Hell's Kitchen, episode 11: Local contestant's scallops count

WOLFEBORO — In the ninth and tenth episodes of Hell’s Kitchen, local contestant Nicole “Nikki” Hanna realized that she had what it took to compete with cooks and chefs with more impressive bona fides. In the eleventh, she came to another realization: as the number of contestants dwindled, she could be eliminated for increasingly minor mis-steps.

The day started out playing to one of Hanna’s strengths: a jumble challenge, with members of each the Red and Blue teams going head-to-head to unscramble the letters of an ingredient – the winner got to add the ingredient to one of their own dishes, or could add it to one of the other team’s dishes as a form of culinary sabotage.

“I’m good with words, I loved it. It was fun,” Hanna said in a telephone interview on Friday, the day after the tenth episode aired. Hanna beat out her opponent for pineapple – and decided to lob it like a grenade at the Blue Team’s halibut and fennel dish.

“Looking back, I don’t know what was going through my mind. I was looking at the fennel that was with it,” Hanna said, but the chef that cooked the dish came away with a winner. “I don’t know why I thought that was so awful. . . I would love to have pineapple with halibut.”

The Blue Team won overall, in fact, which meant that they spent the day playing rec-room games and eating barbecue. Meanwhile, the Red Team was punished with the task of making hundreds of twill cookies – dainty and fussy confectionaries that are made by taking a thin tray of cookie dough that has just come out of the oven and carefully rolling it into finger-sized tubes.

“It was awful,” Hanna said. The dough is only pliable while it’s still hot – the sugar crystalizes when it cools, and then the dough cracks instead of rolls.

“The cookies are so delicate that if you look at them wrong, they will shatter. And we had to make 500 of them,” Hanna said.

The punishment put the normally cheerful Hanna into such a bad mood that she put herself in “time out,” she said, until she felt she could positively interact with her teammates. Eventually, they found a system that worked, and they finished the job in time for that evening’s dinner service.

When they arrived at the restaurant, host and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay had a surprise announcement.

“Hell’s Kitchen is closed to the public tonight. We’ve closed so we can support two remarkable charities that are helping countless people. These nights are extremely important. So, bear that in mind when you’re cooking this evening,” Ramsay said.

The two charities, the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, and the Chris Long Foundation, were dining that night at the restaurant, and each of the contestants were told to take charge of one course. There were only six other contestants remaining, and they were competing to take the job of head chef at Ramsay’s newest restaurant, a Hell’s Kitchen in Lake Tahoe.

Hanna saw that night’s service as an audition of sorts.

“This is an opportunity for me to prove myself to Chef Ramsay and be a leader. I want this to go off without a hitch,” she told the camera.

Hanna’s course was the scallop appetizer, of which she oversaw the preparation of 12 portions. When the food was ready, she grabbed a stack of plates, filled them with scallops and had the waiters take them out.

Then came the hitch she hoped to avoid.

“I don’t want to be overly negative or make any excuses. There were these stacks of plates, all of the stacks, I assumed, had 12 plates. I should have counted them, but I didn’t,” Hanna said after the episode aired. The stack that she took had only 10 plates, meaning that McLachlan and one other guest were looking at their bare placemat, while a mortified Hanna scrambled to fill two more plates.

“That was a stupid mistake, I guess,” Hanna said over the phone. It was just a matter of seconds, though. “All the food was ready and in the pan. I was confused why there was so much food left in the pan . . . There’s always something.”

That mistake, making a guest wait a few seconds longer for her plate of food, put Hanna in the discussion when her team later had to decide which of the remaining four Red Team members would be nominated for elimination. Luckily for her, another team mate, Jordan, failed to check the meat temperatures on the steak course, so she was the one that Ramsay sent home.

Hanna credited her survival to her ability to recover after realizing her own mistake, while Jordan “lost it and got frazzled . . . It’s challenging to be in a leadership position when everyone else on your team are also leaders. And the end of the day, that was the purpose of that challenge.”

Hanna said it was hard to see Jordan eliminated. They had become friends – and Hanna knew she could very well have been walking out herself if not for Jordan’s error. However, that guilt was mixed with feelings of accomplishment and anticipation. The episode was down to six contestants – which, according to history established over the previous 18 seasons, meant that the contest was about to step into a phase.

“I knew once we got down to six people, we know black jackets are coming. You have to mentally prepare yourself. In Hell’s Kitchen history, black jackets are the most difficult challenges,” Hanna said. Yet, the fact that she had to worry about the black jacket phase was itself an achievement for someone who, at the time the show was filmed, had only two years of experience as a line cook for the Wolfe’s Tavern.

“I’m still here, this is reality, I have accomplished this, there are only five other chefs here out of 18,” that started the episode, Hanna said in the interview. “It was a mixed bag of emotions for sure, but at the end of the day I was really proud and honored to be able to prove myself up to that point.”

Hell’s Kitchen airs on Thursday nights at 8 on FOX. Past episodes are available for streaming via Hulu.