Epic Fail / Hell's Kitchen

"YOU MADE ME SICK, YOU FUCKING DONKEY!"

"SHUT IT DOWN!"

Ramsay may be the Determinator, but there are times that even he can see there is nothing to be salvaged. Below are some of the highlights—or in this case, lowlights.

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In General

• Making Ramsay throw up is typically this. Because he is a professional chef, Ramsay has a much higher tolerance for poorly-made food than most people. As such, any contestant who somehow managed to make him nauseous from eating their meal is a major sign they did an extremely poor job.

Season 1

• The second dinner service had the Red Team getting positive reviews for the appetizers, but they were unable to serve entrées to half of their tables. The entrées took so long to be served that one table resorted to ordering pizza (and by the time the pizza had been delivered and eaten, they still hadn't received their entrée). Naturally, the Red Team lost the service.
• During the third challenge, the teams were assigned to create a five-course dinner to present to Chef Ramsay. On the Blue Team, Ralph came up with a grilled ribeye steak with white peaches. Andrew was the one to present this to Chef Ramsay as the main entrée, and both Andrew and Gordon were quite mystified at this particular choice. Nevertheless, he was quite eager to find out if peaches worked with a ribeye. They didn't, and the dish was easily the worst-received dish from either team in the challenge. It was so poor that Ramsay used it against the Blue Team when the challenge ended in a tie, costing them the challenge.
• The first ever Blind Taste Test had the Red Team win 4-1. Only Andrew was able to score a point for the Blue Team as Jessica and Ralph failed to score a single point and the challenged ended prematurely due to how far the red team was in points. Worse, Ralph lost it for them by mistaking baby spinach for lettuce. The Red Team didn't have it easy either, as Jimmy mistook chicken for, well...
  Jimmy: It tasted like a meat tortellini with a bit of sweated onions in the background.
  Ramsay: (after laughing) That was chicken, you twat.
  Elsie: Tortellini, where the fuck does he get tortellini from?
• In terms of completed services, Season 1 has the lowest ranking of two out of nine (not counting the final dinner service). Granted, this could be excused as most of the contestants were amateur cooks.

Season 2

• The Signature Dish Challenge was rife with so many bizarre and ill-conceived dishes that Gordon complained about feeling sick before the halfway point and almost considered stopping right there. Nevertheless, he pressed on, despite having stomached many hot and overly-spicy dishes that nearly had him calling it quits.
• The opening service had the Red Team not send any appetizers for an hour and a half due to a combination of Polly's struggles on risotto and Sara's incorrect timing when she tried to help. Unsurprisingly, the Red Team lost, and Polly was the first one eliminated.
• Episode 3 had Giacomo struggling to turn the oven on. Ramsay saw this as such a huge blunder that Giacomo was eliminated for it, even though Keith and Garret thought that Tom should've gone home.
• Originally, Ramsay had to assign both a winning and losing team after each service, with only the losing team having to put up nominations (as is usual). Episode 4's dinner service however was such a complete disaster for both teams, with Sara deliberately sabotaging Virginia to make it appear as if she was lying to Ramsay, and Tom not only cooking the wrong order, but also nearly setting the kitchen on fire after burning a duck. The red team running out of Wellingtons finally served as the tipping point, with Ramsay angrily throwing off his apron towards Tom, and declaring BOTH teams as losers, something which would become more frequent in later seasons. Tom's horrendous performance that night would ultimately result in his elimination.
• The menu service in Episode 6 was a big one for the Red Team, as they were 11 tables behind the Blue Team. The reason for this? Virginia and Sara's items were too difficult to cook, despite them saying that they could do it. The Red Team was so far behind that, even when the Blue Team was pulled from service temporarily to finish up their delivery punishment, they still managed to complete their tables far before the Red Team. After the Blue Team finished their service, Sara mouthed off to Ramsay when he suggested simplifying the dishes on the fly, prompting him to call the recently finished Blue Team to help the Red Team (something that has never been done before).
• In Episode 8, Virginia won immunity from a challenge, meaning she was guaranteed a spot in the Final Three. She proceeds to collapse on garnish that night by forgetting timings, burning vegetables, and forcing the kitchen to drag on certain tickets. It led to Ramsay to forcibly revoke her immunity, clearly showing she was not performing to expectations, but somehow she survived elimination when Ramsay offered it back because he was a man of his word.
• Virginia's final performance in the finale is deemed by the fans as the worst finalist performance. To break it down:
  • Virginia had the first pick advantage after winning the final tasting challenge, but while she picked Keith as her first choice (given that he was the strongest male chef of the season), she picked Tom and Giacomo (two of the weakest male chefs of the season) believing she could show everyone she could turn them around. Unfortunately, she ends up making everyone of her brigade mad by calling them weak and is pressured into bribing them into working for the night.
  • Come the actual service, Virginia showed to be too slow plating to Ramsay's liking and refused help from her brigade despite food being backed up. Also, because of the her bluntness earlier, most of the team had little morale to do the service and some even talked back to Virginia when she tried to call out orders. Piling on this failure was that some of the dishes were sent back and Virginia ran out of snapper, forcing her to send out desserts on tables that had no entrées served to them. As a result, Virginia holds the unfortunate distinction of being the only finalist ever who is not able to serve all the entrees to everyone during the finale.
  • Virginia's miserable night proved to be the final nail in the coffin as, despite Ramsay's favoritism, she was too out of her league compared to Heather and lost the finale. Although recently released behind-the-scenes footage has revealed that her performance wasn't quite as terrible as was initially believed, the difference between her performance and Heather's performance was still considerably wide.
• Season 2's dinner services were pretty poor, as none of them were completed until the three before the finale.

Season 3

• The Un-person only known as "J.R.". Apparently, he was such a colossal Jerkass, the producers kicked him off the show even before the Signature Dish Challenge happened and scrubbed all they could to remove his existence from the show.
• Rock's Signature Dish had the dishonor of being the first one to have pre-made food in it (he used frozen gnocchi). It's especially notable when you consider his otherwise mostly impressive run.
• Somehow, during the first service, Aaron overcooked the entire meat supply for the Blue Team. Sous Chef Scott summed up the situation succinctly.
  Sous Chef Scott: We don't have any fucking chicken, we don't have any more Wellingtons, we don't have any fucking lettuce! We haven't served any food! How could we be out of anything?!
• In Episode 3, Jen made the mistake of throwing out the leftover spaghetti just moments before another order for it came in. What did she do? She retrieved the pasta she had just thrown out from the trash, washed it, and boiled it to the point where it would (supposedly) kill the bacteria. Thankfully, Julia stopped her from attempting to redeem trashed food, and she owned up to her mistake later that night, to which Ramsay gave her a warning to "stay away from bins".
  • Joanna's carelessness in the same service proved much more damning than the spaghetti debacle, as she failed to notice that the crab she was using in the appetizers was quite clearly spoiled. Ramsay ripped her a new one for letting this slip, with the only good news being that the spoiled crab hadn't been served to any customers. Unlike Jen, Joanna failed to own up to her mistake and was consequently sent home.
• Episode 4 had the Blind Taste Test, and the Blue Team completely bombed it, as only one person on that team was able to score more than one. The biggest mistake came when Vinnie mistook tuna for pancetta^note An Italian salami. Even worse, this came after Ramsay warned the Blue Team that the challenge would be won by the Red Team if Vinnie screwed up.
• Episode 5 had a challenge where the teams had to present dishes for the menu of a wedding reception. Melissa tried to take over Julia's duck dish (against the wishes of the rest of the Red Team), and when it came time for the results, Melissa angered Ramsay by repeatedly interrupting him and insisting that they would not present their dishes. This culminated in their embarrassing meat dish: sliced duck breast... and nothing else. There were no garnishes or sides to it, not even a sauce. Even worse, the duck wasn't even cooked properly. And the bride and groom were with Ramsay when the dishes were presented. Ramsay really let them have it for that one.
  Ramsay: You four Hell's Bitches. I am embarrassed. I don't think I've ever ever been so embarrassed inside this restaurant in my entire life. That was a joke! You should be ashamed. All four are going to work your asses off. Get. Out. My. Sight.
• Melissa's overall performance didn't improve after the aforementioned duck breast incident. Once she was transferred to the Blue Team (which Ramsay said was her final chance of staying in the game), she ended up tanking so hard in the following service that Gordon sent her packing without even bothering to ask her teammates for who they had nominated. For comparison, Gordon called Brad and Josh's performances inexcusably bad, and yet he ultimately allowed them to stay over Melissa that evening.
• Josh's disastrously misguided performance in the first Black Jacket service. Having been assigned to cook appetizers, Josh came up with the brilliant strategy of cooking all the appetizers before they had been called to order. Ramsay was shocked to find at least a dozen risottos on the stove before any tickets had been received and later returned to find him cooking spaghetti before service. Ramsay had to remind him again to cook the appetizers to order, only to find Josh doing it yet again a short time after. When the service did start, a customer returned a risotto Josh had not cooked all the way through, and Ramsay had to spit it out when he tasted it. This prompted Ramsay to finally snap, ordering Josh to leave and taking back Josh's jacket, making Josh the first contestant to be eliminated mid-service. To add insult to injury, he's the only Black Jacket contestant who was eliminated mid-service.

