HK Season 3

7. Melissa Firpo

Melissa’s run in Hell’s Kitchen is perhaps the first example of a chef starting out as a frontrunner and then just collapsing over a painful three-episode dramatic arc that saw her sent home after a team switch. Up to this point, chefs either started and ended bad or started and ended good. The closest example of a chef starting well and ending poorly is Rachel from season 2, but given the quality of Season 2’s cast, it was more like she started mediocre and ended poorly.

Melissa? Oh, no. Even Ramsay lamp shaded after her team switch that he’d never seen a chef tumble so far. Melissa went from being called best of the worst and asked to nominate two competitors to not even being allowed to plea her case after her last performance. It’s wild, and normally I try to avoid commenting on contestants’ appearance, but here I feel it’s justified as it’s a perfect visual representation of how badly Melissa slipped by the end of her run.

She goes from being very well-groomed, put together and capable to looking and acting like what Ramsay described as a “jumped-up little cavewoman.” Her hair is unkempt, her entire demeanor has shifted towards hostility against the other women, and she has this little burn on her chin. Obviously, it’s just a burn, but a good number of people thought that she was growing a little beard, and given how badly groomed she was at that point, it was shockingly possible. That’s not to insult women who grow facial hair, but combined with her other malfunctions in basic personal upkeep and her plummeting performances it created the impression that she was regressing.

Speaking of her performances, in both challenges and dinner services she went completely unwound. The most notorious example is the shameful duck breast her and her team served to a soon-to-be married couple. But that wouldn’t have happened had Melissa not decided, out of the blue, that she was the red team’s leader, and took it upon herself to put the breast back in the oven because she felt it wasn’t done. This led to it being cooked to shit, her refusing to bring it up several times despite Ramsay’s increasing loss of patience, and when he’s dressing them down afterwards once the guests have left, it’s an early example of him being truly, legitimately angry.

That’s the basic rundown. Melissa would go on to fail at the next service, be switched over to the blue team—much to Rock’s consternation—and then sink on service again, getting sent home before she was even formally nominated.

Nadir: The duck breast incident.

Mitigating factor: I think Melissa is legitimately skilled, she just disintegrated after a few days of little sleep and intense pressure. I base this on the fact that her first service was strong.

6. Brad Miller

Very little to say about this guy. He was the other worthwhile blue team member besides Rock, only being eliminated over Josh because he allowed Josh to sink on the meat station in his last service. I’d love to get a Served Raw for season 3 because I can’t imagine what Ramsay’s motivation for getting rid of Brad over Josh was. Yeah, he wasn’t much of a team player, but, well, we’ll get to Josh soon enough. Let’s just say “sinking” was that dude’s natural state and leave it there for now.

Brad wasn’t a particularly likable guy. He wasn’t as bad as, say, Vinnie or Joanna, but he had a bad habit of shifting blame. He blamed Melissa for his bad service in the final 7, blamed Josh in the final 6, was snarky about Aaron’s sickness, but usually this stuff was aired out in confessionals, not in person. Even when he tried to throw Rock under the bus at an elimination ceremony, he wouldn’t say Rock’s name—Rock had to make him acknowledge who he was talking about. Besides giving Rock the opportunity to beat Walter White to the “say my name” moment, it established that Brad was a bit of a weasel, and Ramsay could likely see that.

Besides that, he was the kind of chef who thought he was a damn sight better than he was. He had control over the blue team’s menu on the create-a-menu service night, at one point trying to sell off a mac ‘n’ cheese dish as a fancier item called a “cassoulet.” In fact, let’s go with that. Brad, in one sentence, is a mac ‘n’ cheese who thought he was a cassoulet.

Nadir: Mocking Aaron in the confessional booth. “I’d like to see Aaron get better. Uh, get better at cooking.” Fuck you, Brad.

Mitigating factor: Chef Ramsay noted that Brad was a hard worker.

5. Josh Wahler

In the most recent 10 or 15 seasons of Hell’s Kitchen, the black jackets have gone from being a combination of the last few chefs still standing in a season to this elite club, to the point where there’s a black jacket lounge, there’s a special set of challenges for getting the jacket, and contestants act as if getting a black jacket is akin to getting a Michelin star. Maybe it’s a bit more justified in the later seasons, where the competition is a lot more fierce and even chefs that are in the bottom half of the final rankings at least have some moments of brilliance. But to me, the idea is always laughable. Black jackets are no guarantee of culinary brilliance, and that leads me to Josh, the single worst black jacket contestant in the show’s history, probably forever.

Since I’m about to run down all of this dude’s failures, I’ll at least point out his most positive trait: his attitude. He’s never instigating any drama with his team like Melissa, he doesn’t harbor grudges when chefs like Rock and Brad question his abilities, he always tries his best and never talks back to chef in service, saving it for the confessional booth, and even at his most arrogant and deluded, he’s still likable. I can absolutely see why Ramsay kept him around for a little while.

…To a certain extent.

Because this dude was a trainwreck from start to finish. The gulf between his perception of his abilities and the reality is enough to give the Grand Canyon the appearance of an empty bowl of dog food, and if Josh made dog food and put it in said bowl, the dog wouldn’t eat it.

Nadir: Most of us would choose his mid-service ejection, but I think the challenge earlier in that episode is a much better example. In the DVD release of Season 3, the full results are revealed, and out of 100 high-schoolers, not a single one of them voted for Josh’s salmon with pineapple salsa. I repeat—one hundred high-schoolers, none of them preferred his dish. In a sample size of 100, a bowl full of deep-fried sheep anuses basted in sewage runoff could get at least one fucking vote. It makes me want to taste the dish Josh made, just to understand how the hell he pulled this off—it’s impressive in the same way getting zero on a multiple-choice test is impressive, because you have to know enough about what the right answers are to avoid guessing them. Is Josh some kind of reverse-savant who can make anything taste too bad to be palatable, in a world where there are people who drink coffee made with beans picked from cat shit?