Michelin-star chef Buddha Lo joins Hell's Kitchen as the top eight chefs face a relay-style test

Michelin-star chef Buddha Lo joined Hell's Kitchen as the competition reached its top eight, stepping into Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen to judge a high-pressure relay-style test that put both timing and communication under scrutiny.

In the episode, the remaining chefs were still vying for the job of head chef at Ramsay’s Hell's Kitchen restaurant at Foxwoods Resort Casino, and the visiting fine-dining chef watched closely as they tried to execute four classic Chinese dishes in sync.

The challenge structure required the chefs to trade off mid‑cook, forcing each team to finish dishes that teammates had started, while Lo evaluated the final plates alongside Ramsay.

Hell's Kitchen framed the test around four staples of Chinese cuisine: dumplings, a sweet and sour preparation, a stir‑fry, and a noodle dish.

Two chefs from each team began cooking all four plates before handing over control to the other two teammates at the halfway mark, turning the exercise into a true relay where organization and clear handoff mattered as much as seasoning and technique.

Buddha Lo, brought in as a Michelin-star guest, judged the results and scored each category, adding an external standard to Ramsay’s critiques.

Hell's Kitchen relay test and Buddha Lo’s judgment

On Hell's Kitchen, the dumpling portion of the challenge saw chef Jada Vidal secure a point for the blue team, earning praise for execution under the stop‑and‑start format.

The sweet and sour dish then shifted momentum when chef Lisa Rivera, cooking for the blue team but judged against the red side’s effort, won a point that counted on the red scoreboard, reflecting how the show sometimes mixes service roles and scoring in team relay tasks.

Both the red and blue teams earned a point for their stir‑fry courses, indicating that, at least in that segment, each group managed to keep flavors and doneness on target despite the mid‑stream handoffs.

The tiebreak came down to the noodle dish, where chef Ellie Parker’s work for the red team gained the edge and gave her side the overall challenge win.

With Hell's Kitchen’s relay test complete and Buddha Lo’s scoring tallied, the show moved from reward to punishment.

The victorious red team received a private tour of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, paired with a HexClad cooking set that tied the prize back to their professional development.

The blue team, by contrast, had to deal with a classic Hell's Kitchen penalty built around grunt work and discomfort: jumping into trash bins to sort and compost food waste.

The consequence reinforced the gap between the disciplined relay work Lo had just judged and the mistakes that left one side coming up short.

Instead of running a standard dinner service in the Hell's Kitchen dining room after the relay, the episode pivoted to a charity night format.

The red team cooked for Connecticut Foodshare, with celebrity guest JoJo Siwa at one of their tables, while the blue team cooked for Stand Up To Cancer, giving both sides a high‑stakes service-oriented experience around five courses per charity.

Across the evening, each chef had a chance to act as leader for a course, mirroring the head‑chef responsibilities that often decide the Hell's Kitchen winner by the end of a season.

The service opened with scallops, and chefs Henry Johnson (blue) and Anaiya Lator (red) handled the first course smoothly, sending plates on time and properly cooked.

A slip came on the blue side during the second course of capellini, when Anthony Leonard miscounted the number of diners and initially under‑plated the table, forcing a quick recovery to finish the last dish.

Later, the duck course became a significant problem for Chef Jayden Canady and the rest of the blue team: their plates left the pass after the red kitchen’s plates, the duck had not been properly rested, and some dishes reached the dining room missing garnish.

The filet mignon course and the final soufflé dessert also went out more slowly from the blue side than from the red kitchen, compounding the impression of a service that lagged.

Stay tuned for more updates.