Season 4

• Three words: Matt's Exotic Tartare.^note Featuring raw venison, raw quail egg, lime zest, olive oil, diver scallops, caviar, and grated white chocolate. And capers. This was the first dish in the series where Ramsay vomited rather than just spitting it out. It provides the image for this page.
  Ramsay: That must be one of the worst combinations I've ever tasted in 21 years of cooking.
• The opening service had neither team complete the service, with the Blue Team failing to serve any appetizers and the Red Team only getting a few tables before an overcooked chicken on their first entrée completely derailed the service. What makes this failure especially bad is the Blue Team failing to serve any dishes before all the diners had walked out - when Jason finally got an acceptable risotto approved for serving, it had been three hours since the appetizer orders had come in, and the table with that order was gone. Ramsay's response was to declare it the worst start ever in Hell's Kitchen history, wake both teams up early the next day and have them bin the wasted food with their bare hands.
• The Red Team's performance in the second dinner service has multiple embarrassing failures:
  • Rosann was an assistant maître d' for her team. Not wanting to overwhelm her teammates, she only gave them a few tickets at a time, which wouldn't be so bad if the Red Team didn't have to wait over 30 minutes for the first order. Worse, this led to one of the tables waiting two hours for food.
  • Sharon's performance on the meat station played a huge role in the Red Team's loss. She did so badly that her team lost despite the Blue Team (which managed to serve half of their entrées) having Jason and Petrozza struggling to work together, which ended up getting Sharon eliminated despite not being nominated.
• Also in the second dinner service, Craig (as the Blue Team's maître d') was asked to collect an extra chair for a customer and unknowingly hit another customer's head with the chair's leg. Horrified, Jean-Philippe immediately ordered Craig to apologize for the mistake, during which Craig made an honest (albeit clumsy) apology to the customer.
• Really, Craig's entire time on the season counts as one, and his thirteen years of experience really didn't translate into Gordon Ramsay's kitchen, where he was often inconsistent and communicated poorly with both Gordon and his teammates. His often poor attitude and Napoleon complex didn't help matters. Then there was his spectacularly failed response to Gordon when after the fourth service he was in the bottom three alongside Matt and Ben; Ben insisted he'd give "a hundred percent every day", and Matt followed that up with a promise of "a hundred and twenty-five percent". Craig's response of "I don't know percentages" left Gordon so irritated that he finally showed him the door.
• Jason and the soufflé incident in Episode 3. No matter what he did, he couldn't get them to rise or keep them from sticking to the baking dish. When pressed by Ramsay, Jason tells him that he's going to try and rub some sugar, butter and cocoa powder around the rim and hope that keeps it from sticking. This leaves Ramsay so speechless that all he can do is bang his head against a table ^note For those who don't know, that's the first thing you're supposed to do when making a soufflé. Unsurprisingly, he was sent home that night.
• This season's Blue Team had one of the worst challenge records of the entire series, winning only two challenges all season, and just barely at that:
  • After squeaking a victory on a tie-breaker in the Episode 2 challenge, the team stumbled spectacularly in the following episode's challenge, which had the chefs each cutting up a chicken into eight separate parts. Craig's chicken only had two parts meeting Ramsay's approval and more unacceptable pieces than every chef on the Red Team combined, single-handedly costing the Blue Team the challenge (the women had only served up four bad pieces as a team). What made it worse was that Craig was a Sous Chef with 13 years experience, and finished the challenge just as Ramsay called time. Needless to say, his teammates were not pleased.
  • In the following episode, Craig again proved The Millstone, slowing the team down heavily in the pasta-making challenge, while Matt seemingly took the requirement for one member of each team to have the pasta hung on their arms as an invitation to effectively sit out the challenge — by contrast, all the women took part in making pasta at first, and they only sidelined Shayna when they absolutely had to start hanging the pasta, by which time it was clear she was the weakest at making it. Again, the woman won the challenge without breaking much of a sweat.
  • After better performances in the next two challenges — the Episode 5 challenge had them losing the pizza challenge mostly just because Jen's pizza was that good, and the Episode 6 had them winning under slightly dubious circumstances when the girl having the Sweet 16 dinner was ready to give victory to the Red Team, but changed it to the Blue Team under pressure from her mother — the Blue Team came crashing down once again in the Blind Taste Test, where Petrozza was only able to identify the "dry-ass chicken" he was fed, while neither Louross nor Bobby were able to identify so much as one piece of food. Ben had better luck identifying ingredients in a clam chowder during the final round, but it proved too little, too late.
  • The Episode 8 challenge was to use 20 ingredients to create four dishes, with the only requirements being that they could only use each ingredient once, and had to use them all. You'd think it'd be possible to them to at least follow those simple rules, right? Wrong — the Blue Team lost by default for not using all the ingredients, after Louross and Jen thought each other had used one of the ingredients.
  • The final team challenge loss was at least a case where both teams did relatively poorly, but the Blue Team was still easily the worse of the two, with their attempt at the Cooking Relay challenge resulting in them serving raw scallops, a John Dory with no sauce (which still scored their only point after the Red Team somehow messed theirs up even worse), and an overcooked chicken that was also lacking its sauce.
• At one point, Bobby tried to cook fish and scallops in the same pan. What makes this especially noteworthy is that, as Ramsay pointed out, Bobby has a shellfish allergy and as such should really know better than to do that.

Season 5

• Colleen's risotto. While her mistaking sugar for salt was the result of some industrial-grade Executive Meddling where the Sous Chefs swapped them on her, Colleen's failure to notice that the pots had been switched means that she failed to taste the risotto even once while making it. This was lampshaded in the opening episode of the following season where she appeared on video with a clip of the aforementioned incident to tell the new contestants to, yes, taste their food before serving it.
• The steakhouse service for the Blue Team was a complete train wreck from start to finish:
  • Ben tried to serve cheesecake and brownies before the appetizers were even served. He claimed that it was because he misunderstood Chef Ramsay's instructions and got mocked for it.
  • Seth's attempt to clean the filet mignon, where he ended up cutting off so much good meat while trying to remove the fat that he stripped it down to the bare bone, with the entire Blue Team looking on in absolute horror at how much meat Seth had wasted. Worse still, it was their last supply of mignon that evening.
  • Giovanni undercooked several steaks, with multiple ones brought back. This wouldn't be so noteworthy if he weren't an executive chef at a steakhouse. Ramsay summed it up best:
  Chef Ramsay: Giovanni, thank fuck I never visited your steakhouse.
• The fourth service ended up being such a train-wreck from start to finish that for the first time ever, Ramsay demanded two nominees from each team. On the red team, Coi inexplicably started cooking appetizers before any tickets came in, most of the appetizers she did serve were over-cooked and under-seasoned, and she even dropped a pan on the floor while bringing it up to the pass, while Colleen had no idea what she was doing on the meat station and got the tickets mixed up. On the blue team, J served a salad with the butt of a lettuce in it, while Ben crashed and burned on the meat station, and Seth finally came unstuck completely, serving up over-cooked scallops, not even knowing what was on order due to his for some reason being more concerned with Giovanni's work on the garnish station, and most damningly, wiping his face with a cloth that he then used to wipe down a pan. Having narrowly escaped elimination twice, Seth was finally sent home this time.
• Most of J's performance in his final service (in which he was eliminated mid-service) falls under this, but the crowning moment had to be when Chef Ramsay discovered that he had overcooked all of the rice for the service's risotto (yes, even the Red Team's supply of rice), leading to the risotto being taken off the menu for that night. Even Ramsay was stunned at how J had managed to screw over both teams in one go.
  • Ben's performance on the meat station was also an unmitigated disaster, and he was considered the worst performer of the service after J. He was nominated alongside Lacey that night (who was put up due to her inability to work with her team despite an otherwise passable performance), and Gordon stated that the only reason neither of them were eliminated was because J had already dragged the service past the point of no return.
• Despite being hated by just about everyone across both teams, Lacey was pretty competent in the kitchen... until her last service, where she repeatedly whined about not being able to cook meat, lost track of her orders, and ended up being eliminated mid-service by Ramsay after serving a thin slice of lamb that was thinner than the bone. And this was only one episode after J's mid-service elimination.
  • Lacey wasn't the only person who had a miserable night on meat though. Carol from the Red Team had a poor performance that started with turning down the ovens and being late on tickets. What's worse, she had lamb orders come back for being raw. That caused a ripple effect to occur for Andrea and LA as they messed up on their stations thanks to Carol. It gets more embarrassing because, due to Lacey's mid service elimination, the Blue Team were down to three chefs and still managed to complete all their orders over the Red Team, despite the latter having five chefs. It was thanks to Carol that the Red Team lost the service, but the only reason she did not go home that night was due to Ramsay eliminating LA for showing no motivation.
• During the king crab challenge, Andrea insisted on preparing her crab dish by leaving most of the meat in the shells. Carol was very critical of Andrea's decision, pointing out that Paula's was far more visually appetizing. Gordon was not at all impressed by Andrea's dish, comparing the crab legs to a pair of earrings and saying no customer would want to struggle through a dish like that. To make matters worse, the crab ended up tasting bland. Gordon was frustrated by this poor start to the challenge, and when he called up Paula's dish it was considered far superior to Andrea's.
• Carol's entire performance during the menu service. Starting with her undercooked potato sides, then her poor decision to pour cream on them in order to save the dish (causing Ramsay to immediately throw them out when he caught her), and culminating in her sending up a raw steak. All of this got her the dishonor of being the first person to be eliminated from the winning team.

