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. Meeting the Queen was quite breathtaking (although the canapés were a letdown), but I never go into cooking thinking about being knighted.
Getting my ass kicked and working my nuts off the way I did in France and getting pushed around those kitchens wasn’t about becoming famous. It’s learning your craft and understanding what it takes to survive in this industry.
I get really frustrated when a chef is incompetent or stupid or lazy in terms of health and hygiene. How stupid do we have to be to put together a venison tartar with capers, shallots, parsley, lemon juice, egg yolk, and combine that with a scallop tartar with, again, ketchup, lime juice, white chocolate bound together with caviar? What type of nut is going to actually come out and eat and pay top dollar for that level of stupidity?
When we go out for lunch or dinner, let’s be honest, it is the flavor that holds the memory. It’s not how things look. The pistachio ice cream served with the chocolate sorbet served inside a soufflé, that’s what you go for. It’s the flavor.
I get frustrated, but I don’t like cursing. That may sound slightly bizarre, but trust me, it’s not my fault entirely. It’s the industry language and any chef would be a hypocrite if they didn’t admit to swearing in the kitchen.
It’s something I’m not proud of. Every time, I get reminded of that by my mother. More importantly, I have four young children. My wife is a schoolteacher. I can switch it off. I have an outside life. I’m not forecasting for my first heart attack at the age of 41 and secondly, I’m not going anywhere near a divorce.
Of course the intensity on the show is real. There’s nothing played for any form of camera. You see 44 or 42 minutes of the edited version and I run service from 6:00 until 10:00, four hours, and cook for 120 guests.
Of course it’s going to look like it’s combustive, tenacious and full of drama, and it is, but there’s no script. That’s why I fight every week that that restaurant opens, to make sure I run the restaurant and not a show.
We do have good days and we do have bad days. We have meltdowns and we have tears. That goes on in any top-flight kitchen. Now, if I was running a mediocre, run-of-the-mill, Caesar salad, flip-a-burger, of course there’s no heat.
I constantly critique myself as well. When I make mistakes, I’m the first one to admit it. More importantly, if I do, the mistake doesn’t ever leave the kitchen. Critics are crucial. The customers are highly critical, without a doubt, but I’m my own biggest critic.
If any young chef wants to put 10 or 15 years of their life into my kitchen, then they have to come out talented. I want to put my money where my mouth is and prove to the industry that any winner of Hell’s Kitchen is more than qualified and capable of standing alone in my kitchen.
Running a restaurant is something you have to be working at each and every day; it’s not a foregone conclusion that you’re a success. How many restaurants do we know across the world that customers visit once and once only? The second visit is far more important.
It’s harmony when it hits perfection.
*****
Check out all the Orato.com special series:
Hell’s Kitchen Chopping Block [1]
Song Over For American Idols [2]
People In Peril [4]
