HK Season 2

 

A person who got introduced to Hell’s Kitchen with one of the modern seasons would expect Season 1 of Hell’s Kitchen to look like this instead of what it looked like. Season 2 is when the show began to resemble itself as it would go on to exist, with the documentary style of Season 1 falling to the wayside in favor of bigger drama, bigger music, more outlandish contestants, and an all-around bigger emphasis on personality and style as opposed to the mechanics of cooking and running a restaurant.

This, fans generally agree, is to the show’s benefit. Let’s face it, if we wanted to learn about running a restaurant and cooking on a line, we’d either go do research or if we insisted on learning from a TV show, marathon Kitchen Nightmares’ UK version. And THEN do research, because that still wouldn’t get the job done. But for Hell’s Kitchen, we want donkeys and wankers getting bollocked and buggered. And here are 12 more of Ramsay’s hapless victims.

12. Polly Holladay

A dictionary-standard definition of a first boot, Polly was on the older side of this season’s age range, got kicked off her station after multiple failed attempts at the very first dish of the night, cooked Chef Ramsay a signature dish that wasn’t cooked, and enjoys a reputation centered more around what she failed to do than what she really did. Sweeping the floor after being designated the kitchen donkey was likely her only beneficial action during her truncated stint in Hell’s Kitchen. Narratively, she did little else but get out of the way so that Heather could establish herself as the clear frontrunner as early as possible, as once Heather took over her station, the red kitchen finally churned out an appetizer.

Nadir: I have one chance to impress the greatest chef in the world, so here, have some bread that maybe glanced sideways at a stove one time for a couple minutes. It’s a gutsy move, I’ll admit, to NOT cook your signature dish. I could have gone on Hell’s Kitchen and put a half-loaf of Mrs. Baird’s under a dome with a lit match and it would have equaled Polly’s effort.

Mitigating factor: She took all of Ramsay’s vitriol like a champ. I suppose she did have six sons naturally—which, holy shit. How do you have six kids and all of them are the same gender, what are you, Namekian?

11. Larry Sik

It must have taken Hell’s Kitchen’s casting director ages to find a dude with the last name Sik who was certain to have health problems at some point in the show. Or, at least, that’s what I thought, until I did some research and saw that Larry’s actual last name is “Ross.” So why in hell did he go by “Sik”—first off, who even has a surname nickname? Second, did he choose the name “Sik” because he knew he was going to get sick with a mystery illness after the first dinner service? Did God watch a guy nickname himself “Sik” before working in a high-pressure kitchen and decide to just call his bluff?

I seriously can’t get over how ridiculous this contestant gets the more I think about them. He’s like 5’4 and Chef Ramsay compared him to the Statue of Liberty, he’s the first black contestant in the show’s history AS WELL AS the show’s first med-evac, his last action before getting too sick to continue was to flirt with a lesbian and a newlywed in a hot-tub (yeah, I know, Heather’s married to a guy now, she identified as lesbian during her time on the show), he did absolutely nothing during his only service except fuck up like, one dish, if Served Raw is any indication. I don’t even remember what his signature dish was, I just know it was bad, because the only guy who did have a well-received signature dish is a 21-year-old Italian whose other notable accomplishment is triggering Ramsay with his goddamn hair. All of this is to say, I need to travel to the alternate dimension where Larry made it to the final five, I swear.

Nadir: Flirting with Heather and Virginia while he was already feeling sick.

Mitigating factor: Flirting with Heather and Virginia while he was already feeling sick.

10. Gabe Gagliardi

When Gabe found out Larry was eliminated due to his health, he told him before hanging up, “tonight’s service is for you.” Gabe then proceeded to have one of the worst services of the entire season and obtain the distinction of being the first ever person eliminated despite his team not even fucking nominating him. His service was so bad, it probably made Larry even more sick.

To see how bad this dude’s service was, you have to watch the second Served Raw video. The only impression you get of him in the edited version of his service is that he thought Ramsay needed a quail when he didn’t, then getting his station taken over by other teammates. What the episode probably DIDN’T show you is that his station was filthy, he kept shutting down and not responding, needed goddamn TOM to help him remember orders, Ramsay had to give him a risotto lesson like two hours into service and just kept having to babysit him and remind him to talk for the entire service—everything that a chef could possibly do wrong on this show, he basically did. He probably would have sent raw chicken if one of his dishes included chicken.

Nadir: Bringing Ramsay nearly to tears in his last service just by ignoring him.