Season 6

• The signature dishes were a parade of embarrassment:
  • Amanda's signature dish was a margarita French toast that took about three minutes to make. Ramsay was so shocked that he didn't bother tasting it. To top it off, Amanda tried to get Ramsay to have a shot of tequila in the middle of a judging, claiming it goes with the dish - of course, Ramsay was having none of that.
  • Melinda's Poached Lobster dish barely had any lobster in it, prompting Ramsay to throw the dish out without even tasting it.
  • Louie served a dish that was (according to him) the most popular dish at his diner, to the point that he claimed that the gravy was being sold by gallons every week. After tasting it, Gordon questioned if the "gallons of gravy" were for pigs, because the dish tasted awful.
  • Somehow, both Dave and Joseph served undercooked brussel sprouts with their dishes (an ostrich and a veal chop, respectively) despite both having been cooked perfectly. While Dave at least owned up to his slip, Joseph gave a major lip to Ramsay, which didn't sit well with the chef.
• The disasters continued during the opening service.
  • Lovely cooked all the fondants before they'd even started service (and overcooked them, to boot). The kicker? She was on the appetizer station, not the dessert station.
  • Because of Tek failing at searing scallops, Melinda and Lovely threw away many servings of capellini in the opening service. What caught Ramsay's ire was Melinda throwing away undercooked pasta instead of cooking it more time, and when Ramsay finds almost three pans worth of capellini in the trash and thinks that she's entirely responsible, she doesn't say anything and gives him a "deer-in-the-headlights" look.
    Ramsay: Look at all this fucking... Who's putting all this in the bin? How many portions are you putting in there?? How much is in the bin?! LOOK! LOOK!! What the fuck is this?!! *As a sidenote, this famous latter exclamative wasn't actually uttered by Ramsay during this mishap (it was edited in for dramatic emphasis). It would actually be uttered when Ramsay was observing the Blue Team. (more on that below)
  • Amanda froze the Red Team's entire salmon supply, making it impossible for them to continue with the three salmon entrees they had on order. This caused their first order of Salmon en Croute to turn out raw in the center, with Gordon comparing the improperly-cooked fish to a bison's penis.
  • In the Blue Team, Louie made several mistakes with the lamb chops. He first put the meat in the oven without even searing the rack first, then he started doing the spinach garnish despite Joseph being the one in charge of garnish, and he ended up wasting the blue team's entire lamb supply by having uneven cuts and doing them point blue. The last mistake got him eliminated before the first service even finished.
    Ramsay: Look. At. This! Look! LOOK! LOOK!! What the fuck is this?!! Louie! Fuck off back there! GET OUT! YES, GET FUCKED, PILE OF SHIT! Hey, get upstairs, get your bags packed-
    Louie: Can I help? Can I help at any-
    Ramsay: Yeah, you can help me— GET OUT!
    Louie (confession cam): You want me out? You want me to pack my fucking bags? I'm out; my bags are packed! HE CAN KISS. MY. FUCKING. ASS!
• The second service went so badly that an infuriated Ramsay told everyone to stop cooking and make shrimp cocktails. You know a service has gone south if he has to resort to that.
• The Red Team's performance in the Welcome Back Party is full of idiocy:
  • During the menu challenge, Suzanne didn't pay close attention to the client, who explicitly told her and Robert that her husband loved Soul Food and grilled lobster, made worse by the fact that Suzanne herself asked her about the lobster dish. While Robert told every key detail to the Blue Team and let them suggest alternatives, Suzanne instead forced the Red Team to prepare dishes she wanted to make, to the point where she shut down Tennille's idea of making a Jambalaya sauce (the only Soul Food thing they could have put). As a result, only their shrimp salad was chosen, giving the win to the Blue Team.
  • During service, the Red Team failed to send up a single entree that night thanks to Tek not knowing how the grill worked (the grills in restaurants only mark the steaks, you have to cook them in the oven for the remainder of the time). When Tek finally got an order right, it was quickly hampered by Amanda sending up a raw lobster tail, meaning they couldn't send it up. By that point, an already frustrated Ramsay had enough and called the Blue Team over (minus Kevin, who was working on desserts) to save the service.
• In Episode 6's challenge, Andy managed to blow it for the Blue Team with his dessert in the third and final round. While Amanda (of all people) was able to present a delicious fruit bowl dish with Sabrina's help, Dave was forced to walk up with Andy's egg white crepe topped with yogurt cream, which looked more akin to a Pop Tart. Gordon laughed the moment he saw it and compared the taste to hospital food, and the foul-tasting dish cost them the challenge.
• During the local ingredients challenge, Tennille and Ariel mistake venison for lamb. Sabrina immediately identifies their mistake but refuses to correct them. Even though the venison managed to score two points despite having been prepared as lamb, Tennille embarrasses herself when Gordon immediately recognizes her dish as venison.

Season 7

• Jamie served Ramsay a signature dish that had a toothpick in it. Ramsay was so insulted that he didn't even taste it.
• Salvatore became the second chef to use premade ingredients for his signature dish, this time using premade pasta despite being a native Italian. While Ramsay willingly ate it, he discovered it was undercooked.
• At the start of the season, Ramsay made a public promise to the press that for the first time, both teams would complete the opening night. Come the service, however, both teams had problems that led to nearly half of the 16 chefs thrown out of the kitchen, and Ramsay was forced to merge the remaining chefs into one kitchen just to uphold his promise.
• It's rare that someone earns themselves a mid-service elimination for doing poorly on garnish, but Andrew was awarded this dubious honor after serving poorly cooked mashed potatoes and arguing with Ramsay about it. Gordon sent him out through the front door for his trouble and called him a joke to the industry.

  Jason: "Chef Ramsay is like the Jay-Z of cooking, you don't talk back to a man like that!"

• In the Egg cooking challenge, Ramsay had Siobhan cook the eggs for herself since the Red Team were down a member. However, Autumn butted in and helped her on half of Siobhan's eggs, causing Ramsay to disqualify those eggs. Those lost points ensured the Red Team's defeat.
• Another Red Team loss was in the pork challenge. Nilka and Fran's dish was an unappetizing Blood Sausage and Prune Puree dish that Ramsay called a disaster, and Scott and Maria made a sweet potato soup with ham hock garnish when the pork was supposed to be the main dish.
• The Barbecue service that night didn't go much better for the Red Team. Maria tanked on garnish (generally considered one of the easier stations) while Scott sank on fried chicken of all things. Scott also left the oven door open while cooking, creating a huge safety hazard and Siobhan kept getting burgers sent back raw. The Red Team also spent half their time in the kitchen arguing, at one point even drowning out a very frustrated Chef Ramsay. When they switched with the Blue Team to front of the house, they managed to screw up taking orders. Maria in particular stood out for repeatedly bringing back wrong orders and taking orders at tables that had already ordered and weren't even in her section. This almost certainly solidified her elimination that night. Maria did a worse job at taking orders than Salvatore, who didn't finish secondary school and learned English as a second language.
• In the "mother sauces" challenge, Siobhan proudly presented and gave a little speech about her Cornish hen dish. When she was done giving her speech, Ramsay stared blankly at her for a few seconds before saying "that's a pigeon". On top of that, the pigeon was massively undercooked and dripping with blood, easily cementing it as the worst dish in the challenge.
• In the Blind Taste Test, Jay was the only chef to score higher than 1 point, and the two teams ended up with a combined total of just 7 correct guesses out of 32.
• Nilka seemed to be a clear frontrunner for much of the competition until episode 10, the last service before black jackets. She had one of the worst ever performances on the fish station, it was so bad that Ramsay eliminated her mid-service despite her never having been up for elimination (The only time she was nominated, Ramsay voided her nomination because other members of the Red Team had performed far worse). She particularly stood out as she sank on a night that was otherwise considered by Gordon to be the best service of the season.

Season 8

• Antonia's signature dish provoked another literal regurgitation from Ramsay, but this time he decided to share the pain by getting the other contestants to taste it. They didn't like it any more than he did, with Vinny and Nona also coming close to throwing up, and Ramsay used it as the tiebreaker against the Red Team.
• Raj's signature dish, a seafood and vegetable "pancake", had such a horrific presentation that Ramsay could not make out anything on the plate when the dome came off. Even though the dish tasted good, the Blue Team still lost the point due to its presentation.
• By Season 8, it was well-established that opening nights were usually poor at best, and both teams would fail to complete their tables before Ramsay shut down the restaurant. However, this season's takes the cake, as neither team could get entrees out within two hours (the Blue Team didn't even get a single order of appetizers out in one and a half hours), and an infuriated Ramsay closed the restaurant after all the customers left in anger, deeming it the worst start to a season. As the kicker, the Blue Team's second service barely improved, with the whole team getting kicked out after only managing to serve a small handful of appetizers (in stark contrast, the Red Team got it together once Melissa was moved away from the garnish station and completed the service near-flawlessly).
• The second team challenge had both teams make a plate of sushi rolls. While some pairs struggled, Melissa and Gail failed to get a single piece accepted and had a whopping zero.
• Raj did an awful job in both of the first two episodes of the season, but wasn't the reason why the Blue Team lost those services. As for the third episode, well...
  • During the team challenge, he couldn't get out a single acceptable serving of scrambled egg, failing to add any seasoning and then trying to tell Ramsay that it was seasoned properly. He then left the kitchen and stuck his head in a refrigerator to cool down when he felt stressed, causing Ramsay to have to drag him back into the kitchen. This caused the Blue Team to fail to successfully serve a single table, and the Red Team had to take over their tables.
  • In the actual service, he described himself as an "excellent Poissonnier" (fish cook), and then proceeded to boil the salmon in stock rather than grilling it. Gordon spat the stock out and emptied the pan onto Raj's station for his trouble. Raj then served up another attempt (grilled this time) which was raw, causing Ramsay to angrily smash it. Despite the splattered chunks of salmon attesting to its raw status, Raj tried to argue it wasn't raw and only stopped when his teammates forced him to shut him up.
  • After Boris served raw meat (forcing the whole table to be restarted), Raj decided to eat the fish he had cooked rather than throw it away, despite Boris pleading with him not to.
  • The real kicker came when it was revealed that Raj had used the Blue Team's entire supply of Dover Sole just to serve a few tables. An understandably furious Ramsay ordered Raj to go and apologize to the affected diners and get replacement orders, but Raj refused to do so on the grounds that his jacket was dirty. He then tried pleading his case to Sous Chef Scott, who reacted as kindly as you'd expect and forced him out of the kitchen.
  • The end result of all this was Raj being kicked off despite the fact that the Blue Team actually won the service, and both Emily and Melissa on the Red Team having both done horribly for the second week in a row. And the other men thanked Gordon for getting rid of him.
• Melissa managed to completely destroy the Red Team's supply of steak by cooking it too early (and overcooking them as well), but avoided being eliminated that episode because she was put up alongside Emily, who was also awful and was having her passion questioned by Ramsay! The following episode she was shuffled over to the Blue Team and managed to destroy their entire supply of scallops in a similar fashion, only this time, she didn't survive elimination.
• Emily's appeal to stay in the game on her elimination night definitely left a lot to be desired. With Sabrina having won invincibility that night, it came down to her and Melissa (this was the same night that Melissa had destroyed the team's entire supply of steak), and by this point Gordon and the rest of the Red Team were openly questioning both Emily's skill and passion. Emily insisted the passion was real but she wasn't good at showing it, saying she "wasn't an emotionally extroverted person". Gordon was not at all moved by her excuse, and he ultimately called upon Nona to tell him who she thought needed to go home. Nona picked Emily, who she agreed simply did not have the passion to succeed and said it was in over her head. Gordon agreed and she was promptly eliminated.
• Trev's performance on the garnish station during the 100th service of the series was certainly this, and he struggled to get anything out on time which forced the entire Red Team to come to his aid. And even with their help he still couldn't get the garnish out, eventually prompting Gordon to eject him from the kitchen. He was only allowed to return for the final table, which was already being served by the time he came back to help out. Gordon singled him out as the biggest failure on the Red Team (which otherwise had a commendable service), and Gordon ordered him back to the Blue Team, warning him that it was his last chance to get his act together.
• Vinny frequently made bad decisions that jeopardized his place in the game. During the second service when he was the Blue Team's maître d', he tried to convince the customers not to order sides as he was convinced Raj would not be able to get them prepared in time. As soon as Ramsay found out about this, he ripped into Vinny hard for it and kicked him out of service (making this one of the few times where Raj was not to blame for the holdups in the dining room). And that's to say nothing of how Vinny thought he could get away with serving an old risotto to Gordon's wife and children in a later service. Once again, he ripped Vinny a new one for daring to serve anyone (let alone his own family) a dish that was no longer fresh. The rest of the Blue Team was appropriately shocked that he had managed to screw up that bad.
• The first black jacket service was at the time, one of the worst the show had. Aside from Nona, who was on tableside, everyone made mistakes that ended up being a painful experience for Ramsay to bear. Sabrina and Trev had problems getting appetizers out and kept butting heads, Gail served an overcooked halibut that was stuck to the pan, and even the normally consistent Jillian and Russell made mistakes that led Ramsay to kick the entire team out of the kitchen.
• Russell is considered to have had the worst final service of any finalist, mainly for attempting to send out two tables at once (which Ramsay told him point blank that it wasn't behavior exhibited by chefs at LA Market) and nearly got into blows with Rob, in addition to having a piss-poor selection of chefs for his brigade that didn't like him for being a massive Jerkass throughout the season and made no secret of it, such as the aforementioned Rob and Vinny. As a result, despite his talent for cooking, he ended up losing to the less experienced Nona, who was able to command her brigade much better than he did and showcase that she would be a much better leader and less of a liability in the kitchen than he was, coupled with his Sore Loser moment after losing pretty much ensuring that he'd be remembered as one of the most disliked finalists in Hell's Kitchen.

