MARY ELLEN WRIGHT | Staff WriterLocal chef Alan Parker was on the winning team for both challenges on Wednesday night’s episode of the Fox TV cooking competition, “Hell’s Kitchen."
The Neffsville resident, who is a sous chef at the Hollywood Casino at Penn National, wasn’t on camera a lot during the cooking challenges on Wednesday night’s third week of competition for season 15. That was because the all-male blue team won the night, and most of the drama took place among the chefs of the all-female red team.
By text this morning, Parker said that, in last night’s episode, he got to serve an appetizer, table-side, to Astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon during the 1969 Apollo 11 space mission.
Parker served a seared sea bass with green-tea soba noodles and a sesame and chili sauce to Aldrin's table of 10.
“Buzz was nice, but didn’t talk much,” Parker recalled.
Parker also later helped cook beef Wellington in the dinner service portion of the show.
The male chefs won the initial “communication” challenge, which involved reading to each other recipes written on the backs of their chef coats and preparing those dishes.
Their prize was being pampered at the posh Bacara resort in Santa Barbara, California.
Parker called the resort experience “amazing,” and said it marked the first time he ever got to dip his toes in the Pacific Ocean.
The women chefs of the red team, who had to gut, scale and clean 100 pounds of sea bass because of their initial loss, fell apart during the dinner service.
Ramsay kicked them out of the kitchen during the dinner service for infractions ranging from not being able to remember orders to throwing away properly cooked entrees. The women turned on each other, and yelled a lot in the kitchen.
As the male chefs took over the red team’s portion of the service, Parker could be heard encouraging his fellow chefs to “break the curse” and “win the challenge, win the service,” which they did. They were the first team to win both halves of the show so far this season.
“The guys were definitely pumped after that day,” Parker said. “We (were) pretty much feeling invincible.”
California Chef Vanessa Soltero was eliminated at the end of the show, which was filmed last year in Los Angeles.
Next week’s episode, which airs Wednesday at 9 p.m., will feature celebrity diner Kris Jenner — matriarch of the Kardashian clan.
