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Hell's Kitchen Season 9 Premiere

Hell’s Kitchen Season 9 premieres tonight, July 18, on Fox at 8:00pm ET/ 7:00 CT. The show will once again take 18 cooking professionals of differing skills and pit them against one another in a series of cooking challenges. Most of the challenges are done in teams and the winning team gets rewarded. The losing team has one member sent home, and the rest of the team gets punished, usually with some onerous kitchen task. This year, says the Fox Promo site, the losers “will be required to decorate for a high school reunion, take delivery of and butcher an entire side of beef, create ice sculptures and put together an entire children's playground for family night.”

Hell's Kitchen Contestants

For season 9 of Hell’s Kitchen, the 18 contestants are: Amanda Colello, Brendan Heavey, Carrie Keep, Chino Chang, Elise Wims, Elizabeth Bianchi, Gina Melcher, Jamie Gregorich, Jason Zepaltas, Jennifer Normant, Jonathan Plumley, Krupa Patel, Monterray Keys, Natalie Blake, Paul Nieermann, Steven Paluba, Tommy Stevens, and Will Lustberg. I won’t recap their bios as you can read them at this link.

How to Pick Potential Hell's Kitchen Winners

Generally, however, if you want to pick a favorite, look for someone not only with basic cooking skills (and they don’t have to be the best chef, just adequate), but who also has the ability to work under pressure and stay organized. The winner will be required to run a professional kitchen and keep the staff on task no matter what challenges pop up.

If you can spot that person, through all the production editing, then you’ll know the likely eventual winner. Of course, anyone can have a really bad day and get kicked off the show, but on Hell’s Kitchen, Gordon Ramsay gets to decide who leaves and who stays. If he has someone he thinks could run a high caliber restaurant kitchen, he’s most likely going to do what he can to keep that person around, especially while there are weaker candidates still on board.

Hell's Kitchen is a Reality Show to See Who Breaks Under the Extended Stress Test.

In Hell’s kitchen, we don’t get to see a lot of useful cooking information. It’s more of a reality show designed to provide us with the entertainment value of putting a group of people through a pressure test and seeing who breaks, especially with Gordon Ramsay castigating them on a weekly basis. Remember, the contestants on Hell’s Kitchen are all people who work in the food industry, private chefs, sous-chefs, caterers, and so forth. That means their livelihoods depend upon their reputations as cooks and as level-headed people. When Gordon Ramsay tells them and the world that their cooking is amateurish and rubbish, or that they are falling apart under pressure, that can have a lasting and significant impact upon their careers.

I’ll be watching to try to pick out those with a chance to win tonight and I’ll post my choices to this blog.
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