Season 9

• Jonathon's signature dish, aka the Punch Drunk Chicken. Already a terrible-looking dish, Jonathon made the critical mistake of topping the chicken with pineapples that Ramsay could immediately tell were canned. Jonathon tried to defend the move by saying he had "limited time" to prepare his dish, but Gordon however wasn't having it and was so put off by the dish he threatened to eliminate him on the spot. Jonathon quickly turned down Gordon's "offer" to leave and went no further, and Gordon didn't bother to taste the dish.
• The first dinner service saw the Blue Team unable to get the sides out due to Steven's struggles on the station. Worse still, he and several of the other chefs were forced to eat their subpar food before they could return to work in the kitchen, and the sides still failed to come out, forcing Jonathon to throw out several perfectly cooked wellingtons as they were no longer fresh. Unsurprisingly, Steven was sent home that night.
• The family night service for the Red Team. They couldn't get any entrees out thanks to Carrie making multiple serious mistakes, such as cooking the wrong items for the first ticket and serving raw lamb. Ramsay was so upset by this that he had the entire Red Team go to each table and apologize to all the customers before kicking the team out.
• In Episode 5, the Fire and Water Challenge ended in a 2 point tie, but Ramsay named the Red Team the losers due to two major mistakes:
  • Because the Red Team had an extra person, both Elizabeth and Carrie cooked a prawn dish, and the Red Team decided to sit out Carrie's dish (with Elise being the most vocal of the women). Elizabeth's dish was underwhelming, and Carrie's dish was considered ten times better by the judges when they merely looked at it. To add insult to injury, Ramsay deemed Carrie's dish the best one of the day.
  • Krupa worked with what she thought was veal, but Ramsay quickly noticed during judging that she used filet mignon instead of the required protein. Ramsay was less upset over her mistake and more upset that, in the 45 minutes of cooking, none of the Red Team noticed that she wasn't using veal (while Elizabeth noticed that the veal wasn't being used, she assumed it was a spare side after Krupa stated that she was using veal).
• The High School Reunion challenge. Due to Elizabeth's leadership, the Red Team seemed to miss every single cue from the committee tasting the dishes: they made Asian dishes instead of Hawaiian and added bacon to a seafood dish after specifically being told that one of the guests was a pescatarian. As a result, the Blue Team won the challenge in a rare landslide victory. Ironically, the subsequent service ended up being the complete opposite, with the Red Team's service flying by with almost no hitches once Elise stepped up and took control of the appetizer station, while the Blue Team crashed and burned and got ejected after serving almost no entrees.
• Episode 8's challenge (co-judged by Chef Ramsay and Wolfgang Puck) had only 3 of the 10 dishes worthy of a point (Jamie, Natalie, and Jennifer), but the pizza battle was by far the worst: Carrie's pizza was quite clearly raw, while Jonathon's pizza was filled with vinegar and angered the judges so much they refused to eat it.
• Krupa's performance in the finale, which resulted in Will's loss. She failed fish after fish and was blatantly not caring, and when she was replaced, everything had to be started from scratch.

Season 10

• During the signature dish challenge, Guy messed up so badly on his dish that he warned Ramsay not to taste it. Ramsay did so anyway, and said it tasted like a "fish sundae."
• The Blue Team managed to serve zero dishes in the opening service, partially due to Tavon completely butchering the Blue Team's supply of scallops (resulting in him being the first chef eliminated that season). Neither team managed to send one entree through two episodes.
  • After the first service, the Blue Team nominated both Tavon and, to Gordon's surprise, Don (who had been prevented from cooking through much of the service). Gordon overruled their nomination of Don and instead called Royce alongside Tavon. While Gordon has been irritated with nominations before, this was one of the few moments in Hell's Kitchen where he called complete bullshit on a nominee.
  • Tavon's one episode in general was this. Despite being an executive chef at 22, he was no Antonia Lofaso ^note Who also became an executive chef at 22, yet is successful enough to have several appearances on Food Network. His signature dish had so much vinegar that Chef Ramsay was left to call it "rank" and "really bad," he shredded his team's entire supply of scallops to the point of unusability, and he laughed when Chef Ramsay called him out on it.
• During the Scallops challenge, the teams had to get six acceptable servings of scallops in order to win and it was a complete blow out in the women's favor, already having five successful plates by the time the men got their first, ultimately winning 6-2.
• In the Episode 8's challenge, Royce served a dish that had a large piece of hair in it and what could accurately be described as a "shit" sack. Bad enough, but the dish was being served to Michelin Star chefs. Needless to say, it was one of the leading causes behind the Blue Team's loss.
• In Episode 9, the chefs had to cook steak dishes using ingredients they received from a slot machine. Out of all the dishes, Robyn's ribeye was the worst received as it was overcooked and the coffee and flour rub tasted disgusting. Even worse, had the Red Team used Kimmie's dish instead (due to the fact the Red Team had an extra chef, they had to drop a dish for equal sidings), they would have beaten out Clemenza, as Ramsay felt her dish was miles better than Robyn's.
  • In the same challenge, Dana and Patrick's flat iron dishes were atrocious. Despite receiving ingredients that were very common in a steakhouse restaurant (potatoes, mushrooms, blue cheese), they still failed to make note-worthy dishes with Dana's dish having too much liquid and being overcooked, while Patrick's dish was overly salty.
• The Southern Cuisine night service can fall into this. Kimmie struggled a lot on catfish despite it being part of her speciality. It got so bad that Ramsay had enough and ejected the entire red team. The blue team fared no better. Ramsay threw out Brian after his mishaps on fish and making a joke of the returned dish tasting like fish. Though he avoids leaving through the front door thanks to James, the blue team ends up getting thrown out after Robyn sends up raw chicken twice. This leads to Ramsay getting sous chef Scott to bring the teams down just to tell them how that he, Scott and Andi will finish the service while getting them to nominate one person from each team for elimination.
• In Episode 15, the remaining chefs did so badly at the day's challenge that Ramsay awarded a total of zero points for both teams. For the first time in the series, both teams were made to do punishment and the reward of a helicopter trip for a day at the beach (including a beach club rented for the afternoon) went out the window. Doesn't help that the classic convertible meant to take the winning team to the reward was parked out front, where the chefs had to clean the show's SUVs. Dana describes the situation the best:
  Dana: (Confession Cam) Hell's Kitchen, Season 10, making history. Only making history because we suck!

