Jason Santos is a wise, quick witted smart young man with blue hair who wanted to do Hell’ Kitchen for exposure and nothing more! But the nothing more is bigger now than when the show was on the air!
Jason Santos is a talented chef from a small restaurant in Somerville, Massachusetts who realized to get to where he wants to go and where his talent would take him would mean considering doing a reality TV show.
Jason applied for and got on Season 7 on Hell’s Kitchen without evening cooking which is somewhat surprising since Hell’s Kitchen is a cooking show! Would you believe the day Jason was leaving to do Hell’s Kitchen he got an offer to do Top Chef! Top Chef’s loss was Hell’s Kitchen’s gain!
This is where I learned how much consideration Jason Santos put into making his decision to do Hell’s Kitchen. Jason has watched all the reality cooking shows including every season of Hell’s Kitchen including the present season which he is blogging about. He realized the viewership on network and not a cable station, would be much higher and he wanted to be on a show that had the most viewers. He also understood the game behind Hell’s Kitchen and knew he was tough enough to handle all that would be thrown his way. He could handle the heat, the fire and Gordon Ramsey’s yelling which would have no affect on him!
Before Jason became a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen and he watched the show on TV, he was surprised how a chef could not cook a meal in an hour or how a chef could burn a meal. Soon Jason would realize why. In his years of watching Hell’s Kitchen, Jason saw grown men cry from being yelled at by Gordon Ramsey but he was not going to be one of the men that cried.
It wasn’t until Jason was doing the show that he learned the secrets behind the show and kept his eyes and ears open to realize what was going on around him! Jason learned to play the game well and quickly which says a lot about him. Hell’s Kitchen, Jason realized is a business and he feels it is genius to take 16 chefs with egos, sequester them for two months, take away everything from TV, magazines, windows, e-mail, and sleep to do a reality cooking TV show where the eyes and ears of the producers are everywhere!
There are many things we as viewers don’t see, why Gordon shows up when he does, why he takes a chef away from their station when he does, when they say you have an hour and then tell you without telling the audience you only have 20 minutes to prepare your meal and how editing changes everything! It is TV at its best and even if you look closely you won’t see everything that is really going on. The editing process can make you look very good or very bad. What is real and what is not real on Hell’s Kitchen, Jason knows but I’m not going to tell all the secrets I learned!
Our interview with Jason is not over yet; check back for more of our interview with Jason Santos!