Mitigating factor: He did feel sympathetic to Larry for having to leave due to illness. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more than can be said for chefs in future seasons.

9. Giacomo Alfieri

A lot of chefs wound up in Ramsay’s crosshairs during the first five seasons, where it seems like he would look for any reason to badger and belittle them. These will be discussed as they come, but perhaps the first example of someone who just couldn’t avoid getting a mudhole stomped into his ass every chance Ramsay got was Giacomo.

In this case, I’m positive that Ramsay hammered Giacomo so much because he had the best signature dish. Sometimes, if Ramsay’s got his foot up your ass constantly to the point where you start feeling like a shoe wearing a chef’s jacket, it’s because he’s driving you to be as good as he thinks you might be. What was later revealed in an interview, and what Chef completely failed to catch, is that Giacomo’s pasta dish was using pre-packaged pasta, something that is verboten on this show. When I learned about this, I came up with a second theory as to why Ramsay rode Giacomo so much—he figured out about the pre-packaged pasta later and, infuriated that Giacomo got something like that past his palate, decided to give him the worst three or four days of his life before eliminating him.

So yeah, this hapless bastard got his hair-do insulted, got called dirt-brain, donkey, dick, a goon, told he was poncing around, harangued by Chef Scott for not having his oven on, and to his credit, he took it all to the best of his ability, especially considering he was just barely old enough to drink and had no idea what a lot of the stuff he was cooking with even was. By the time he left the show, he must’ve felt just as much relief as disappointment.

Nadir: Chef Scott bitching him out about his stove being off. Ramsay yells at you because he cares, but Chef Scott yells at you because he has mostly bile and malice running through his veins.

Mitigating factor: Probably the only chef in the show’s history who fooled Chef Ramsay with pre-packaged ingredients.

8. Tom Pauley (Poley)

Before I start, this chef did recently pass away. So please keep in mind that none of these are meant as personal attacks. The only thing I know about this man is what the editors of Hell’s Kitchen showed me, so when I start writing about this guy, keep in mind it’s less about him and more about the product that resulted from how the show used his footage.

Anyway, to begin with, the show cared so little about this guy and his dignity, they didn’t even bother to spell his last name right. Let that just set the tone for you.

Tom’s talent was how well he could sell himself, which was enough in this cast of chefs to make him the third strongest among the men. This is either a positive take on his speaking skills or a scathing indictment of the degree of talent this season had going for it. Personally, I fall in both of those camps.

Beyond his relatively strong elimination pleas, Tom’s accomplishments mostly involved helping to make Chef Ramsay sound like he was going to start weeping at any minute. Ramsay was angry in Season 1, and sometimes contestants clearly got to him there, but here in Season 2 the casting department had figured out what would make for entertaining meltdowns and they narrowed the field down with quantum precision. That’s the only way I can explain how Tom managed to make it on the show at all, never mind how far he made it, because the dude could do no right, and Ramsay probably aged 10 years over one month of trying over and over to help him attain any degree of competence. That is, when he wasn’t breaking Tom’s balls for acting like he was in the movie Martyrs every time he cut or burned himself.

Nadir: Seemingly declaring that Chef Ramsay, a confirmed blackbelt, doesn’t want to get into a street fight with him during a confessional. I say “seemingly” because the way it was edited makes it seem like he could have been talking about any other male presence on the show.

Mitigating factor: Saying “if he didn’t care, he wouldn’t break my chops” after Ramsay savaged his signature dish. Say what you will about Tom, he had a better understanding of how Ramsay worked than many other early contestants.

7. Rachel Brown

Once again, I must preface by saying that this chef has died since their season aired. She died under very tragic circumstances not long after being on the show, so I am going to tread lightly here.

Rachel started off as one of the prospective leaders in the red kitchen, quickly forming a tight bond with Heather and a rivalry with Sara. However, once Heather got moved over to the blue kitchen, a switch seemed to go off in her head and she started to snowball downhill, with Ramsay at one point even taking her into the pantry to try and wake her up with a pep talk, which I’m pretty sure is the first time he ever did that. Usually, when he does that, it either means that you’re having an unusually bad run or you’re in danger of being eliminated in the middle of service. Rachel, I think, was in the former.

I think Rachel is one of the first examples of somebody starting off spot lighted as a legitimate frontrunner and totally collapsing way earlier than they should have. Chefs like Melissa from the third season and Anton from twelve would have a similar arc. If Rachel kept it consistent, she might have been in the final two with Heather instead of Virginia. Sadly, she was unable to do that because of nerves that led to her being unable to recover when she made one mistake.