Season 11

• During the signature dish challenge, Susan served up a plate of lamb chops that Gordon immediately saw were raw, a mistake that he threatened to eliminate her for on the spot, accusing her of trying to kill him. Worse still, the bed of couscous it was on was overcooked.
  • Sebastian's dish wasn't much better, having served up a plate of salmon and shrimp corn dogs. He was so fearful of Ramsay's reaction that he tried to scurry off the stage! Fittingly enough, Gordon was not impressed with the idea.
• In the first dinner service, Gordon kicked out 12 of the chefs, including all but two members of the blue team, for various reasons. These range from simple (Jeremy was kicked out for being unable to repeat an order) to just plain stupid (Sebastian was kicked out for using nicknames, not helped by the fact that he tried to return to service twice after being kicked out).
• Former NBA star Jalen Rose is out to dinner with a girl, and Nedra is serving lobster. JP explains who he is and why this table is so important. Nedra's response?
  Nedra: And which one is that one? The guy in the suit?
• Ramsay dragged one contestant per team on the 3K run with him, skinny Dan and slightly chubby Mary (who didn't volunteer), and wouldn't let the teams start until their respective runner got back; Dan got back well before Mary, but the red team still finished first due to Zack's mishandling of the salmon.
• The men lost the protein taste challenge due to the women beating their ten-minute, thirty-three-second time with almost four minutes to spare. Not even Jessica and Nedra’s problem with identifying duck could help the men win.
• Jeremy served a cold sample during the breakfast challenge, which infuriated Ramsay and ensured that he would be eliminated despite being on the winning team.
• Jacqueline serving up pink chicken. Never mind the fact that it could have killed someone, its something that even basic chefs know not to do and even Gordon said he should have eliminated her mid service. The only reason why she was spared was Jessica's worsening performances.
• Ray and Dan's disastrous performance on the fish station in Episode 6 definitely counts, as they repeatedly sent up undercooked scallops and halibut throughout the evening, which meant that their tables couldn't be completed even when the meat station kept sending up perfectly cooked entrees. It got so bad that not only did Gordon order them all out, but Sous Chef James personally went up to the dorms to rip the Blue Team a new one for their display, laying the undercooked halibut out for them all to see.
  • Even worse, the Red Team was also kicked out immediately thereafter due to Mary and Nedra's poor performance on the meat station. That night, Gordon called Mary, Nedra, Dan, and Raymond forward, and told all four of them that they would have to work for their jackets in the next service and anyone who didn't would be kicked out. Fortunately, in the following episode, the four chefs responsible for the aforementioned service finally pulled together, sparing them from elimination.
• The family night service in the eighth episode had a few of these:
  • In the middle of serving the appetizers, Ray served a stone-cold cheeseburger to Ramsay's son. You can probably guess what happens next.
  Ramsay: At this stage in the game, I don't expect an "I'm sorry!" (Beat) It's not good enough, it's fucked!
  • The red team finished several tables before the blue team, after which Ramsay ordered them to help the men out. And that's when Barrett served raw chicken to Sous Chef James' wife, who was pregnant.
  Jon: Raw fish, people could survive, and with undercooked meat, cook it a little more, it's not going to fucking kill you. But raw chicken will fucking kill you.
• While past contestants have done poorly during the Blind Taste Test, Anthony beat them all by scoring 0 of 4, ensuring the blue team's losing streak continues. Ramsay cited him as the first contestant ever in the show's history to not get a single point in the challenge.^note Which isn't actually true, as numerous contestants before him had zeroes.
• While the Blue Team was a disaster in challenges all season, the International Cuisine challenge particularly stands out as an embarrassing failure. Jon was the only one on the Blue Team to score a point. Nedra cooked a calamari dish despite being assigned Thai food, Anthony did an otherwise decent Greek lamb dish that was tanked by an ill-advised plum garnish and Zach cooked a ghastly looking chicken and noodle dish which looked like something out of a mall Chinese takeout place for a Japanese dish challenge. The cherry on top is that Zach put a random herb leaf on top of the dish despite not knowing what it was and repeatedly mispronounced "Bok Choi" and "Soy Sauce" to the mockery of his teammates.
• The Episode 11 challenge was another embarrassing defeat for the Blue Team. Jon had the highest scoring dish but the rest of the team once again lost the challenge with low scores, meaning that a lower scoring dish from the Red Team got the reward of being featured in People Magazine. Jon was not amused.
• Episode 14 has contestants participating in an immunity challenge where they can cook anything in 45 minutes. Susan wanted to redeem herself by making a lamb dish... which ended up being raw, again.
• The red team's winning streak ended in the worst way possible in episode 16. None of their dishes scored a point, resulting in the blue team winning 2-0. A disappointed Ramsay even openly wondered if this loss had anything to do with Ja'Nel leaving the team (as she moved to the blue team to even the numbers).
• Episode 20 had the final four chefs take a turn running the pass, and when it came time for Jon to take the reigns, his leadership skills could be best described as "awful." For context, Jon was seen as the only chef in this season's Blue Team who was even remotely great when it came to cooking. But once his leadership skills were put to the test when he began running the pass, it was all downhill from there, as Jon failed to notice an error with the ticket he was given, could not get the team to work in sync due to his lack of vocalness, and mistook butterfish for scallops in his quality control test. Come the next episode and it's revealed that all of these slip-ups ended up costing Jon a spot in the final two. It goes to show that no matter how good of a run you have in Hell's Kitchen, one bad performance on the hot plate can be the death of you, and for many fans who wanted to see Jon win the competition, this was really hard to watch.

Season 12

• The first service of the season was deemed the worst one of the series to date, as no dishes left either kitchen!! The final straw for both teams was overcooked scallops, resulting in team wide ejections. The second service also had no dishes leave either kitchen.
• During the signature dish challenge, Mike served canned tomatoes and packaged tortellini. Chef Ramsay threw that one out before he tasted it. The blue team lost, and Mike decided to sit out the team's punishment, ensuring that the rest of the team would dislike him.
• Gaurav's short time on the show was definitely this. His signature dish, a tuna steak, was considered abysmal when Gordon tasted it. Following that failure was Gaurav's lack of sanitary care in the kitchen, tasting the food with his finger and then sticking it back in. Naturally, this did not go unnoticed by Ramsay, and the entire night he made excuses saying "Everybody does it!" Unsurprisingly, this embarrassing mistake got him sent home, with Gordon saying he had nowhere left to go with Gaurav.
• None of the teams were able to complete the first three services, and both teams were kicked out in those services. It got so bad in the third episode that Ramsay ordered both teams to nominate three people from each team (instead of the usual two).
• DeMarco had five consecutive nominations before being thrown out in Episode 5, a record that would only be tied by Season 14's Josh.
• In Episode 7, pizza was the main theme for both the challenge and dinner service, but both scenarios had moments of failure;
  • In the challenge, the chefs had to make gourmet pizzas, but Ramsay and guest judge Wolfgang Puck would be tasting only three of the four from each team. Melanie decided to drop Kashia and Bev's dish for looking burnt, but that decision ended up costing the women the challenge. Joy and Jessica's skinny girl pizza (named due to them being forced to make a smaller pizza after Joy dropped their initial pizza to the ground) angered Ramsay and Puck, while Melanie and Sandra's parmesan crispy prosciutto flatbread pizza still had a raw dough. To make matters worse, Kashia and Bev's pizza was deemed the best of the women and, had it been used, would have scored them 7 points.
  • In the service, both teams struggled on making pizzas and were forced to toss pizzas into the trash, with Ramsay forcing the teams to pull out the rejects from the trash after service ended. The only reason the women got out of a joint loss was due to the men struggling everywhere else that night.
• In Episode 14, the chefs participated in the Blind Taste Test, and after Rochelle got the Blue Team off to a solid start when she correctly identified three out of four ingredients while Gabriel also got one right, both Jason and Melanie failed to identify all of theirs, and Ramsay singled them out for costing their team the challenge.
• In Episode 15, the final seven were in an individual challenge for a black jacket, and had their dishes judged by past contestants (Season 3 winner Rock, Season 9 winner Paul, and Season 10 contestant Dana). Gabriel made lamb chops, but the judges noticed how small and overcooked the lamb was. While this isn't a terrible failure, the fact that the half that he did not plate was cooked perfectly absolutely counts, as it angered Ramsay to the point that he gave Gabriel zero points.
  • Another dishonor went to Melanie's lamb dish, as she made a big error by adding flour to her mashed potatoes in order to thicken them. The result? Gluey-tasting potatoes and an inedible puree.
• The night before the black jackets had Gabriel serve three different temperatures of fish, none of which were correct. This led to him becoming the first contestant to be kicked out through the front door.
• During the finale, Jessica had a horrible performance on garnish which included her messing up french fries of all things! Scott became so frustrated with her performance that he threw her out of service without any prompting from Ramsay.
• On Jason's side of the finale, Sandra had an arguably equally terrible performance on garnish with Melanie openly wondering why Jason didn't kick her out and Jason asking her point blank: "What is going on with the garnish here? This is not that hard!". It's often said among fans that Sandra's atrocious performance on garnish combined with Jason's hesitance to kick her off the station may have cost him the competition.

Season 13

• During the signature dish challenge, JP served up a New England-style haddock dish which certainly sounded appetizing. However, Gordon pointed out that he had finished the dish with twenty minutes to spare, which meant that he had to re-fry the dish so that it would be hot when served, resulting in the fish being dry. Gordon was so offended by this that he threatened to cut JP from the competition right there, finding the entire preparation to be ill-advised, ill-managed, and lacking in basic cooking sense. JP quickly apologized for the fumble.
• La Tasha's signature dish was also this, as it consisted of a grilled hickory-smoked watermelon. Gordon and the audience were aghast at the dish, and despite her confidence Gordon still found the dish to be underwhelming in its concept and flavor. Luckily, this was La Tasha's only major fumble in the competition, as she was quickly proven to be a major asset in the kitchen.
• The opening night service by the blue team. They struggled through the appetizers because of poor communication between the fish station (JP and JR) and the hot appetizers (Aaron). After Fernando took control of the risottos, the blue team managed to complete the first table in nearly an hour. However, they were kicked out of the kitchen after mishaps with the halibut from JP, JR, and Fernando, the latter of whom got the whole kitchen kicked out. This was in stark contrast to the red team, who had a near-flawless service.
• In the second service, Janai overcooked a risotto by 10 minutes and, when asked to explain herself later that night, said "That's all it was". Naturally, she went home in the same episode.
  Ramsay: That's all it was, did you just say?
  Janai: Yes chef.
  Ramsay: (bewildered) Where is your mind?!
• Roe single handedly cost the red team Episode 6's challenge with a poorly made pork dish. Before then, they were in the lead, but Roe got the lowest score of both teams in the challenge (4 out of a possible 15). While her dish initially received praise for its simple and appealing presentation, the judges found its components to be completely lacking in flavor and underwhelming in combination. Even worse, they chose Roe's dish over Jennifer's pork dish, which was considered to be miles ahead of Roe's dish - had they chosen Jennifer's, they would have been guaranteed a win.
• In Episode 8, the chefs were making dishes for the people in charge of a dog show. Sade thought that they were making food for the dogs and ended up making dog food. Even worse, none of her teammates on the blue team either knew of her mistake or bothered to correct her. Fortunately for Sade, the blue team had an extra member, making her dish not have to be judged.
• In Episode 9, Frank's abysmal fish performance easily counts. He single handedly cost the Red team a victory, and Ramsay eliminated him without any nomination ceremony.
• The red team's performance during the amuse-bouche challenge certainly borders on this. After a very strong showing from La Tasha, Roe presented a seared ahi tuna dish, which got a measly 4 out of 10 from Gordon and the guest judge due to being too salty. Naturally, Jennifer mocked her for the fumble, only for her plate to consist of grilled prawn heads with a dabble of coconut milk in the broth. Everyone was thoroughly baffled at why Jennifer thought serving the heads was a good idea, and while the two judges commended her for the risk she took, they still found the coconut milk too strong and the presentation offputting. Jennifer ended up earning a mere 5 out of 10, for which Roe mocked her. The red team was easily beaten by the blue team, all of whom scored 7 or higher with their dishes.
• Frank's entire performance in the final service. Bryant tried to make his menu easy enough so Frank wouldn't screw up as he did in the last one, but Frank still managed to slow down the kitchen with his terrible performance on appetizers and garnishes, forcing Bryant to kick him out of the kitchen.

