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Hell's Kitchen Season 5

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marigold:

Thank you for sharing TL  :-*

marigold:
An interesting article:

For Reading native, 'Hell's Kitchen' is hot

Andrea Heinly has gone from the frying pan into the fire. Happily.

The 30-year-old line cook who grew up in Reading is a contestant on this season's "Hell's Kitchen," the reality/game show where foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay excoriates contestants to their highest level of excellence. Or he dumps them.

This season begins on Thursday at 9 p.m. on Fox with a prize as a head chef at a restaurant in the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City at stake.

If Heinly wins, it will be a homecoming of sorts for the chef who lived in Reading off and on during her youth, before attending the Culinary Institute of America in her 20s.

"I was born in Reading and moved away when I was 3," she said. "I grew up mostly on the West Coast but came back here for some elementary school and then sixth and seventh grades. I moved back to Reading in my early 20s and then decided to go to school (CIA) in New York. All of my family is here."

Heinly, who recently moved back to Reading again, to be with her family during the show's run, said she'll be watching the premier with a group of 30 or so friends and family at Mountain Springs Bar and Restaurant where both her mother and grandmother used to cook.

It was her grandmother, Jean Dengler, who inspired her to switch careers from real estate to cooking.

"My grandmother passed away when I was in my early 20s," she said. "I had been in real estate and decided to do a complete career change and go to culinary school. It was pretty much to not only fulfill my dream, but also my grandmother's dream that I learn to cook."

Heinly said that, at the time, she had no plan beyond learning to cook.

"I didn't want to own my own restaurant," she said. "My grandmother was a cook all over the place at Mom Chaffee's and Mountain Springs, too."

Because her grandmother died when Heinly was still rather young, she decided that cooking was a way to honor the memory and possibly have a new career.

"I felt like I didn't really have the opportunity to learn from her, so I wanted to fill that hole," she said. "I felt very compelled to go and fulfill her legacy. I was miserable with my life. I found real estate very stressful."

That stress probably helped her deal with the stress of cooking in Gordon Ramsay's kitchen, though. Even the selection process was rigorous.

Heinly estimated that she was one of 36,000 applicants who wanted one of the coveted 16 spots on the show.

"I just did a cold call to the talent agency," said Heinly, who had been working as a cook for six years. "It was like they put me under a stress interview. They wanted to see if they could push my buttons - and they did."

The next hurdle was to do an on-camera interview.

"They did that and got me going again," Heinly said.

After much waiting and more interviewing, Heinly found out that she had been selected for the show.

"And my first thought was, 'Is anyone going to hire me again after I've been on this show?' " she said. "But then I was on the show making my signature dish."

Heinly's signature dish is a Korean-influenced pear kimchee with sesame rice and a bulgogi made from steak.

"I cook it all the time for my family," she said. "But when I make the bulgogi at home I'll marinate it (for several days). With a 45 minute time period to prepare the signature dish, I was a little scared."

Heinly said she watched the show beginning in Season 2, and knew what she was in for with the temperamental Ramsay.

"I was in culinary school and I thought, who in their right mind would ever want to go on this show," she said. "And then someone suggested that I should try out, but I didn't think my skills were there."

Eventually though, she figured it couldn't hurt to at least make the call.

The show, which wrapped filming a year ago, was even more intense than she had seen on television.

"Without a doubt," she said, of the continual craziness. "I cannot even tell you how stressful it is being there and how little sleep we get."

Heinly hasn't seen any of the show either, when the hours and hours of taping and cooking and performing challenges gets edited into a story told in one-hour segments. She assumes though, that some of her own personal craziness will make it to the small screen.

"You could call me a spitfire," she said. "I definitely have a habit of speaking my mind."

Heinly isn't at liberty to say how far she gets in the show, but in whatever time she was there, she got to know Gordon Ramsay.

"What you see on television is really true," she said. "In the kitchen he's a maniac, with veins and wrinkles that you wonder how they got there. But outside the kitchen he's a big teddy bear who seems fun loving and relaxed and loves to enjoy life. But really, he's a very intense individual."

Link to the article: http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=122791

marigold:
An interesting article:

Tough cookies take on Ramsay

'Hell's Kitchen' star dubs this season's chefs the best ever.

