HOT-headed chef Gordon Ramsay is weeding out the weaklings and adding some spice to the next season of his restaurant reality show.
Hundreds of “Hell’s Kitchen” hopefuls lined up around a Sutton Place block yesterday to audition for the next installment.
Oddly, the auditions seemed to have more to do with toughness than agility with pots and pans.
“Did you ever get in someone’s face?” the candidates were asked. “Did you ever have a fistfight?” “Were you ever beaten up by a girl when you were five?” and “Is Gordon going to make you cry?”
“We’re looking for the underdog, the overconfident,” says Debbie Ganz, who along with her twin sister Lisa screened wannabes for six hours yesterday. “I want someone who’s hungry, whose life will be changed by this.”
Applicants didn’t hold back as they were grilled by the sisters.
Louis “Big Lou” DePalma, a 41-year-old from Hammonton, NJ, who’s worked the kitchen at events for President Bush and John McCain, was happy to share his most embarrassing moment.
The one-time chubby Chippendale – who weighs north of 300 pounds, said, “I was playing baseball, slid into the base and I had no underwear on,” he said. He left the humiliating finale of the incident to the casting agent’s imagination.
Dwayne Andrews, 36, a line-chef from Philadelphia, humbly admitted that, in his youth, a female classmate got the best of him.
“It brought back memories. Her name was Pamela,” he said. “I remember being on that bus and the whole class watched while she beat me down.”
The father of eight said of the tryout, “I want this bad. My mother’s sick and I’d like to help her.”
Mitchell Truesbell, 33, of Mastic Beach, LI, tugged at the heartstrings with his story of last year’s tryouts, when he flew to LA as a finalist while his father was terminally ill.
“Go do it for me, son,” he quoted his dying dad as saying.
Truesbell didn’t make the cut and is back to try again.
Truesbell did splits for the casting agents and broke out in a rendition of “You Light Up My Life” àla “American Idol.”
As contestants waited for their opportunity, they took advantage of the restaurant’s sprawling bar area.
“Are you drunk?” Lisa Ganz asked.
“I sleep two hours a night. I work 15 hours a day,” Carlo Perretti, 34, told the casting girls. “I want this so bad.”
He then lifted his shirt to reveal a large tattoo of a crazed chef with bloodshot eyes menacingly wielding a butcher knife while choking a chicken.
“I can dominate,” he boasted. “I love the crafts of cooking.”