Season 14

• The Signature Dish Challenge this season was one of the best as the majority of the chefs scored in the three to four range and featured the first two perfect fives in the series. However, the red team still lost due to three low ones.
  • Mieka's dish was a shrimp cake with asparagus and peach salsa that Ramsay deemed bad all the way through.
  • Chrissa had the brilliant idea of crusting her chicken with ginger cookies. Ramsay was so baffled by this and its poor presentation that he laughed his ass off before even tasting it. Unsurprisingly, he quickly spat it out.
  • Monique's pasta dish definitely counts, as the Red Team depended on her dish to overcome Bret's to secure victory for their side. When Ramsay inquired on how she prepared the marinara sauce, she casually admitted that it was from a jar. Gordon quickly spat it out and chastised her for this lazy move, to which she had the audacity to say he should've told her that he only wanted fresh ingredients. Not only did this cost them the challenge, but the others were quick to call her out on her ignorance after the fact.
• The Red Team's opening night was derailed by Monique and Christine's poor performance on meat. They kept serving raw meat throughout the service. But that was largely because they were cooking with the oven off. Even with Meghan noticing and trying to get the service back on track, it led to most of the team trying to cook meat. They still manage to serve raw pork, prompting a fed up Ramsay to boot the team out.
• The third service was this in Ramsay's eyes.
  • The red team had Mieka doing so poorly on the appetizers that the red team was kicked out before they could even start on the entrees.
  • Despite being able to serve entrees, the blue team didn't perform much better than the red team. Michael ended up heating up a pan to the point where it was smoking hot, and then attempted to put it on top of the colder pans under the fish station (Ramsay quickly stopped him and scolded him for this, as it could have resulted in Bret or Josh getting third-degree burns), and one of Adam's scallop salads had plastic in it and was only spotted by the customers. However, what got the team kicked out of the kitchen was Nick sending up raw meat three times (twice with pork, once with lamb - the latter of which was noticeably full of blood).
  • The service was so bad overall that Ramsay actually went up to the dorms (which he never did in the series before this point) to tell both teams that they lost.
  Ramsay: In fourteen seasons of Hell's Kitchen, I have never set foot in these fucking dorms.
• Monique's performance in episode 5 absolutely counts. During the challenge portion, the chefs are instructed to make gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches. Monique's dish was a grilled cheese that you'd see at a particularly cheap roadside diner, only with a tomato on top. As for the service, she got eliminated because she served a poorly made garnish three times in a row.
• Episode 7 featured the red team collapsing on entrees thanks in part to Sarah on meat (who sent up raw wellingtons, overcooked lamb, and burnt chicken) and Christine on garnishes (who served raw and then burnt eggplant and severely over-seasoned lentils). As a result, the team was eight tables behind the blue team, and a fuming Ramsay ejected the red team for the fifth time that season.
• In the ninth episode, during the exotic meats challenge, the two teams struggled to produce a series of dishes to impress Gordon and the judges, but the win ultimately went to the blue team. Ramsay and his two guests then asked Michelle to present her dish, which was passed over by the rest of the red team. Her Asian-inspired alligator curry with coconut rice was not only considered to be the most visually appealing dish of the lineup, but the judges said that they'd have given it a fifteen out of fifteen if it had been selected.
  T: This is just great. We're probably gonna be hearing about this for the duration of the fucking competition.
• During the Mardi Gras Homecoming service, Josh sent up a risotto with white wine in it. This doesn't sound too bad until you remember that they were serving high school-aged patrons that night.

Season 15

• Kevin's signature dish was a Caesar Salad on top of pizza. Not only was Ramsay not impressed by it, but Kevin made it even worse when he revealed that he used two pre-made ingredients to make the dish. He almost got eliminated on the spot because of it.
• The blue team struggled so much on opening night. Although they got the first appetisers out quickly enough, they failed to send anything else out for the rest of the service. Alan and Kevin had problems on fish while Mark failed to get any of his dishes right. Most notable was him burning a pizza and never recovering from it. Even Eddie and Jared leaving tableside to help the kitchen didn't improve matters. Still unable to send anything out, Ramsay threw the whole team out after customers start leaving the restaurant.
• In the dumpling challenge, the Hassan-Frank pair got zero points because they had all their dumplings incorrectly plucked (they looked closer to pierogies). This ensured the blue team's loss.
• In Episode 3, the red team's communication challenge loss in Season 15 was downright embarrassing. While they did lose just 5-3, they made multiple mistakes: Kristen's spanakopita dish looked awful thanks to Meese's mistake on the recipe, Manda made a burrito instead of taquitos due to Danni's miscommunication, and Jackie's Eggplant Parmesan was undercooked and looked unappetizing. Plus, the challenge ended prematurely because the blue team was in a lead so big, it was almost impossible for the red team to catch up.
• Kevin struggled on scallops so badly in episode 6, that Chef Ramsay personally showed him how to cook them, and then screwed them up again. He got eliminated right then and there.
• In the Wedding Challenge, Frank had so little faith in Manda's skills that he decided to cook an extra dish to replace Manda's (without anyone's permission). Both of his dishes were awful, and he almost cost the blue team the win.
• In Episode 8, the ingredient number challenge saw the red team win 3-1, as the blue team's loss was due to Frank, Joe, and Chad's dishes failing to meet the mark.
  • Frank's hanger steak was not properly cooked, and his decision to space out his potatoes on the plate actually made Ramsay laugh about it.
  • Joe's lobster salad had little to no lobster due to him tasting his dish a lot during the cooking, prompting Ramsay to remind him that it was not an eating challenge.
  • And finally, Chad's black garlic tuna ruined any chance of the blue team bouncing back, as his decision to cover the entire protein in black garlic (which Jared warned him not to do earlier) ruined the taste of the tuna.
• The blue team's performance in the Blind taste Test counts here due to the poor performances by Dannie and Frank that had them lose 3-8. Special mention goes to Frank for guessing Snickers.

Season 16

• During the signature dish challenge, Kimberly made the rookie mistake of including canned clams in her pappardelle pasta. The pasta wasn't handmade, either. While Gordon was still willing to eat it, he called the overstuffed dish a disaster for its poor execution. Johnny summed it up the best after Ramsay's verdict:
  Johnny: You cannot make the words "canned clams" sound good, ever.
• Heidi failed to score a point for her team in the Southern dish head-to-head challenge. Doesn't sound especially bad until you remember that her opponent for the challenge, Koop, literally served nothing (as he cut himself while slicing celery and was unable to finish the dish).
• The blue team was kicked out of service seven times in the first ten episodes (the original record was five times, which was tied with Season 10's Blue Team and Season 14's Red Team) because they couldn't work together properly and made too many basic mistakes. By the sixth time, you can tell that Ramsay was exasperated by the constant kick-outs.
  • One particularly notable service is Episode 8, where the blue team is ten tables behind the red team before being booted, leading to an unsurprising loss.
• While the first black jacket service always seems to go rough, Season 16 takes it to a whole other level when they didn't get any entrees out, forcing Ramsay to kick them out and (reluctantly) pull his sous chefs from their night off. No wonder it's referred to as the "Worst Black Jacket Service Ever" by fans.

Season 17 (All Stars)

• The Red team in the signature dish challenge held a respectable lead over the Blue Team for most of the time, and it almost looked like they would win. Then Robyn's Salmon dish received a 1 out of 5, which singlehandedly cost them the challenge. Even Ramsay noted that they almost had it.
• The red team didn't have the best start of the season, as they lost two challenges in a row (the second one being worse because they had a thirty-second head start thanks to Michelle winning the pre-challenge) and got ejected from the first two dinner services. When they had their second elimination ceremony, Ramsay lampshaded their poor start.
  Ramsay: Ladies, two dinner services and two challenges, you are 0:4. Hold on there, you did actually win a cup-stacking challenge. Big fucking deal. (To the Blue team) Give them a round of applause.
• The red team's service in Episode 8. They started off slow with Elise's attempt to prepare the cold starters, but then things got worse when Manda could not remember a pork order, causing them to fall ten minutes behind, and then Barbie kept sending up raw meat. It eventually led Ramsay to kick the red team out of service and deem it their worst one so far.
• If Episode 8 was bad for the red team, then Episode 10 took it up a notch:
  • First off, the Blind Taste Challenge had the blue team crush them in an 8-2 Curb-Stomp Battle with Barbie getting the only points for her team. Understandably, Michelle called it the lowest point for the red team. In fact, the challenge ended so early, Michelle didn't even get to go!
  • Then came the charity service. They were doing fine in the first two appetizer rounds, but once it got to the entree dishes (which Elise and Barbie were in charge of), it devolved into chaos: shouting, screaming, lying, burnt food, you name it. By the end of it all, a very weary Ramsay called their performance the "worst charity night performance ever".
• Dana, who was one of the most consistently good chefs of the red team, single handedly sunk her team on her disastrous performance on meat. This included scorching her initial Wellingtons and the sending out Wellingtons to the pass that were either raw or overcooked. It was so bad, Ramsay eliminated her over Elise in Dana's first time being nominated.
• In the second Black Jacket challenge, Elise served Ramsay lobster that still had the digestive tract in it. Ramsay understandably refused to even taste the dish, and it destroyed any chance she had at winning.
• Robyn's pathetic performance on the meat station during the final service, including one point where she put a lamb on a pan that was just used for a beef entree. What makes this worse is that she was kicked out by Ramsay instead of Benjamin, who saw her performance far away from their stations. Her performance completely destroyed any chance of Benjamin winning.

