"Chopping Block" recap

Anyone who has worked in the restaurant biz - and who has loved it - knows that fluttery, butterfly stomach feeling that happens right before service begins.

It's an adrenaline rush that becomes addictive, even when things start going wonky and you fall into the weeds. I got that rush whether I worked in the front or the back of the house. (But for years, I used to have dreams - nightmares actually - that I forgot to wait on a table and by the time I got to the customers, the kitchen had run out of food. Amateur Freuds, please don't analyze that.)

So that's what was running through my head during tonight's episode of the NBC series "Chopping Block" when the fake restaurants were crowded with patrons. The heat was on.

I like how this reality program, in some ways, captures the behind-the-scenes of the restaurant industry. (Running out of food, trying to push another dish on the menu, getting slammed with tables.)

But I'm not really feeling the heart of this series and, in terms of culinary imagination, it doesn't even come close to "Top Chef." There are no contestants I'm rooting for or particularly like very much right now. Much of the food seems very pedestrian.

I do like the calm, stern authority projected by Marco Pierre White. I want more of him, if anything.

MPW first judged the teams on the perfect table at a restaurant. Watching him sit at one wobbly table - one of my biggest pet peeves! - and convey his disappointment with just one "tsk, tsk" look was worth sitting through this hour.

Highlights:

Contestant Angie - from Philadelphia - who complained that the lamb was so rare, it was still baaaing. (Turns out she was wrong and guest judge and Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten liked the lamb. No wonder her restaurant only got a one Liberty Bell rating from the Philadelphia Inquirer's restaurant critic.)

Designer Nicole Miller and Steingarten smacking around the chefs for wanting to serve Chilean seabass, an endangered fish.

The dude who dared serve Steingarten's wife a slice of five-day-old, farm-raised salmon - and STILL walked away without getting chopped. Wow. But, man, I wouldn't have wanted to have been in the Steingarten house tonight and hear that I ate old fish.

I'm sorry, but contestant Michael Anapol is a dead ringer for Riff Raff from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." (See photos above.) Every time I see him I want to throw toilet paper at the screen and start dancing "The Time Warp."

Faux hawks are so "Top Chef: Season Three." Glad those two spiky-headed yahoos Mikey and Chad were sent packing.