Hell's Kitchen, episode 9: Hanna sets her sights on the prize

WOLFEBORO — At the beginning of the season, it was looking like Kingswood graduate Nicole "Nikki" Hanna was likely going to be one of the early casualties on the competitive cooking show "Hell's Kitchen." Lately, though, she's looking more and more like not only does she deserve to be there, but that she could win.

The ninth episode, titled "Blind Taste Test," was designed to gauge each contestant's palate, starting by giving each of them a milkshake made with a mystery flavor. Each contestant whiffed on what was in their shake, except for Hanna, who correctly identified hers as peanut butter.

"I'm very surprised that the other chefs were having such a hard time detecting what kind of milkshakes they have. We all know what food tastes like, or I would hope we would all know what food tastes like at this point," a confident Hanna told the camera afterward.

Pride comes before the fall, the saying goes, and so it went for Hanna. Next up was the main challenge of the episode, in which each contestant was blindfolded and given headphones to silence their hearing, and then spoon-fed common foods by host and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.

As Hanna was the only one who ID'd her milkshake, she went up first. She thought the chicken was "squab or duck," for the carrots she said, "is it pear?" Next were pears, but she said, "It tastes just like the last one, apple?" And after a bite of cheddar cheese, said, "I know this, I know this, what is wrong with me, tahini?"

That's 0 for 4, which would be embarrassing enough on its own. Adding insult to injury was the fact that one of her teammates got drenched with a bucket of half-melted ice cream, then gallons of ice cream toppings, for each of her wrong answers. Even worse, her team ended up losing the competition – and missing out on a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon – thanks to her poor showing.

"I felt so bad," Hanna said in a telephone interview on Monday. However, she said it was harder than it looked, because what wasn't made clear in the episode was that the headphones the contestants had to wear – so that they couldn't hear what other people were saying – were playing heavy metal music at a very loud volume.

"It was the anxiety of it," Hanna said. "You have to turn off all these distractions, and you're being spoon-fed by Gordon Ramsay, and guess what the boiled cubes of food are."

So, instead of an adventurous afternoon, Hanna's Red Team had to break down a side of beef for that night's service. It was steak night at Hell's Kitchen, and Hanna was back on the fish station, which was where she had her emotional moment at the beginning of the season.

"I worked fish for the very first dinner service. I had a really hard time as everyone continues to talk about. I really have to redeem myself and show Chef Ramsay what I'm really made of," Hanna told the camera. On Monday, she said the other contestants wouldn't let her forget about how she started in the competition. "They never let me live it down, which to me was absurd because everyone else at that point had had an emotional breakdown. Why are we still talking about it?"

Hanna proved herself capable on the fish station. Every member of the Red Team, in fact, had a flawless dinner service. The Blue Team, however, was a train wreck, and one of their members was sent home from the competition.

By the end of the episode, Hanna, whose only cooking experience prior to the filming of the season was two years as a line cook for Wolfe's Tavern in Wolfeboro, had survived to the halfway point in the season, and watched nine other contestants get eliminated. Some of those had much more impressive resumes than hers. 

Hanna said on Monday that, at that point in the contest, she was feeling the limitations fall away.

"It's not that I didn't believe that I could win in the beginning. My mind was open to the possibility of it but I didn't want to put myself in the mindspace that that was my expectation," she said. Regaining her composure after her initial stumbles, and building a streak of strong performances, she said, grew her confidence – and her aspirations.

Whoever was the last contestant standing would be offered a coveted job: executive chef at the Hell's Kitchen restaurant in Lake Tahoe.

"I was focused on the prize, and I believed that I should win and could win. I was halfway through the competition and I thought, I really could win this, and I want this," Hanna said.

Hell's Kitchen airs on FOX on Thursday nights at 8. Past episodes can be streamed via Hulu.