‘Hell’s Kitchen’ preview: A quienceanera gone awry?

As great of a guilty pleasure show as “Hell’s Kitchen” may be, one of the biggest criticisms we have of it is that if you look at many of the challenges over the years, there is quite a tendency for them to all blend together. It’s hard to really differentiate one dinner service from the next, mostly because they follow a pattern: You cook similar food, Gordon Ramsay screams at you if you fail, and you are barely acknowledged if you get it right.

Luckily, Tuesday night’s new episode looks to be in some ways trying to break free of that mold. The service for the week is going to revolve around an occasion that is enormous in Latin American culture: the Quinceanera, which is a grand celebration of a young girl turning 15 years old and “becoming a woman.” We don’t know what would possess someone to think that this hotbed of swearing and drama would be perfect for a teenage girl, but whatever. Ramsay tries to explain the event in the video below, while also explaining that this is one of the few events out there that the show has not done before.

Hopefully, there will be an overall sense of success in the kitchen than what we saw last week, and the elimination will be a little less polarizing. We spoke to the most recently eliminated chef Jacqueline Baldassari last week, who explained that one of her biggest flaws in the game was merely taking control of a meat station, mostly because her fellow chef in Amanda struggled with meat temperatures. There is something that can be said for being too much of a team player at times, and that coupled with inconsistency in the kitchen was what ended up sending her home. (Jacqueline did say that she loved the experience, and that her phone was “blowing up” with kind messages within the 24 hours after her exit.)

What sort of celebration do you want to see happen in “Hell’s Kitchen” next? If you want to read our full review of last week’s episode, be sure to visit the link here.

Photo: Fox