‘Hell’s Kitchen’ recap: Watch out for the salmon shrapnel

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Is this the season of delusion?

I felt like I was in an alternate universe watching Rikki Tikki Tavi Raj (he got a little DeNiro there, didn’t he?) yaking it up like he was the best chef in the joint, and Sabrina with her ghetto hood-rat routine. Good stuff.

If we’ve learned anything in nearly 100 episodes of ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ it’s that each team needs to designate a whipping boy and girl, probably as a defense mechanism for dealing with the sheer stress of never knowing when you are going to be struck by salmon shrapnel.

On the men’s side, now that Raj and Louis are gone, it’s Trev. (Maybe it’s just me, but I noticed so little of Louis that I thought ‘Who is that guy?’ when he was eliminated.) For the women’s team, it’s shaping up to be -- Sabrina? I actually hope she sticks around a bit longer. She gets on my nerves in a good way with all that defensive posturing and eybrow pinching. I love how she blamed Gail for causing the women to lose the ravioli challenge when she ALSO lost a point for having busted up raviolis. Again with the delusion.

Chef Gordon Ramsay may be the dark overlord of ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ but he’s also the king of spitting sarcasm, starting with sending emergency paramedics to wake up the contestants and check them out to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong with them to explain why dinner service has been so pathetic so far. He found out that, nope, they’re all in good health -- just incompetent in the kitchen.

And his ‘Gail, your pan’s a bit hot’ line -- while throwing the charred piece of meat over his shoulder into the sink where her skillet was still on fire -- was vintage.

Two ‘What the?’ moments of the night:

-- Boris deciding in the middle of dinner service that it would be a good time to go do dishes.

-- Sabrina in that garish outfit as they headed to the Santa Monica Pier. Maybe it would be OL for night (not really), but in the harsh sunlight she looked like a street walker. And she should know there is only one TV personality that can pull off the flower-behind-the-ear get up. And that’s the inimitable Miss Niecy Nash.

And finally: Hey, looks like Vinny can cook!

-- Rene Lynch
Twitter.com / renelynch