Sixteen new contestants will face Gordon Ramsay this season as they vie for the show's grand prize: running an Atlantic City, N.J., restaurant and earning $250,000.

But first, they have to survive each other and the picky eye of Ramsay.

They also have to live together. Nerves are frayed.

"You're in such extreme conditions that you act out of the norm," says Carol Scott, a Knoxville, Tenn., chef who is among this season's lineup. The contestants were drawn from the Chicago area, New York, New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Nevada and Tennessee.

"I don't want to see myself act crazy on television."

In the opener, hers is the first dish he tastes. The prospect of it weighed on her.

"I was worried," Scott says. "If he had tasted it and hated it, I would have been mortified. If he could say something about my dish, I could go home and be just fine."

Ramsay concedes in the opener that contestants in this group are the best cooks the show has had. Scott agrees.

"I think we were a pretty talented group of people," she says.

Scott says Kitchen turned out to be more than just another grand game for her. It was a life-changing experience.

"I learned so much about myself through the whole filming process," she says. "I guess it was a self-journey. I'm happy with the outcome."

Link to the article: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/jan/25/tough-cookies-take-on-ramsay/?partner=RSS

TexasLady:
Interesting indeed! Filmed a year ago!!!

I love that these will be the best cooks that they have ever had.

marigold:
An interesting article:

Palisades Park chef took heat during TV contest

The recruiters for the "Hell's Kitchen" reality show on Fox had one question for Ji Cha: Can you cook?

The answer was yes.

"Where are you going to see a 6-foot-tall Asian girl who knows how to cook?" Cha asked them.

"And they're, like, 'Yeah, you're right,' " she said. In the end, the Palisades Park resident made the cut.

Cha, 35, says her cooking chops helped in the competition in which celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay belittles, torments and ultimately hires one of the contestants. But she thinks her bold personality was crucial. "They want ratings," she says of the show. "They want people to be entertained."

Indeed, the first episode, to be aired Thursday, features such contestants as a cooking teacher whose dishes disgust Ramsay and a banquet chef who has never worked on a line before. But Ramsay gives Cha some rare praise. Her dish impressed him so much that he says, "It looks like you've been cooking for 15 years."

In reality, Cha graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 2004 and has had only a few professional cooking jobs. She is launching a career as a private caterer and cooking instructor, while working at her boyfriend's Palisades Park furniture store.

One of her former CIA professors assures that Cha knows her way around a kitchen. "She's very talented," said Thomas Griffiths, whom Cha assisted during his examination for certified master chef. "She was conscientious, hard working, the kind of person who has something to prove — they work that much harder. She was very pleasant, very polite."

Cha had a personal motive to entering the world of food. Her family has long been in the restaurant industry. And though she spent many hours working in her father's former midtown Manhattan Korean restaurant, Arirang House, "we still don't have any kind of father-daughter relationship at all," she says. "I'm kind of scarred by it, in a way. It felt like I wasn't accepted."

"I'm always trying to find ways of getting his approval, or even acknowledgement that I exist. … Recently, I'm realizing more that I think that's why I got into culinary … just so I can be close to my father," she says.

Is it working? "No," though he has asked her about the possibility of taking over one of his restaurants in Korea, which does not appeal to her.

She talks about this struggle in the fifth season of "Hell's Kitchen," for which she says she was cast without ever cooking for the recruiters and given very short notice to get on a plane to Los Angeles. Taping lasted an intense month and a half in late 2007, she said: "I was so stressed, so stressed. I was living on chocolate chip cookies."

What's it like to be yelled at by Gordon Ramsay? It's not much different than other kitchens she's worked in, she says: "I was known to be called Hitler, myself … I do kind of have a tendency of belittling people. But I tell them in advance, don't take it personally, this is business."

The winner of "Hell's Kitchen" will become executive chef at a restaurant at the Borgata Hotel Casino Spa in Atlantic City. Cha can't say how far she got. But she sounds confident and praises only two other contestants: Andrea, a fellow CIA grad who she says she saw as her main competition, and Ben, a Chicago chef who "seemed like he knew his stuff." "Everyone else was mediocre to me," she says.

And she says she'd do it all over again. In fact, she wouldn't mind appearing on more reality shows.

And her e-mail signature now reads: "Ji H. Cha. Celebrity chef."

Link to the article: http://www.northjersey.com/entertainment/tv/38317269.html

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