Nadir: Sending up massively overcooked lamb wellingtons and then beating herself up back at her station. Becomes really painful to watch given what happened after the show aired.

Mitigating factor: Offering to take the place of one of her teammates on the chopping block if Ramsay thought she deserved to go over them.

6. Maribel Miller

Maribel is someone I feel people sleep on a little bit. This might be because I saw an interview of hers where she showed more of her personality, but in a season where people are starting to show early signs of being picked for drama as opposed to competence, Maribel just feels like someone who is trying to make it to the end of the day. That’s not to say she ever had a chance to win, I don’t think anyone but Heather was winning this season, but Maribel sometimes feels like a stand-in for the audience with how she reacts to Chef Ramsay’s insults and jabs. This is especially true in Served Raw, where we often hear her laugh or talk back to Ramsay and Sous Chef Maryann, not necessarily with attitude, just casually. Like, it never felt like she was intimidated to be there.

One interesting thing she said in that aforementioned interview was that she was eliminated because she requested the producers to send her home due to being homesick. Normally, when chefs voluntarily quit the show, we see it—which, now that I think about it, that’s a dumb sentence, because of course I’m not going to know about the voluntary eliminations the show doesn’t tell me about—anyway, she quit due to homesickness and as soon as she got back home she was asked to come back for the finale, which she declined, giving us the gift of more Giacomo in the finale. Not much else to say beyond all that, I just recommend Served Raw if you want to see Maribel having a little more personality than she does in the edited show.

Nadir: Doing so badly during one service that a table walked out after waiting two hours for entrees. Upon being called useless for this, Maribel responds under her breath with, “I love you, too, man.”

Mitigating factor: One bit that lives rent free in my head is in Served Raw when Maribel imitates Ramsay saying “wakey wakey” under her breath. She’s lucky Ramsay didn’t hear that, as we all know from Boris’s example several seasons later.

5. Garrett Telle

The more I go through these chefs, the more I realize how much every single one of them got yelled at throughout the season. It’s especially noticeable by the final five, where you can’t help but wonder how these people got as far as they did. Really one of the weakest casts in the show’s history, and it shows by the fact that Garrett, who would be an early boot on a season with two digits in it, makes it to fifth place.

Garrett at least is an interesting personality. A fine example is that he almost immediately clashed with Heather over a sexist joke he made that, honestly, I think Heather blew out of proportion. Garrett was clearly being ironic with the “have our dinner ready” comment, considering he was folding laundry while saying it, not to mention the goofy-ass way he said it. At the same time, I do get where Heather’s coming from, because as it’s mentioned in the season, women do have to work much harder than men to gain the same amount of respect.

Garrett’s most noticeable trait is his anger. Between him and Keith, this was one of the saltiest blue teams ever. It’s little wonder that the finale was two women, because every male this season was either an asshole, incompetent, or an incompetent asshole, and unfortunately Garrett hits in the middle of that Venn diagram. He serves raw chicken in his final episode, which, okay, imagine if your doctor prescribed you Tylenol 4 but the pharmacist accidentally gave you carfentanyl. That’s pretty much what we’re looking at here. Raw chicken can and will kill a person, particularly if they’re immunocompromised, so it’s little wonder Garrett got sent home and was subsequently picked last in the finale—though this can be chalked up to some unbelievably poor strategizing that we’ll get to when it’s that chef’s turn.

Nadir: Flipped off Ramsay accidentally, not realizing he was in the car with the women on their reward.

Mitigating factor: Singing “turbot, salmon, wellington,” during service, which inexplicably was left out of the actual show. Seriously, anyone watching this who hasn’t seen Served Raw, go watch that shit, it’s incredible.

4. Sara Horowitz

Here’s someone I would consider to be the show’s first true villain. Somebody who was willing to sabotage her teammate, or at least take joy in having made them look bad, and somebody who just caused all sorts of unnecessary drama with her teammates, especially Rachel and Virginia.

Some of it was also in her immaturity. For example, goofing around, dancing, and doing helium impersonations of Chef Ramsay during a punishment led to her and Rachel having a rivalry that lasted until the latter was out the door. It also led to Maryann spiking a cake into the ground like it was a goddamn touchdown. At least, I think it did, Maryann may have just done that because she was pissed off in general. That’s something worth observing about her, she clearly hated being there for her three-season run as a sous chef. Working with people like Sara probably brought out the worst in her. It brought out the worst in Ramsay, too, and I’m amazed she didn’t get screamed at for farting during the photo-shoot reward when Chef was like a couple of feet away from her. More like photo-shit.

