouting throughout the whole show like a cat in heat. The kitchen and the dining room are separated by a glass divider, but the there is no way that his foul mouth and angry insanity isn’t heard by the patrons.
“Wake up and do your job!”
“You have tables that haven’t been served yet! “
“You call this lamb? It’s raw!“
“Would you eat this?“
“You are pissing me off!”
He yells and turns purple and his sandy hair stands on edge like a porcupine hooked up to a 9 volt battery.
He grabs raw meat and throws it at the wall. He sticks his fingers through chunks of chicken and looks disgusted at how pink the meat is.
“Happy now?,” he says as he storms to the back of the kitchen, whirling around like a frenzied drunk.
He is a human jack in the box.
It’s got to be an act, because there is no way any restaurant could operate with a guy like this at the helm.
It would be like acrid football coach Bill Parcell standing over you with a whistle screaming at you to hit someone while you cooked pasta. After a while, you’d be so punchy, you’d be afraid to cook a French fry without flinching.
What it lacks in realism, it more than makes up in reality TV.
I could care less about cooking. But I watch this one. You would think that cooking show would be as boring as women’s billiards.
But the show is strangely compelling. It is full of competition and conflict and people to root for. The winners get flown to Vegas to party, while the losers scrub the grease traps at Hell’s Kitchen.
At the end of each show, Chef Ramsey picks one contestant to hand in his kitchen smock. And so it goes until there is only one cook left.
That chef wins a job in one of Gordon Ramsey’s many restaurants around the world.
I’m not proud that I watch a cooking show. But then again, I’m not embarrassed by it either.
I mean I can’t make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but if I had to fight in a kitchen against a bunch of culinary pirates, I think, after watching this program, I would be prepared to do so.
I at least know how to throw food, and that is half the fun.