Hell's Kitchen: Raising the Bar Mitzvah

Wow. Maybe Lacey was right about the red team’s bitchiness after all.

With Coe-lleen, Seth and most of the rest of the clowns gone, the show made the crazy decision to focus on some of the stronger contenders in the competition. This week that meant the impending showdown for red team supremacy between alpha females Andrea and Carol was front and center and threatened to tear the women apart (as a giddy Lacey watched from a distance).

Then again, it’s more likely that the Andrea/Carol blood feud is really not all that different from the Ben/Danny power struggle on the blue team a few weeks ago. It’s also much more likely that Lacey’s current “happy happy, joy joy” time on the blue team will instantly come to an end as soon as something goes wrong. When Ramsay told Lacey she was finally “shining”, he didn’t necessarily mean she was excelling. He probably just meant that she finally stopped looking like someone who’d perpetually just walked into a Porta-Potty.

The continuation of this “Hell’s Kitchen” recap was surprised to find the women (LA at least) really missing Coe-lleen. I guess no one minded the fact that she was a terrible cook that dragged down the whole team because she “kept their spirits up” (as they were losing). I was also pleased to see Andrea and J own up to their shortcomings in the kitchen, with J taking it especially hard and consulting some family pictures to find inspiration (at this point, I figured he’d be a goner by the end of the hour).

The week’s challenge involved a first for the show — “Hell’s Kitchen” would be hosting a bar mitzvah for a young man named Max. This excited Ben, who felt the need to mention about 67 times that he was Jewish, because the week’s challenge involved making a chicken soup, brisket and burger dish for Max and his family (including his adorable/oblivious grandmother) to taste.

It was blazingly obvious that Ben (after all his talk about being Jewish and having this one in the bag) would lose his portion of the challenge. (Remember Steakhouse Guy Giovanni flopping on steaks a few weeks back?) In typical “HK” fashion, the challenge came down to the wire with Not-Bobby’s Kobe beef burger (insert joke, including one by Robert himself, about Robert eating more than his share of burgers) vs. Carol’s bleu cheese-infused hamburger. Andrea (and a couple of other teammates) had repeatedly implored Carol to reconsider the bleu cheese, but she ignored them. It wasn’t exactly a shocker when Max said he didn’t like the bleu cheese and awarded the bleu, I mean BLUE, team the victory.

The men were off for a relaxing spa reward (where J got on my nerves again by referring to himself in the third person, and a LOT of Not-Bobby’s flesh had to be accounted for) while the women prepared “Hell’s Kitchen” for the bar mitzvah.

Fortunately (unless you’re Jean-Philippe), they had the assistance from the same obviously-phony, stereotypically gay party planner from last season. (Even Martin Short in “Father of the Bride” thinks this guy is over the top.) Did we really need a subplot where this guy continually antagonized J-P? My favorite part was Coi repeatedly using the word “fabulous” to describe Francisco. It’s ok Coi — he’s GAY. It’s ok to say “gay.” Gay LA certainly did.

Andrea and Carol fought some more while assembling the dance floor for the bar mitzvah, though the shots of Carol “angrily” hammering the hardwood crosscut with Andrea irritating her felt even more manipulative than usual.

The dinner service got off to a rocky start as Andrea skimmed on the mushroom in the mushroom risotto. She threatened to go off the rails, but quickly turned things around. On the blue side, J struggled to follow instructions by putting salad dressing on a “no dressing” salad order.

J also went on to have problems on the meat station, but Coi was even worse on the red side. She made some nasty-looking charred hamburgers which still managed to be cold somehow. She got even worse from there, and even resisted LA’s help at one point. J had the same problem with cold meat on the blue side, which leads me to believe there’s some sort of massive, unseen air conditioner unit that makes the chefs’ meat cold.

Meanwhile, the Andrea/Carol feud continued as Carol semi-snapped at Andrea for repeatedly asking for a batch of French fries. Other than that, there wasn’t much drama in the kitchen (and Max and his friends didn’t seem to care about the long wait as they shot hoops) because the chefs appeared to have a relatively competent dinner service. (This also led to a disappointingly low number of Ramsay rantings.)

That meant the show had to resort to showing us J-P “accidentally” knocking over Max’s cake from Francisco’s hands, and an appearance from the Harlem Globetrotters that was even more random and made less sense than the time they were on a Scooby Doo episode.

Ramsay gave the blue team the edge, named Andrea the best of the losers and asked her to nominate two people for elimination. This completely flabbergasted the women’s team and with relatively good reason. Despite making a nice comeback last night, she HAS been flat-out bad on a couple of occasions.

However, Andrea has also been the only person on the women’s team willing to step up, take a leadership role, put her neck on the line while maybe rubbing people the wrong way and own up to her mistakes. As I wrote last week, teammates complain about her bossiness, but I don’t see anybody else stepping up. And no, Carol’s slightly psychotic passive-aggressiveness and half-joking threats to punch someone in the neck don’t count.

If you’re looking for a favorite on the red team, how about Paula?

Andrea ended up nominating Coi (for good reason) and LA (huh). I actually ended up liking the LA nomination because, while she has been a competent cook, she represents what I’m talking about on the red team — a lot of whining, not enough assertiveness. The nomination appears to have lit a fire under LA’s ass.

Coi wasn’t going down easy. She claimed Andrea was actually the worst person on the team and had the (ludicrous) support from all her teammates, who were undoubtedly sick of Andrea’s aggressiveness (and maybe even threatened by her skills). Well, everyone except Paula, who was the only person who had the guts to say that Coi was the worst person in that particular dinner service because (hello!) she was. As a result, Chef Ramsay sent Coi home.

Between that moment, cooking the apparently awesome ahi tempura last week and a couple of this week’s wonderfully sarcastic (rolling her eyes at Ben’s repeatedly Jewishness, mocking the blue team for wearing sunglasses indoors) and harsh comments (why did she need to slam Max by saying it was the last time in his life girls would be lifting him on a chair during the Horah dance?) Paula could become the most stealthily entertaining person to watch this year in a cast of crazies.

So what’d you think of this episode? I wasn’t too clear, but is Ben Jewish?! Why does Lacey fall down in the kitchen so much? Whose side are you on, Andrea’s or Carol’s? Finally, do you think Francisco has a chance with Jean-Philippe? (I don’t — we all know J-P’s heart belongs to Chef Ramsay.)