Have some *bleep*ing passion!
For anyone who watches Hell’s Kitchen on Fox, you’ll learn two things:
- Fox loves creating drama
- Gordon Ramsay is a badass
If you haven’t watched the show, here’s the deal: A bunch of chefs all get together in a kitchen where they compete against each other for a reality show style prize. Each week, one of them is voted off the island *cough* kitchen, while the last one standing wins their own restaurant (for a year). The catch is that during each episode Gordon Ramsay screams at them incessantly while they’re cooking, and there’s not so much voting as just Gordon picking whomever he hates the most.
Ramsay is what makes the show so great. He’s been awarded twelve Michelin stars. Twelve! The man could probably setup shop in a cardboard box and get a Michelin star. He’s absolutely passionate about food, quality, and customer service. Watching him run a kitchen is like watching a true master craftsman do what he does best.
The contestants are a different story entirely. Every week the two teams compete in a challenge, someone wins, someone loses, and the losers have to perform some kind of punishment. Most of the time, the punishment is extra prep or kitchen cleaning. These punishments are almost always related to a typical restaurant task, but the amount of griping from the losers is usually insufferable. You would think that they had to clean septic tanks or something. They’re almost all chefs, yet none of them have passion for what they do!
If you love food, then you should love being with food. You have to do extra prep? Great! You love food and that’s what chefs do! You have to go pick vegetables from a field? Great! Thomas Keller grows his own produce for The French Laundry so that he can always have the best food in the kitchen.
Be passionate! Losing on Hell’s Kitchen should be like winning.
By the way, if you want to watch, you can catch episodes on Hulu. In fact, this gives me an excuse to try Hulu’s embedding feature. Here’s a nice video of grown men throwing tantrums because they have to go pick food from a field.
