How Hell's Kitchen Contestants Memorize The Orders, According To Reddit

The contestants on "Hell's Kitchen" have to deal with a lot of pressure and display many expert skills to capture a win. Among those is the ability to turn around perfectly executed dishes with consistency in a short time frame.

Fans of the show have noticed that in the scenes in which the contestants are preparing dinner services, there are no tickets with diners' orders on them. Rather, "Hell's Kitchen" star Gordon Ramsay simply calls out the orders once and then expects to quickly see immaculate plates.

Viewers wondered on Reddit how the contestants can consistently hear the orders just once and then jump right into cooking without even hearing the orders a second time, much less having written tickets to refer to. The contestants aren't savants with superhuman memories. There isn't some cheat sheet off-camera, either. The answer is in a skill that many people learn in public schools as they grew up.

Redditors responded that it's all about the prep work. According to one user, the show's contestants get to see how to set up their mise en place and are shown how to prepare each dish to the standards of Gordon Ramsay prior to filming. They also wrote that contestants get books with all the recipes beforehand to memorize and practice. Therefore, they are already very familiar with the dishes and how to prepare them. In this way, the filmed cooking sessions are like a test that the contestants have had the material and time to study for.

That doesn't mean that contestants have foreknowledge of everything that's going to happen on the show, however. Per Delish, contestant Ariel Malone explained how contestants essentially go into filming blind. "There is zero prep," Malone said. "None whatsoever. All you can do is brace yourself for whatever's going to come." While Ramsay only gives the contestants one shot at hearing the orders, they should do well as long as they do their homework.