I turned down a spot on Hell's Kitchen S23.

For you. For me. For independent journalism. 💛

One week of sticking to my editorial calendar and everything is behind already!

Today’s piping-hot paid-subscriber chisme was supposed to slide into your inboxes Friday, but sometimes one has to prioritize their day job. 😐

Here it is, on a Sunday. Still piping hot: the surprising tale of my rocket to the top of the Hell’s Kitchen Season 23 cast list, and the reasons I turned it down.

A reminder if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, I truly do not mind one iota, just send me a message. I do this so that only those who want the tea receive it, and so that my enemies have to pay to know what I wrote about them.

Now…

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Remember earlier this week when I waxed poetic about covering shifts in cafes? When I say I meet my best regulars there, I mean it. My community wouldn’t be nearly the size it is if I didn’t occasionally trade espresso for secrets. No matter what my full-time gig is, I keep an eye out for barista shifts that need coverage (and in that regard, there are many, because the turnover rate in cafes is abysmal).

One day, a gentleman came in who I have a good repoire with. I have learned his name, but in my mind he’s just Almond Latte for Here. He ran restaurants in both New York and Los Angeles, and we’d had a few lengthy conversations about our shared interest in the industry.

“You’re a cook,” he said to me one day. “My friend is a casting agent for Hell’s Kitchen. They’re looking for people a lot like you — would you want to compete on television? I think you’d be entertaining.”

He passed me a phone number on the back of a coffee sleeve, scribbled in Sharpie.

I slipped it into my apron pocket and forgot all about it until later that night, when it re-emerged while I was doing laundry. I showed my husband, who shrugged. “Why not?” he said.

I didn’t entertain the idea because I thought I could win, necessarily, but I’ll admit to you all here behind the safety of the paywall that I am a genuine fan of Gordon Ramsay. If you watch Hell’s Kitchen with a keen eye, you can see his ability to put pressure on people to succeed.

He knows when to turn up the heat and when to properly teach. Sometimes it involves yelling, of course — not because he wants the cook to fail, but because he wants the kitchen to rise. The television flair is dramatic, but anyone who has worked in kitchens can see that it’s not nearly as bad as some real kitchens out there, where chefs will yell at you as an ego-trip, rather than to inspire any kind of greatness or teamwork or leadership.

Those leadership skills coming from the old-school way of cooking have always intrigued me, the DNA of the old guard on display for the general public to see — plain as day, if you can look past the bloated Hollywood gauze of reality television.

I texted the number on the back of the coffee sleeve. The response was instantaneous — a friendly casting agent, presumably the friend of Almond Latte for Here, sent me a link to an application and an instruction to list her as a reference. The journey had begun.

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The questions on the application were quite funny to answer: What meal do your friends and family say you cook best? (My husband kindly replied, all of them! when I asked). Are you comfortable in high-stress environments? Have you seen the show before? Are you comfortable being yelled at? Do you have pictures of your prettiest plates?

Somewhere, buried in the pages-long application, was a question along the lines of, “Why would you subject yourself to being yelled at by Gordon Ramsay?”

My answer was quite straightforward. I told them what I just told you — that I’d been yelled at by worse chefs who didn’t care about my success, and if I was going to be subjected to kitchen abuse, I’d rather it be by someone who gives a shit.

Another question was, “If you could meet any celebrity chef alive, who would it be?” To which I replied, already prepared, “Guy Fieri, for supporting independent mom-and-pop businesses since the beginning, plus his quick aid coming to the industry’s rescue during the pandemic, launching fundraisers for restaurants and workers into place.”

Is that cringe? I asked myself, before submitting it anyway.

I fired off my application and within 12 hours, I’d been scheduled for a call with the next agent.

The first call was a basic screening to make sure I sounded legit and pull any interesting nuggets out of me that might turn into a storyline. It was brief but positive, and the agent told me to await a Zoom call within a few days. I was also told to share a few key photos: myself as a child, early kitchen photos, and dishes that I had made.

Embarrassingly, I had very few quality photos of dishes that didn’t look completely amateur from my culinary school days, but I sent them anyway — the entire application process seemed to be an exercise in the cringe-factor of my culinary history.

When I jumped on the Zoom call a few days later, it turned out to be a digital screen test. I wasn’t quite prepared, but I gave it a shot — a very enthusiastic woman instructed me to place my camera at a certain angle, talk with my hands, and share as much as possible. “The more story you tell, the better. Be enthusiastic. This isn’t a job interview — this is FUN!”

She asked me dozens of questions out of a file they’d already compiled on me, questions like, “You’re a prankster in the kitchen — what’s the best prank you’ve ever pulled on a coworker?”

She also asked a lot of questions about my childhood, and I could see them shaping my narrative in front of me: the small, tough girl from Wyoming. Look out boys! She can cook steak! Don’t mess with her, she’ll make you regret it!

“Would you be okay representing your home state?” she asked. “Even though you’re not living there right now?”

I consented.

“We’re going to put together a reel of you,” she said. “All of your photos, stories, and asides, just like you were a contestant on the show. We’ll show the producers room and they’ll whittle it down to their top candidates, so stay tuned okay? We’ll call you.”

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They did call me.

I ended up in my next Zoom call with the show’s producers, where they got a feel for my personality and chatted with me for about fifteen minutes about all the same things, all over again.

“Are you a pushover?” Randy, one of the producers, asked me. “How do you express anger and frustration? Do you get quiet, or do you yell?”

I got off the phone with them all, perplexed. My intuition was buzzing. It felt like I was being… inspected. Which, I suppose, was true. But now I had a sparkling premonition that it wasn’t really a joke anymore, I had made it very far and the likelihood of making it even further had exponentially increased.