I’ll confess that I enjoy Hell’s Kitchen. I think it was the BBC Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares that won me over. His willingness to clean grease-traps and cook anything at the drop of the hat is just the “money-where-your-mouth-is” quality that a character like Ramsay needs to have.  He’s a loud mouth. He’s a bully. He enjoys it too… that’s fine. Hell’s Kitchen is repetitive but that’s expected. What really should embarrass him is the lack of respect paid tonight to the cow.

On the show contestants are broken into teams and while the winning team enjoys a reward, the losing team suffers a punishment that’s usually related to the kitchen-prepping for that night. Usually it’s menial, stressful, humiliating punishment… I guess that’s simply the Hell in Hell’s Kitchen… this week’s show had the losing group of women sitting around a table, as a group, eating and vomiting up kidneys, tongue, offal, etc. ostensibly from the cow they just unloaded off a truck.

While it certainly was a bouncy castle for sale pretty perverse punishment, unfortunately it also denigrated the animal. Juxtaposed with the men eating N.Y. strips I guess it reinforced steak = good. Like Americans need that message. What it should have been was the men enjoyed eating sweetbreads while the women ate glands… it would have been the same effect and we would have all been better off for it. The contestants would have been better off too and Ramsay would be hailed as diabolical. Instead, a dead cow was regurgitated on camera. It certainly didn’t set the stage for the show’s cooking competition that followed, and Ramsay finally disappoints.