Finally, we have to talk about the incident with the lamb at the final six. I guarantee you Maribel’s homesickness was the only reason Sara survived this shit, because oh my god, this has to be the worst outcome of any create your own menu service in the show’s history to this day. Sara brags up this lamb dish she made while working at a restaurant that was so good, she was fired. For anyone who listens carefully, this is like telling someone the reason you failed a test is because you got a score larger than 100, so it scrolled over back to 1. Anyway, Sara’s dish winds up on the menu only for her to absolutely fuck it up during service, to the point where Ramsay 86es it. Keep in mind, a rack of lamb is expensive, so for Ramsay to watch Sara tooling around with poorly cut lambchops like she’s playing goddamn solitaire must’ve been akin to watching someone piss into a garbage bag full of money. But hey, she was learning, Chef!

Nadir: Getting called a “fat-mouthed little stupid bitch” later in the aforementioned lamb service because she argued with Ramsay over consistency.

Mitigating factor: The service where Heather burned herself, Sara, having been assigned to waiting tables, asked Ramsay if she could come into the kitchen, which he agreed to, and this led to a shot of Sara ripping her waitress shirt off like goddamn Superman.

3. Keith Greene

Another chef from this season who has since passed, so I must once again preface by saying that I’m not criticizing the person, I’m criticizing the edit of that person that Hell’s Kitchen gives us.

K-Grease, much like Jon from Season 11, was the lone shining star of a very weak men’s team. Also like Jon from Season 11, he failed to make the final two because he shit the bed running the pass. Which is really strange, you’d figure a guy with a personality like his, who had been working with Heather since almost the beginning of the competition, would be able to lead. But he always shut down, and what kills him in the end isn’t so much his weakness as a leader, but his seeming unwillingness to lead.

Keith is perhaps best known for his shade thrown at Chef Ramsay for picking Virginia over him in the final two, and in fairness, Virginia was winning challenges constantly and surviving shit service after shit service, at one point having immunity, only to have it taken away during dinner service and then promptly returned once on the chopping block. It did feel, at times, like Virginia was being railroaded into the finale at the expense of other, more consistent chefs. He could have chosen better phrasing than “you have a hard-on for Virginia,” but he’s far from the only one who thinks he was robbed that season. Personally, it’s like I said earlier, nobody but Heather was winning this season, so the other person in the final two was always just going to be fodder.

Overall, Keith as a contestant has a unique blend of having a serious attitude problem while also being a very endearing guy at times. His friendship with Heather is charming, his closest brush with drama was when he took Virginia on a reward with him when he already agreed to take Garrett on any rewards during black jackets, and Chef Ramsay even told him that he could be a great chef if he’d just learn to take criticism and be a leader. Sadly, we’ll never know how good he could have been.

Nadir: Demanding money from Virginia before he would work for her in the finale. Yeah, Virginia probably shouldn’t have been in the final two, but if you didn’t want to possibly work for her, you shouldn’t have come back.

Mitigating factor: As I mentioned earlier, welcoming Heather into the blue team and forming a legitimate bond with her. It’s fun to watch the two of them goofing around in the dorms or during rewards.

2. Virginia Dalbeck

The most controversial chef in this season, Virginia tends to split fans down the middle. Not literally, like she’s goddamn Samurai Jack, but some people fall into Camp Keith and others into Camp Virginia. It’s generally agreed that Virginia is a strong chef if you task her with doing a single dish, or maybe a few of the same dish for a group of construction workers, but it’s when you put her on the line that her weaknesses become readily apparent.

Along with Bonnie from Season 3 and Scott from Season 12, Virginia is maybe one of the worst line cooks ever to make it into the final two. Her single good service at the final seven aside, she was put up for elimination by her team every time they lost, and almost every single time it was warranted. Nobody who wants to win this show wants the kind of record Virginia has in service. It’s like she signed up for MasterChef and went to the wrong studio.

That’s not to say that Virginia ever had a bad attitude or ever gave up. Quite the opposite, she kept trying even if she was immune from elimination, or if it would have been to her benefit to let someone sink, and I think her much more positive, malleable nature played a big part in her beating out Keith for runner-up.

