Heather West, who won Season 2 of “Hell’s Kitchen” when she was just 26 years old, was — according to the show — supposed to become the head chef at T-Bones, a fancy steakhouse in the Red Rock Casino Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas.
Bulletin: She isn’t there anymore.
She is now the head chef at a new restaurant in Long Beach, Long Island and happy as a clam inventing seafood recipes for people who live in the beach town and know their fish from their seafood.
I found this out last weekend when I walked into the re-imagined Monterey Restaurant and was shocked to see cute little Heather cooking up a storm as head chef.
So how did a girl like that end up in a place like this after a gig like that?
Heather says it was a natural progression: Port Jefferson High School to the Culinary Institute of America to sous chef to “Hell’s Kitchen” to Red Rock to Seattle to California and back to Long Island in a restaurant where she’s already started changing the menu.
“I love it,” she declared, clearly in her element. Not that she didn’t relish the experience of being famous for 15 minutes and then another 15.
Sure, it was hell, but how did you survive it?
“For 28 days,” she laughed, “you get about an hour-and-a-half to two hours sleep a night.
“I’d wake up at 5:30 and wake everybody else up so they didn’t have to wake us up with alarms and sirens. I’d get ready and fall asleep right by the door so when they came I was completely ready.
“They’d mike us, and then we’d do prep all day ’til around 2:00 and then we’d do the ‘confessionals’ [complaining directly into the camera]. Service started around 5 or 5:30 [p.m.] until 9, sometimes 11.
“Then more confessionals and eliminations until around 2 or 2:30.
“You’re exhausted, you’re sleep deprived, you keep on going.”
So what happened to the gig in Vegas?
After hesitating, Heather said, “Surreal. Honestly, they’re really not going to completely trust someone they saw on TV with a multi-million dollar restaurant.
“But I did work at all the restaurants in the resort, learned a huge amount, and a lot about promotion and marketing. . .”
But she’s thrilled to be home now.
“Two weeks ago, I surprised my sister by making her wedding cake!”
That’s one thing she couldn’t do from a casino in Vegas — it would have ended up in a wedding chapel with Elvis on top.
No regrets, no tears.
She is still a “Hell’s Kitchen” employee after a fashion (she worked as a sous chef for the contestants last season) and still has Gordon Ramsay’s cell phone number, in case she needs it.