History Series / CutthroatKitchen

** The number one example of this trope is Chef Jourdan, from the episode "The Full Monte Cristo". She gets caught in the pantry, gets her bread swapped for the sogged bread in a French Onion soup, and then finds out too late that what she thought was cheese (for a Monte Cristo) was ''[[FailedASpotCheck butter]]''. She was the first to go.

* WeWinBecauseYouDidnt: A legitimate strategy is to simply bury one poor chef in sabotages that, unless you screw up ''really'' badly, hamstrings them so much you're guaranteed to cruise on to the next round. Unlike ''Chopped'', where you're judged on all three dishes at the end, here you don't have to be the best, only the ''second'' worst.

** Did a contestant present something to the judges that didn't closely resemble the assigned dish? If the judge in that particular episode is Simon Majundar, nine out of ten times that contestant is being sent home.

* RefugeInAudacity: Chef Boots, who decided that he was going to flaunt his love of bacon, and propriety be damned. In ''all three rounds'', he busted out the bacon - even on a Cherries Jubilee. Brown scratched his head and even Majundar had to comment that the man certainly had chutzpah to keep serving him bacon every round.

* MeanBrit: Invoked but defied with Simon Majumdar, who's British but is explicitly a soft-spoken and fair judge.

* BlessedWithSuck: Alton decides to give the chefs superpowers during a [[JustForPun Hero Sandwich]] challenge. Said superpowers are a [[ComicBook/TheIncredibleHulk Hulk]] hand (which is a large glove that's closed into a giant fist) or a {{ComicBook/Wolverine}} claw (which resembles a knuckle-duster with knives sprouting from it) that competitors have to wear for the round.

** Leaving ''Cutthroat Kitchen'' with the full $25,000. However, given the nature of this game, it's HarderThanHard.

* HisOwnWorstEnemy: Alton himself has noted that more chefs have been set home from ''self''-sabotage then the sabotages he hands out.

** In the Halloween episodes, the judges wear different costumes every round. Probably the most memorable is Simon Majumdar dressing up as [[StarWars Princess Leia]].

** Don't add in extraneous stuff to the dish because the judge has to factor that into the dish. This has felled quite a number of chefs due to their stupidity. Hell, Alton even warned Chef Skylar of "[=SaBOOOtage=]" not to add in the Ice Cream. [[WhatAnIdiot She did it anyway.]][[invoked]] Hell, the judges and Alton find this [[BerserkButton a really annoying habit]] of contestants that they have told people in the ''After-Show'' to just do the challenge and do it well. It's not that hard.
** The number one example of this trope is Chef Jourdan, from the episode "The Full Monte Cristo". She has an entry to herself for WhatAnIdiot[[invoked]].[[labelnote:Why?]]She gets caught in the pantry, gets her bread swapped for the sogged bread in a French Onion soup, and then finds out too late that what she thought was cheese (for a Monte Cristo) was ''[[FailedASpotCheck butter]]''. She was the first to go.[[/labelnote]]

* FreePrizeAtTheBottom: In "The Breakfast and the Furious," all of the challenges were breakfast-themed, and the finally challenge was to make cereal (with milk, though they didn't have to make the milk.) The first sabotage of the round was to make your opponent forfeit all their tools and vessels and use only what they could find at the bottom of cereal boxes provided by Alton Brown, such as toy dinosaurs, a toy truck, and, yes, a little toy pan.