Suzanne Schlicht's training at MATC and the Milwaukee area's Bartolotta restaurants couldn't take her all the way through this latest season of "Hell's Kitchen."
"I've given you so many chances," chef Gordon Ramsay told her before her run on the "reality" competition ended Tuesday night, leaving four competitors remaining.
The usually confident Milwaukeean, who's now living in Las Vegas, had begun the episode admitting "yeah, I'm shaking," after facing the foul-mouthed Ramsay three times on the show's chopping block.
"Determination" was Ramsay's theme for the episode, and a determined Schlicht still had problems with scallops and fish for the night's dinner service at the Fox show's faux restaurant. But the other finalists had problems with their food as well.
By the end of that service, the 25-year-old Schlicht was confident about her performance in the kitchen, calling it "beautiful, beautiful."
That didn't stop her from getting sent to the block for the fourth time.
"Tonight I was focused on solid techniques," she told Ramsay in her defense.
"You were focused on a lot of good things," Ramsay told her as he sent her packing. "But you accomplished nothing."
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
