NY POST/ADAM BUCKMAN

"Hell's Kitchen"
Monday night at 9 on Fox

ON his new Fox reality show, "Hell's Kitchen," British celebrity chef
Gordon Ramsay wastes no opportunity for a put-down.

"I think you're a plank!" he tells one contestant on this
cooking-competition show when the contestant presents him with a dish
of salmon roasted on a plank of cedar.

"I don't even know what that means, Chef," says the bewildered
contestant, Christopher North, 35, of Yorktown Heights, N.Y. That made
two of us, since I didn't know what that meant either.

"Plank means idiot!" says Chef Ramsay, who turns out to be correct.
Plank does mean idiot, but not in the three dictionaries and one
thesaurus I consulted before finding this particular usage in an
on-line dictionary of British slang.

In the same segment, Chef Ramsay declares one contestant's Absolut
penne to be "absolute dog[bleep]!" and tells another, "You've got a
palate like a cow's backside!" And there isn't a Web site on Earth
that
can explain that one.

Chef Ramsay aims to become the Simon Cowell of cooking shows, but he
needn't try so hard.

"Hell's Kitchen" works just fine without the comparisons to Cowell
that
Fox is emphasizing in its publicity campaign for this new summer
series.

"Hell's Kitchen" has 12 amateur and professional cooks vying for a
grand prize - their own restaurant.

Each week, one contestant will be dismissed by Ramsay, who, in the
first two episodes provided for preview, has yet to come up with a
catchy and consistent way of "firing" each week's failure.

In the manner of such shows as "The Apprentice," the 12 are divided
into two teams - blue and red. They compete each week to serve dinner
to hungry Hollywood types packed into a trendy, new restaurant called
Hell's Kitchen that has been equipped with 72 cameras.

It's in the manic kitchen scenes that Ramsay is at his best - or
worst, depending on your point of view.

Directing the contestants as they ruin dish after dish, Ramsay
lectures, screams and curses at them - a style he seems to think will
motivate them, but seemingly has the opposite effect.

The show reaches its boiling point when restaurant patrons, who have
waited for more than two hours without receiving their dinners, come
to
the kitchen's rim to complain to Ramsay, who unrepentently tells them
to "F' off."

The shocked looks on their faces would be reason enough to watch
"Hell's Kitchen," if not for this show's many other appetizing
ingredients.
* * *
NY DAILY NEWS/DAVID BIANCULLI
Color me shocked.

My appetite for reality shows is such that the prospect of new ones
tends to make me nauseated, but with the new restaurant reality series
"Hell's Kitchen," Fox is plating and serving something almost
palatable.

Based on a British series of the same name, and featuring the same
star, "Hell's Kitchen" presents chef Gordon Ramsay, who's renowned in
England for his world-class restaurants as well as his volatile
temper.

Here, Ramsay takes a dozen recruits - some experienced chefs, some raw
recruits with a passion for cooking - and throws them into a
sink-or-swim, fry-or-die competition.

There are two teams of six chefs each; as with "Iron Chef," there are
two identically equipped kitchens side by side. In "Hell's Kitchen,"
though, they're cooking for a Ramsay restaurant of the same name,
opened in Los Angeles for the occasion.

The aspirants, each hoping to win the grand prize of a restaurant of
his or her own, are shown the kitchen and are given 45 minutes to whip
up an introductory signature dish for Ramsay's inspection. And when he
inspects, he's brutal. By the time he finally tells one person, "Not
bad," you'd think they had hit the lottery.

Then comes a stunning announcement: Both teams will be serving dinner
that night, to opening-night patrons, under the direction of Ramsay
and
his equally tough sous chefs.

For a while, Ramsay looks like a perfectionistic taskmaster, and your
sympathies are with him as the trainees make one mistake after
another.
Then, when Ramsay reacts to an undercooked piece of fish by slamming
the dish into the chest of the offending chef, he loses the patina of
mentor and turns into a simple, unpredictable bully.

And when one fiasco follows another, prompting Ramsay to toss out one
course after another, and patrons are inquiring why their gourmet
meals
are taking hours to prepare, he reacts to their inquiries with almost
psychotic hostility.

Annoyed that two young blonds have approached the kitchen, and him, to
complain about the delay, Ramsey says to his maitre d', "Would you
escort these two ladies, please, back to plastic surgery?"

That's not the only gasp-inducing remark or altercation, and it's a
fascinating case study. How can a chef be so obsessed over the quality
of food, yet simultaneously so hostile and dismissive to those waiting
to eat it?

Hidden cameras capture most of the action, which appears too raw and
unchecked - from the teams, the patrons and Ramsay - to be explained
away as grandstanding. More so than in "The Restaurant," the drama in
"Hell's Kitchen" seems real, and the show itself seems perfectly
titled...even before Ramsay cuts the kitchen air-conditioning to teach
one team a lesson.

Apparently, cooking for Ramsay, like war, is hell.

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