by Arthur Perkins
  
Gordon Ramsay started off with a demonstration of a $200 pizza he had created using expensive white truffles. He was making the point that pizza can be extremely gourmet, but that is a function of exotic ingredients. If you have $150 of exotic or expensive ingredients, why don't you just create something more interesting than pizza with them? However, Ramsay has a mission as we shall see so pizza it is. The Fine Dining Pizza Challenge is about each individual creating a high-value pizza using any ingredients in the kitchen. The Blue Team and the Red Team will nominate their best entrant into a head-to-head team competition which Ramsay will judge. There is a lot of pride and honor at stake here, so everyone goes all-out. The blue team selects Ben's Duck Confit, Chanterelle Mushroom, Caramelized Chevre Cream Sauce pizza. The red team selects Jen's Italy/France herb-crusted prosciutto, fried basil, sundried tomatoes pizza. Both sound fabulous to me. Ramsay comments that there is grit due to improper cleaning of Ben's mushrooms and awards the win to Jen's pizza and the Red team. Their reward is to go with him to the Square One restaurant in Santa Barbara where the $90 hamburger and black truffle fries are special. A helicopter ride up the scenic Pacific coast is included although the women do not know that until it actually happens. As a bonus, Jen's pizza is going on the menu for the following night as a special. The men get to prep all the ingredients for all pizzas for that next night and they are shown a vehicle smaller than a Yugo. It looks like a small golf cart and they refer to it as a go-kart. Its function is to transport a pizza deliverer. One of the men is going to be taken away from service and assigned to deliver pizzas. That was totally for show, however, since it only affected Ben for a short period of time with one customer, probably in the neighborhood, and they did not show him out of the kitchen for very long. Ramsay warns the MEN that they have been showing little ability to work together and communicate.
 
The next day during prep Vanessa is having difficulty chopping with one hand. She goes to Ramsay who tells her basically that she has an equal chance(a lie since she was at the bottom of the chefs and likely to get eliminated before she was injured) to win. She knows that her real chances were poor before the injury and negligible now, so why bother when she believes her team will actually be better off without her. She elects to quit and he tells her to say her goodbyes promptly and leave Hell's Kitchen.
 
The service starts and there are banners flying in the sky to advertise the Pizza Delivery service. In the Red kitchen, Jen is first to have a success, setting a new record of 45 seconds for a risotto appetizer. Matt does a poor job in the Blue kitchen on quail eggs, which Ramsay makes him eat. Bobby insists on taking over the redo since he does not want a repeated failure. Sharyn does Beef Wellington rare when it should have been more done. Rosann screwed up the potatoes of mashed potatoes and carrots not once but twice in a row. Ben delivers his pizza at this point.
 
At 1.5 hours into the service Jen is switched off desserts to plug the problems Rosann is having. Louross is undercooking steaks. They are apparently supposed to be medium rare and he is scorching them. The first this happens it is Ramsay who disciplines him. The second time it is Scott, who I actually find scarier. Petrozza comes to the rescue by cutting off the burned ends, which leaves two perfect medium rare cuts. Score a big one for Petrozza in team support! Christina is going crazy trying to cope by herself when desserts are normally manned by two. She has 4 souffles about to deflate in the next 1.5 minutes. Corey is reassigned to help her and does so grudgingly.
 
Kitchen service is successfully completed after 2.5 hours, which Ramsay calls the first time that has happened. He states that there is no winning or losing team and asks each team to nominate one individual for him to consider for elimination. The WOMEN think about Rosann, who really screwed up, and Christina, who was given too much to do to be successful. The MEN think about Louross, who really screwed up, and Matt, who historically is a liability for their team. In a blatant power play by Jen, she tries to get Christina knocked off having the team think it will be Rosann then switching to Christina at the last moment. Louross believes he is guilty and is ready to face judgment, insisting they he be the nominee. So Christina and Louross are nominated, but Ramsay is having no such crap. He knows who are the worst performers on each team and asked pointed questions on why it wasn't Matt or Rosann nominated. He accuses Jen of trying to eliminate a tough competitor, which was precisely what she was trying to do. He is so much more intelligent than anything of them that they hopefully got the message to stop playing games with these nominations. The best way to do that, of course, is to fire the person responsible for the bad nomination, which is this case would be Jen. That would send a strong message to all future episodes and seasons of Hell's Kitchen that nobody could possibly miss. He did not do that and missed that opportunity. Instead, he announced that the person eliminated, by her own choice, was Vanessa. He praised them for their successful performance but warned them that the "heat" ratchets up as the number of players dwindles.

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