A private chef from Commack is among the 18 contenders under age 25 competing on, appropriately, season 25 of the Gordon Ramsay reality-TV series “Hell\u2019s Kitchen,” premiering Thursday at 8 p.m. on Fox\/5.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t even submit a video!” when he auditioned in November, \/\/2025\/\/ says marvels Michael Catuosco Jr., 24, speaking by phone last week about his audition in November. “I was just sitting on my bed with my girlfriend,\u00a0and was just, like, \u2018Maybe I should apply. Why not? You never know.\u2019 I did just the online portion \u2014 it’s optional to include a video,” added Catuosco, who splits his time between his parents\u2019 home in Commack and his own place in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “And funny enough, they reached out a couple days later.”<\/p>\n
The show \u2014 currently shot at a kitchen\/restaurant studio at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut \u2014 pits ambitious chefs against each other in cooking and other food-related challenges, generally eliminating one each week until a winner emerges for the $250,000 prize and a position at a Ramsay restaurant.<\/p>\n
Catuosco, the eldest of three sons of Michael and Karen Catuosco, has been working in kitchens since high school \u2014 first at his hometown\u2019s now-gone McDonald\u2019s on Vanderbilt Parkway, set to be the site of Long Island\u2019s first Raising Cane\u2019s restaurant, and then at the gastropub Prato 850, on Jericho Turnpike.<\/p>\n
After graduating from Commack High School in 2019 \u2014 learning cooking part-time at the BOCES school Wilson Tech, in Dix Hills \u2014 Catuosco spent a COVID-interrupted five years obtaining a culinary art degree from Rhode Island\u2019s Johnson & Wales University. In addition to a school-required internship semester \u2014 in his case as a line cook for Yachtsman Steakhouse at Disney World in Florida \u2014 he concurrently spent four years on-and-off as a junior sous chef at Commack\u2019s Athenian Greek Taverna, which closed abruptly this spring after 30-plus years.<\/p>\n
“Chef Alex there taught me so much,” Catuosco says of Alex Homenides, who with his brother, John Homenides, had created a local mainstay. “I would go in the mornings for a couple hours and practice and prep cook with him. … He was obviously older than me, but he kidded around like he was my friend. It was awesome.”<\/p>\n
Post-college, Catuosco became a manager for the company running the cafe at the pharmaceutical giant Moderna\u2019s Norwood, Massachusetts, manufacturing plant \u2014 something akin, he says jovially, to the cafeteria scenes of the scientist sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.” “That’s exactly it!” he laughs. “I’m seeing all these scientists walking around! It was just a really cool experience, and I got to learn more about the front-of-house side of things.”<\/p>\n
He progressed to sous chef positions at two consecutive Massachusetts country clubs, then expanded his side gig as a private chef to full time. In that capacity, he says, he has worked private dinners, events and catering in New York\u00a0City;\u00a0Boston; Newport, Rhode Island; Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
None of this prodigious experience \u2014 nor even his being “head chef” at 75 Main in Southampton on HBO Max\u2019s “Serving the Hamptons” season 2 (2024) or his three episodes as a cook this year on Hulu\u2019s “Vanderpump Villa” season 3 \u2014 completely prepared him for the rigors of “Hell\u2019s Kitchen.”<\/p>\n
“It’s really crazy because you don’t get phones or electronics technology,” he recalls excitedly. “I didn’t even know the time, the day, the part of the week! … So there’re 18 of us. You live with them in the dorms. We go to bed and at about six to eight o’clock every morning \u2014 I can only guess because we have no clocks! \u2014 you wake up to the brightest lights in the world flashing on. Some days you get woken up with other craziness, which I can’t say, but you’ll see when it comes out.”<\/p>\n
For all that, he says, “Hell\u2019s Kitchen” proved to be a joy. “You’ll see me laughing, having fun, joking around, and I feel like that’s the biggest thing, to just stay true to yourself and enjoy the ride. There were people struggling, crying, on \u2018Hell’s Kitchen,\u2019 and I’m saying [to them], \u2018Look where you are right now. Just enjoy it. Enjoy life.\u2019 It’s not that deep. Just enjoy every moment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A private chef from Commack is among the 18 contenders under age 25 competing on, appropriately, season 25 of the Gordon Ramsay reality-TV series “Hell\u2019s Kitchen,” premiering Thursday at 8 p.m. on Fox\/5. “I didn’t even submit a video!” when he auditioned in November, \/\/2025\/\/ says marvels Michael Catuosco Jr., 24, speaking by phone last<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7720,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,1436],"class_list":["post-7719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chefs","tag-chef","tag-reality-tv"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dnc\/117310736476382664","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}