Taking The Heat From Chef Gordon Ramsay

I’m very excited about Season Four, more so than any other year before. We’ve raised the bar. This year 22,500 participants entered Hell’s Kitchen. Finding 30 chefs in that bunch wasn’t difficult. It’s a great team of chefs.

This season I get put into this prosthetic mask - my name is Terrance from Texas - and I’m actually made up as one of the contestants, so nobody spots it. I went through six hideous hours of sitting there. I’m not very good at sitting down for six minutes, let alone six hours.

It was really weird to sit opposite the contestant Bobby on the coach when he’s like yelling at me, “I’m the black Gordon Ramsay and you guys, good luck, because you’re going to need it. I’m the five-star general.”

I was absolutely peeing my pants with laughter but trying to keep a straight face. I had a ponytail, long hair, which is really weird. Chefs don’t do ponytails and we shouldn’t do them because I guarantee that whenever there’s a discovery of hair in the food, it’s guaranteed it’s from the chef’s ponytail.

Of course, the pressure is on this year more than any other. I’m taking it more seriously and the stakes are a lot higher. The level of jealousy and insecurity in this industry is far greater than ever before.

I had all the previous winners on season four back judging. It was so nice to see them grow in stature and maturity. It’s quite nice to see how they handled that exposure. Not every chef deals with it properly; they get slightly excited, a little bit overconfident and then they miss out on the most important part. You don’t become a chef because you’re obsessed by becoming a celebrity.