One thing we need to discuss is how bad she did on her final night. First off, this woman won the final individual challenge and was rewarded with first pick. Out of a returning cast including Keith, Sara, Garrett, Rachel, Tom and Giacomo, Virginia snatched Keith, then took Tom and Giacomo. I repeat—this goddamn woman had FIRST PICK, she was set to DICTATE how Heather’s team was going to look, and not only did she pick the one guy who hates her, even if he was very talented and would have been a great boon to Heather’s team, she picks TOM as her second pick and fucking GIACOMO as her third, passing up the other black jackets she could have easily had since Heather’s first pick was Rachel! It’s as if Virginia thought that by choosing to play the game on Very Hard difficulty, Ramsay would give her the win out of respect or something, ignoring the fact that the men she picked must COOK.

But, no, we aren’t done yet. Not even close. Virginia meets up with her team outside later, where she point-blank tells these two men, Tom and Giacomo, that they are weak, that she picked them to make a point to Chef about her leadership qualities, and that Keith was going to be picking up their slack. This is like a coach walking into the locker room and telling his players, “you’re here because you suck ass and everyone knows it, but if you go out there and win for me, I will look like a GOD for getting anything out of you worthless jerks. Now GET ON THE FIELD!” This is exactly the reason why Keith corkscrewed Virginia into paying each of them a grand to help her win—how can she possibly have thought this was anything other than a horrible idea?

So, predictably, Heather goes on to defeat Virginia in the finale, in one of the most obvious landslides in the show’s history. To this day, speaking purely talent-wise, this is the biggest gap between two finalists. But, to end on a more positive note, Virginia took her loss with grace and admitted that Heather deserved it, and when Virginia returned for a service against the black jackets of Season 10, she was much stronger on the line, showing a great deal of growth that only someone with a positive outlook and willingness to learn could show.

Nadir: Sending Ramsay burst tortellini, then telling him she would serve that in her restaurant. Ramsay has to ask her two or three more times if she would really serve that, practically begging her to give the right answer, until eventually she stares at the dish for a few seconds and declares she will try again. All Ramsay can muster up in his exhaustion is “I think that’s a really sensible idea.” This is the kind of shit that would get somebody tossed in the middle of service nowadays.

Mitigating factor: On the night she was told to nominate two of her team, when Ramsay asks her for her second nominee, Virginia goes on this super-long spiel about how Sara screwed her over a few services ago by lying about some turbot… and then doesn’t nominate her, opting for Maribel to go up with Rachel. This earns her praise from Chef Ramsay. Take that as a lesson if you’re ever on Hell’s Kitchen—you should always nominate the chefs who are objectively the worst instead of the ones you don’t like.

1. Heather West

Finally, we arrive at this season’s only unmistakably great chef, and the only person who could lead a kitchen. Virginia was too scatterbrained, Keith was too lackadaisical, Sara was too much of a backstabber, and Garrett straight-up served raw chicken. No, Heather was the only one who could do the job, and Ramsay clearly saw that, because at no point did it feel like she was in serious danger of elimination, when every other chef, save for perhaps Keith, had several appointments with the chopping block.

Heather has the distinction of being the first Hell’s Kitchen contestant to come back as a sous chef during a future season, being the red team’s sous chef for Season 6. Given how terribly Season 6’s red team performed, it doesn’t surprise me that she didn’t return for future services. That said, Heather is still among the most respectable winners in Hell’s Kitchen history, holding her own against sexist comments and backstabbing teammates, absolutely crushing the pass, and also just being a total adorable goofball during her Season 2 run. She’s so much fun at times, it’s hard to imagine she’s also a total hardass leader, and that’s what makes her great—she knows when and when not to let her cute, chilled-out side out. Ramsay gave her a hard time in Season 2 as he did with everyone else, but it never felt like he gave up on her.

Nadir: When she lost the construction worker challenge. Her reaction to taking such a low place is heartbreaking, it’s obvious she felt it on a personal level.

Mitigating factor: Coordinating dishes with her team while suffering from a terribly serious burn that wound up landing her in the hospital. I bet this is the exact moment where Ramsay decided she was the winner.

CONCLUSION:

Season 2’s cast is weaker than the cast of Season 1, in terms of talent. Even though Heather is still one of the strongest winners in the series, the other chefs are either untalented or flawed so deeply they never had a chance. It’s going to be a pleasure to enter the later seasons and see some of the real nail-biter finales.