Season 18 (Rookies Vs. Veterans)

• After spending the first two episodes acting overly cocky, the rookies got a heaping dose of reality during the opening night's dinner service. Their blunders included raw proteins, Chris writing ticket times down instead of helping Mia, and Scott cooking shrimp for tableside when it was Scotley's job.
• The second service was this for Jen, where she consistently failed on the garnish section with both her portions and seasoning, much to the frustration of Gordon and her team. However, the crowning moment was when she accused Gordon of sabotaging her when he complained about insufficient sides for the duck garnish. Gordon ordered her to get out, and the veterans were understandably happy to see her leave.
• In Episode 4's soup challenge, Bret ruined the Blue Team's streak by making his soup out of canned tomatoes. This is particularly shocking because Bret had already seen someone get scolded for using premade ingredients in their signature dish (he was from Season 14), so he should know better. It didn't help that the Red Team scored three perfect bowls, which gave them a 10 point gap.
• Both teams' dinner services in Episode 4 were so bad that Gordon abandoned the "Rookies vs. Veterans" format entirely and went back to Men vs. Women.
  • During appetizers, Gizzy decided to leave her post on tableside and budge her way into Mia and Scotley's station, despite neither of them asking her for help.
  • Chris left a pork chop in the oven for seven minutes too long, and it came out as the most burnt protein the show ever filmed in eighteen seasons.
  • On the veteran side, Kevin had his worst performance in both seasons as he served lamb that was overcooked, undercooked, and then raw. That last one forced Ramsay to do the order himself, and Kevin was given his first-ever nomination.^note While Ariel did consider him for elimination back in Season 6, it was during the final three when Ramsay asked them who they thought did not deserve to be in the finals.
• Trev forgot to plate the fish for the cioppino in Episode 7’s challenge (similar to his failure to plate correctly identified carrot puree in Season 8’s "Taste it Now Make it" Challenge), costing the red team the victory.
• The Blue Team's performance at the Sweet 16 Service isn't as disastrous as some of the other services noted here, but what puts them on here are just who and what got them kicked out in the first place. First, Roe (who in Season 13 was one of the strongest people on the meat station) sent two straight raw steaks, which was followed by Mia (who at that point was one of the clear frontrunners in the competition) failing to put enough batter on one serving of fish and sending another one still raw. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was Ariel accidentally sending out a halibut she was still cooking instead of the one she had cooked perfectly just earlier to the table occupied by the birthday girl herself, Gordon's youngest daughter Tilly. Naturally, Gordon went Papa Wolf on them and kicked them out for the 2nd straight dinner service.
• In Episode 9, after struggling all night, the Red Team gets kicked out and the Blue Team steps in to finish service. How badly did the Red Team screw up? Almost 2/3 of their diners were fed by the Blue Team.
• Like the season before, Episode 10 was another disaster for the Red Team.
  • The Blind Taste Test took place in this episode, where any hope of a Red Team victory vanished when Trev tasted zero out of four items correctly as the first one up (compared to Heather, who scored 2/4).
  • As for the Charity Night Service... hoo boy. Both teams were neck and neck throughout, but what ultimately cost the Red Team the victory was Jose failing to check his saltimbocca plates on the pass before sending out the 12-top. As a result, half of the saltimbocca dishes were returned for being raw, leading Ramsay to cook the refires himself while delegating the rest of the team to desserts. This, combined with the fact that Jose would be on his fourth nomination that night and blamed Trev for the whole mess instead of taking ownership, ensured his elimination.
• Episode 11 continued the trend of the red team's failure.
  • First came the Dessert Challenge where they lost 11-14, as both Bret and Trev scored low two's on their desserts (Bret's for being raw, and Trev's for being one of the worst desserts on the show).
  • Then came dinner service where the mistakes from both Trev and Bret ranged from idiotic (Trev forgetting to put the crust on the lamb) to dangerous (Bret trying to serve a five-month pregnant woman raw salmon). This led to the team's defeat and ejection, along with Trev’s elimination.

Season 19 (Las Vegas)

• Kenneth finishes his first dish with a good 20 minutes left and unlike JP from Season 13, didn’t even bother trying to refire it. His chicken ends up heavily burnt and gets him only 1 out of 5.
• In the second episode, Kenneth serves a shrimp dish that has a massive block of what was revealed to be ungrated parmesan. This caused him to be the first chef to get traditionally eliminated before the first service.
• Elliot in episode 2's service offered quite possibly the worst elimination plea ever, trying to say he wasn't focused on what he was doing despite not doing anything to begin with. The cherry on top was him replying to Chef Ramsay's question of if he's a better chef than Drew by saying he's not, earning him an immediate elimination.
• Episode 5's Mexican challenge was mostly a fairly strong showing from both teams, but contains a personal one for Kori. Despite being the only chef on both teams who was both Mexican and lived in Mexico for most of her life, both of her dishes failed to impress Aaron Sanchez.
  Kori: "I'm super disappointed and I'm super upset; I know this is gonna take a while to get over."
  • What's worse, her enchilada dish was beaten out by Adam
  Adam: "Kori is from Mexico, she speaks Mexican, and I'm from Milwaukee with a red beard and tattoos! I'm the farthest thing from a fucking enchilada, but I know I got this"
• Episode 6 featured a Modernization Challenge for Italian cuisine, but Syann made a big mistake by making tortellini with wonton wrappers. Not only did it not look like a traditional tortellini dish, but the judges failed to taste the seafood inside the dish, getting more cheese than protein. It was clearly the worse dish of the challenge, but Syann only got the bare 3 out of 9 minimum because, as Ramsay claimed, a guitar pedal did not have a zero on it.
• Episode 7's protein identification challenge was this for Declan, who went up twice. In both turns, he picked proteins that had already been declared wrong, and this ended up costing the blue team the challenge when he grabbed monkfish instead of snapper, even though he and his partner Adam already tried the former.

Season 20 (Young Guns)

• Matthew was not good with meats of any kind. He started off by serving a shrimp dish that still had the intestinal tract in it. Next, in the Cook For Your Life challenge, he served raw chicken and only survived because he had a good presentation (his opponent, Ava, served raw salmon). Finally, he had to use a meat thermometer for his meat and it was still raw - and he was laughing about it. The cherry on top was Ramsay not even letting him make an elimination plea.
• The first dinner service was this for the blue team. Whereas the red team made no mistakes during opening night, the blue team repeatedly suffered from raw proteins and a lack of communication. The worst part was what led to them getting kicked out: after Ramsay had them regroup in the pantry, he asked them how long on Mike Tyson's ticket, and they proceeded to give a barrage of conflicting answers (such as "We're at 3 minutes," "Wellington's ready," and "13 minutes"), causing lots of screaming and failed attempts at restoring order. Ramsay and sous chef Jason's disgusted looks said it all.
• The Alcohol Challenge was also this for the Blue Team. While the Red Team made the right choices of which chefs had the best dishes, the Blue Team allowed Antonio to steamroll them into picking his dish and failed to notice that Matthew's chicken was raw. Those two dishes were chosen as the worst dishes from the challenge.
• Episode 3's service is another lopsided defeat for the blue team. The red team made just one mistake, whereas the blue team repeatedly suffered from raw proteins and a lack of communication. Again. Even worse, Alex blaming his team for the raw chicken caused a record-breaking 5 nominees in a team, Chef Ramsay to retreat to his office for a bit, and even the red team to interrogate the blue team during that time.
• The blue team set a new record for challenge and service losses from the start, having lost the first four challenges and first three services before winning their fourth service. In fact, before Chef Ramsay decided to switch up the teams, many viewers thought that the Red Team would win every challenge and service.
• Following the first four episodes of this season, one would expect the red team to continue their dominance over the blue team even after the team switch. Well Episode 5's service proved otherwise. It started poorly when Payton served the wrong garnishes on order, but Morgana led them down the hole further by breaking a halibut dish and failing to tell the team when they had items on the pass, wasting a ticket. Combining her meltdown on fish with a lack of communication, Morgana single handedly sunk the red team to defeat, leading Ramsay to kick the team out. And to make this more embarrassing? The blue team managed to regroup following their disastrous start to the season and win the service with much better communication than the red team had. The performance was so bad Ramsay asked the red team to nominate three people for elimination (although he spared Keanu as the red team came up with a flimsy explanation of why she deserved to be nominated).
• The red team's entrée performance on Megan Ramsay's 21st birthday service. It already started poorly when Sam and Payton kept serving raw steaks (with one still having white fat), but snowballed into disaster when Payton's Pad Thai was sent out bland (making things worse was the fact that the dish was sent to Megan herself, leaving Chef Ramsay fuming). This culminated in the lamb on the following order, where everyone (minus Kiya) had a hand in getting it ready and still came out raw. Needless to say, Ramsay called it a teamwork level screw-up on the highest level and ordered them to nominate three people for the second time in a row, and this time, he actually followed through with it.
• Kevin in episode 7's service. He repeatedly served raw lobster tail four times and, after falling behind hard on fish, was eliminated by Ramsay on the spot.
• Sam's final performance in Steak Night. After struggling on steaks, he ended up struggling on a single chicken order for half an hour because it was either dry, burnt, or raw. After the fourth failed attempt, Ramsay kicked the red team out as he didn't want to wait another half hour on a chicken breast that may very well be cooked incorrectly again!

Season 21 (Battle of the Ages)

• Nicole is the first chef since Kimberly from Season 16 to use premade ingredients in her dish, where her tagliatelle was boxed and her sauce was canned. Ramsay gave her a 1, and admitted even that was a stretch.
• The theme of this season was supposed to be a battle against forty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds, but in the first three episodes, the Red Team (the 20-Somethings) curb stomped the Blue Team (the 40-Somethings) so hard that the latter lost the first two services (both of which were kick outs) and lost three chefs in that span. It was so bad that Ramsay was forced to go back to the Battle of the Sexes format because if not, the Red Team would have continued to dominate the Blue Team and leave half the dining room hungry (and that's something he will not stand for despite this being a competition). They lost both reward/punishment challenges, too.
• As an indicator of just how bad things would have gone for the 40-Somethings, even after the team switch, the first person eliminated was another 40-Something, and the 20-Somethings only lost their first member after five services in a double elimination that took out another 40-Something. With Abe's elimination in Episode 10, Tara and Alex were the only 40-Somethings left - and Tara didn't even make it to Black Jackets. In the end, only Tara and Abe were brought back for the final service. Ironically, Alex's victory meant that the 40-Somethings would actually win the Battle of the Ages in the end, but damn if it wasn't an uphill battle for their last hope.
• During the 21st Annual Blind Taste Test, both Sakari and Alex each got 0 out of 4 ingredients correct, effectively costing the Blue Team the challenge.
• The first Black Jacket service is, to put it lightly, atrocious. The events that lead to Cheyenne's downfall starts with her sending raw lobster tail and forgetting two orders of scallops, then goes into a nervous breakdown when a fire breaks out from the fish station (her salmon turns out to be undercooked). More mistakes happen when Dafne fails to communicate with Cheyenne which contributes to the latter's crumbling performance and also forgets to bring garnish, as well as Alex of all people sends undercooked steak, which pushes Ramsay to the last straw and kicks everybody out of the kitchen as diners look on in shock. No wonder this service causes fans to be painfully reminded of Season 16's first Black Jacket service.

