Hell's Kitchen, episode. 8: Monkfish is wild for local cook

WOLFEBORO — In the first seven episodes of Hell’s Kitchen, viewers watched local contestant Nikki Hanna struggle to adapt to the pressure, then find her footing. In the eighth episode, she emerged as her team’s leader, if only for the episode.

Titled “Crapping out in Hell,” the eighth installment of the FOX elimination-style cooking competition opened with a challenge styled after the table game Craps, one of the many homages to Las Vegas, where the current season was shot.

Each team member was told to roll a die, the face of which had letters instead of numbers. Whatever letter was face up after their roll, the team member would have to come up with an ingredient, then each member of that team would have to create their own dish made up of the ingredients rolled by their teammates.

By the time Hanna held the die in her hand, there were already two “M” rolls prior to hers, which translated to mushrooms and monkfish. She selected miso to add to their flavor palette.

Speaking on Friday, the day after the episode aired, Hanna said she made the choice to give their ingredients a point of view.

“I like miso a lot, it’s fermented soybean paste and it’s great in soups and stocks, it’s Asian in nature and I was trying to steer our set in a particular direction, it was kind of vague at that point,” Hanna said.

Members of her team followed suit. Sprouts, rice and Thai chiles rounded out their list of ingredients.

When it came time to cook, Hanna lent her expertise to the other members of the Red Team. At the start of the season, Hanna was seen by the other competitors as green, as her sole kitchen experience prior to the 2019 filming of the season was two years as line cook at Wolfe’s Tavern in Wolfeboro, the same town where Hanna went to high school. Others had worked as chefs in big-city restaurants, so they didn’t think much of Hanna.

But she proved herself to them, and by the eighth episode learned they could look to Hanna, especially when it came to seafood. She was able to show her teammates, especially Lauren, how to break down the usual, and unusually ugly, protein.

“Randomly, I have worked with monkfish a couple of different times. None of the other girls had worked with monkfish,” Hanna said. “It’s a very unattractive piece of fish.”

She wasn’t making it easy on herself, though. Hanna conceived of a mushroom and miso fish stew, with bean sprouts and chiles to punch through the earthiness of the broth. She had never made it before, and said she surprised herself, even, with how it turned out.

“I was really alarmed at how great it tasted,” she said. During the challenge, though, she was also alarmed by something else. She was supposed to use rice in her dish, and to make hers stand out, she decided to make a rice cracker – something she had no business attempting.

“Nope, I had never done that before,” she said. “It popped into my head and it was kind of risky,” and as she attempted to make them, she realized what a risk she was taking.

During the episode, the camera shows her scrambling in the kitchen, saying, “I’m trying to make a rice cracker, but it’s not going to plan.” That turned out to be some suspenseful editing, though, because she did get the cracker to crisp.

“I love the cracker,” said host and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, when he tasted her dish. He called her stew “delicious” and gave hers the highest score of all the Red Team’s creations.

That turned out to be a pivotal score, because after the tasting, Ramsay announced that the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant, where the contestants usually cook for the second half of each episode, wouldn’t be opening that night. Instead, each team was going to have to send up two of its own members, who would have to “cook for their lives,” as Ramsay put it, as one of the four would be sent home.

Further, he said the creator of each team’s best dish would be tasked with identifying their two teammates to enter into the elimination contest. And, they would first conduct one-on-one interviews with each one of them first.

If it was the intention of the show’s producers to use the interviews and selection as a means to sow division, it didn’t work, said Hanna.

“It felt good to have that opportunity to show my leadership skills in a more difficult scenario. It also gave me the opportunity to speak to each of my teammates candidly about how things were going,” Hanna said. “To be honest, nobody was upset. We were all on the same page in the first place.” She said it was apparent to everyone on her team the Lauren and Jordan were going to be the nominees. “At the end of the day, having those conversations helped us as a team moving forward. They also spoke to me about what I was contributing, what I was lacking.”

She then had to join the rest of her team, and the balance of the Blue Team, to wait. One by one, Ramsay acquitted nominees and sent them to rejoin the others, until only the two women from the Red Team were missing. Hanna knew that it meant that one of her nominees would be sent home.

“It was nerve-wracking, especially in a cook for your life competition. It could be anybody,” she said. Then Jordan walked in, meaning that Lauren’s time at Hell’s Kitchen was over.

“To be honest, I was very happy that Jordan came back, but I had become biased because Jordan and I had become friends. I was really happy when she came back, I screamed, picked her up and hugged her.”

It has now been close to two years since that episode was filmed. Hanna’s life is much different now. She lives in New York City, works at a fine dining restaurant at a hotel in New Jersey, and is in the process of launching her own line of female-friendly chef attire. Her experience on Hell’s Kitchen helped prepare her for the next phase of her life in many ways, and one of those ways is giving her a recipe for fish stew.

“I still use that for tasting menus. It’s one of my signature dishes now,” said Hanna. She adds a little bit of mint for color and flavor contrast, otherwise it’s very similar to what she served to Ramsay. “That is one of my favorite dishes.”