TV is the New Reading

If you can’t stand “Hell’s Kitchen,” give it a few weeks

World-renowned chef extraordinaire and five-star restaurateur Gordon Ramsay is once again at the top of his tantrum-tossing game, taking to task a collection of chefs who each night just manage to survive the heat in “Hell’s Kitchen.”

Sadly, this season’s cringing cuisiniers are as dull as a fried egg on limp lettuce. There are no personalities in the bunch equal to their ranting, raving overlord, and in the end, I wouldn’t trust any of these chefs to helm a coffee cart, let alone a brand spanking new kitchen service in a Vegas motel.

Don’t get me wrong – the season just started, there’s still more than a dozen of them and they’ve not had an opportunity to stand out much at all. This is the set of episodes when everyone’s attitude outpaces their talent.

Yet we’ve still had opportunity to witness some terrible choices. In this week’s installment, one of the contestants let her fellow fretfuls clean up the kitchen and prep the shellfish for an upscale preparation while she went up and took a whiny little nap because everything was “so hard” and she “couldn’t do it” and besides, everyone was against her.

Well, how did she imagine leaving them to do all her work was going to improve their opinion?

Meanwhile, the guy chefs all got to tour Catalina Island, except for one of them, who weighed 400 pounds and the helicopter’s insurance wouldn’t cover him. He complained about having to take the ferry and missing the tour. I noticed, however, that he got a nice nap, and he also didn’t have to prep anything for the dinner service.

This show seems to encourage complaining and back-biting among the contestants, down to the losing group having to nominate two chefs for elimination each week. The pressure stays on the whole time because you never know what it’s going to come down to. This week, both contestants who got pushed forward for elimination could’ve been shoved off the roof for all the love lost between their fellow contestants and them. But at the last minute one of the other contestants – one who’d hurt her foot earlier in the challenge (but you’d never know it for the high-quality evening’s work she put in) – volunteered herself for elimination, citing intolerable pain.

Ultimately, Chef Ramsay accepted her resignation over the other two nitwits, thereby ensuring that one of his best contestants would be out of the running before two of the worst. But that’s just how it goes.

My opinion may come around more as the field narrows to some definable quality, but right now, I’m still way more interested in who will win “Top Chef” on Bravo.

“Hell’s Kitchen” airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on FOX.

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