Season 22 (The American Dream)

• For his signature dish, Tad decided to make biscuits and sausage gravy. Not too bad, right? Well, that's before he added strawberry jam and lemon to it. Well, hey, it can't get any worse, right? It can if he accidentally dumped half a bottle of paprika on top. Meanwhile, Dahmere had used boxed pasta (a big Ramsay no-no) and this dish was singled out as the worst of the night; Ramsay even admitted his score of one was generous.
• The opening night for both teams ended up becoming an epic failure as both ended up getting kicked out due to multiple mistakes, making it the first time since Season 12 that we had a joint loss on the first service. While it wasn't as terrible as Season 12 (unlike that season, both teams managed to get food out before they were kicked out), it was still embarrassing to see the chefs make too many mistakes on the first go. Special mention has to go on how the red team got kicked out, and it was thanks to Claudia giggling during a Ramsay rant! And in keeping with Season 12, both teams would get kicked out in the following service, making it another season with a slow start.
• In Episode 4, the challenge consisted on elevating classic American comfort food. What makes this notable is that almost all of the contestants got a point each, with only 3 notable fails.
  • Jason presented sweet and salty chicken wings with a vinegar dip, but Gordon pointed out that the wings were too salty. On top of that, Jason replied that he didn't think the dish was too salty.
  • In the Spaghetti and Meatballs round, Atoye tried to set herself apart by making Penne with Veal. Gordon immediately pointed out that she wasn't supposed to change the recipe, because the pasta choice was more suited for Mac and Cheese than for Spaghetti.
  • In an attempt to be innovative, Raneisha had the idea of deconstructing the pizza by making fried pizza dough chips and a pizza sauce dip. What didn't work was the exaggerated amount of cheese on top and the big chunks of toppings inside the dip (like whole slices of pepperoni).

• In Episode 5, the teams competed in the Protein Identification Challenge, which had a "Surf & Turf" theme to it, and similar to the Blue Team from Season 11, the Red Team this season took forever to get all the proteins correct, in large part due to Sandra and Donya being unable to identify the halibut during their portion of the challenge, finishing with an accumulated time of 13 minutes and 14 seconds. By comparison, the Blue Team would get all the proteins right in a little over half the time^note 6 minutes and 39 seconds, to be exact, giving them their third consecutive challenge win at that point.

• Episode 6:
  • To select the cooking styles for the Fusion Challenge, the chefs had to kick the soccer ball and aim at the respective signs. Jason misses seven times, attempting to hit one sign, as he either keeps hitting the goal post or missing entirely.
  • For the Fusion Challenge, Raneisha makes a Poke Bowl (a Hawaiian dish) for a Japanese-French theme and thinks this is, somehow, a good idea. What baffles everyone in the room is that she thought infusing her rice with BRIE CHEESE and GRAPES was going to be great, with duck and langoustine as toppings. It's not. Presentation-wise, the bowl was a lifeless brown and grey grub, which made the bizarre dish even more unappetizing.
• Jermaine's performance on the garnish station in the Episode 7 dinner service: he couldn't handle the station on his own despite the garnish station being considered easy, and needed to be helped by everyone except Devon, who was on the meat station. This led to Devon struggling on the meat station, got the Blue Team kicked out and ultimately led to Jermaine's elimination.
• The Blind Taste Test was this for Sammi. While all of the other chefs were able to score at least one or two points, Sammi got none of her ingredients correct, effectively giving the Blue Team the win.
• If the previous season's black jacket service wasn't bad enough, then Season 22's might be the most shocking. It featured three previously extremely consistent chefs in Dahmere, Johnathan, and Leigh crashing on their sections. Dahmere struggled on fish all night and failed to bounce back, Leigh did such a bad job with slicing wellington that Gordon had to give an on the fly demonstration on how to do it, and Johnathan letting his bad attitude effect his performance on the garnish station. It was so bad that both Dahmere and Leigh would wind up being eliminated on their first nomination no less.

Others

• It's not just individuals who provide epic failures; some whole teams end up as a nexus of Facepalm-inducing incompetence.
  • Season 7's Red Team only won three challenges, and only two dinner services (if you count the last dinner service before the Black Jackets a Red Team win) which they tied with the Blue Team. Meaning that they never outright beat the Blue Team in any dinner service. Unless you didn't count the two finalists' service, which can be (hardly) considered as their only service win.
  • Season 6's Red Team was a close contender. They did well in the challenges, winning half of them. But in terms of service, they only beat the Blue Team once. It's even worse when you remember that their only victory was in the seventh service, meaning they lost six services in a row since starting the season!
  • Season 17's Red Team became this. Aside from the 3 straight wins in dinner service (one of them is a joint win, and their member is eliminated), they lost the rest of the services and had a 7-3 loss record against the Blue Team in challenges. Also, despite having their second member eliminated 6th, only 1 original Red Team member got to the Black Jackets (Robyn kind of counts, but she was with the Blue Team for the majority of her stay after Episode 4).
  • Season 18’s Red Team post-men vs. women switch. They only won two services out of six (losing all the rest to the Blue Team) and had one of the worst challenge streaks in the history of the show, recording just one victory out of seven.
  • As for the worst Blue Team, Season 10's in the entirety of their existence only won one dinner service and lost all the other dinner services (11 total losses) sometimes in combination with the Red Team.
  • Season 11's Blue Team is another competitor. They only won 2 out of 14 challenges, and 3 out of 14 services. A record 10 chefs were eliminated from that team!
  • Season 16's Blue Team is also another consideration. While they did win most of the challenges, they were kicked out of the kitchen in seven services and only completed 5 of the 12 services, two of which they won against the Red Team.
• Sometimes, a contestant performs so horrifically during service that Ramsay eliminates them from the competition right then and there. Examples include:
  • Season 3: Josh's aforementioned incident.
  • Season 5: The only season to have two of these in a row.
    • The aforementioned J incident above, but also poor mistakes on the fish station.
    • The aforementioned Lacey incident.
  • Season 6: The aforementioned Louie incident.
  • Season 7: Nilka ruining the Red Team's entire supply of fish, then very nearly sinking the team entirely when she desperately tried to save face.
  • Season 12: Gabriel screwing up on the salmon three times. The first time it was dry, the second time it was burnt, and the third time it was raw.
  • Season 15: Kevin sending up raw scallops after Ramsay showed him how to properly cook them earlier.
  • Season 17 (All Stars): Josh's terrible performance on garnish got him kicked out of the kitchen, but trying to fight his way back led to Ramsay eliminating him on the spot.
  • Season 18 (Rookies Vs. Veterans): Jen had a poor performance on garnish along with a poor attitude throughout the night. This culminated in her serving Ramsay under-portioned garnishes and having the balls to accuse Ramsay of sabotaging her. This, naturally, enraged Ramsay, who proceeded to eliminate her on the spot for her disrespectful attitude.
  • Season 19 (Las Vegas): Peter was lost on garnish all night long and slowing down the kitchen by not communicating with his teammates. Ramsay gathers the Blue Team and asks everyone if they have the skills for the head chef position. Peter says he does not because he has grown disillusioned with the intense pressure and combative atmosphere of the competition, which results in Ramsay sending him home immediately.
  • Season 20 (Young Guns): Kevin dragged everyone else on fish all night, and was by far the worst performer that night, with no one else even being nomination-worthy.
• While several contestants have described the Blind Taste Test as being way harder than it looks, they'll sometimes make guesses that are so wildly off-base that you're left questioning how in the hell they could've possibly arrived at that conclusion.
  • Season 1:
    • Ingredient: Chicken. Jimmy's guess: Meat tortellini with sweated onions.
    • Ingredient: Scallops. Jessica's guess: Liver.
  • Season 5:
    • Ingredient: Lobster. Giovanni's guess: Poached egg yolk.
      Ramsay: What?!
      Lacey: Egg yolk?
    • Ingredient: Black truffle. Robert's guess: "Tasted like shit, whatever it was!"
  • Season 6:
    • Ingredient: Clams. Kevin's guess: Spinach.
    • Ingredient: Avocado. Andy's guess: Boiled coconut.
      Van: (Confession Cam) Boiled coconut? Who eat's that shit?
  • Season 7:
    • Ingredient: Coconut. Fran's guess: Potato.
      Holli: (Confession Cam) How the fuck can coconut be a potato?!
    • Ingredient: Eggplant. Nilka's guess: Prunes.
      Ramsay: What?!
  • Season 10:
    • Ingredient: Turkey. Christina's guess: Tofu.
      Christina: (Confession Cam) Fuck that turkey...
    • Ingredient: Sweet potato. Clemenza's guess: Mango.
  • Season 11:
    • Ingredient: Prune. Anthony's guess: Licorice.
  • Season 12:
    • Ingredient: Hot dog. Jason's guess: "I dunno... fish..."
      Ramsay: ...fish!
    • Ingredient: Bell pepper. Melanie's guess: Honeydew.
      Rochelle: (Confession Cam) Honeydew melon... not even close!
  • Season 14:
    • Ingredient: Zucchini. Milly's guess: Pear.
  • Season 15:
    • Ingredient: Avocado. Ariel's guess: Cheese. Frank's guess: Hazelnut.
    • Ingredient: Carrot. Ariel's guess: Melon. Frank's guess: Mint.
    • Ingredient: Peanut butter. Frank's guess: Snickers.
      Ramsay: Snickers isn't an ingredient!
    • Ingredient: Corn. Manda's guess: Fish.
    • Ingredient: Green tea. Ariel's guess: Fish... again.
  • Season 22:
    • Ingredient: Kalamata olives. Sammi's guess: Kohlrabi.

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