Say “I” if you spent 60 minutes desperately wanting to tie Claire Robinson’s hair back for her on last night’s episode of Chefs vs. City!

Come on, woman! Buy yourself a 30-cent hair tie. A scrunchie. A bump-it. Anything to hold those gorgeous locks back while you’re hacking at a fish that weighs more than you do.
Now that we got that out of the way, welcome to Food Network Humor’s coverage of Chefs vs City! If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s basically Amazing Race with a smaller budget, cornier clues, less fuel-efficient vehicles, and a slightly less rugged host. Each week, two people race against chefs Aarón Sánchez and Chris Cosentino to complete challenges and get to the finish line first. Last night’s competitors were the Food Network’s own Sunny Anderson and Claire Robinson.
The season 2 premiere was supposed to be rematch between the two teams, but how could it be a rematch if one of the parties (Kelsey Nixon) wasn’t competing? In all honesty, it didn’t feel like a rematch so much as it did a chance for the network to parade Claire Robinson around in tight jeans.
For the first challenge, the teams had to carry a gigantic grouper through a slippery fish market, and then portion it into ten 9-10 oz. pieces. The men completed the challenge without incident, but the women struggled from early on. Claire could barely lift the heavy fish up out of the barrel, and then had a hard time filleting it. Perhaps she wasn’t strong enough. Perhaps she couldn’t see through her own hair. Whatever the reason, the boys completed the challenge first and moved on first. The girls left only a few minutes later.
Cut to a shot of Sunny Anderson sitting in the back seat of an SUV that’s bigger than many NYC apartments, screaming driving instructions at Claire Robinson like her life depended on her getting into the right lane AT THAT VERY MOMENT. Was she just getting into the competition? Probably. Would I have intentionally maneuvered the car off of a cliff had I been driving? Probably.

For the next challenge, the teams headed to an animal farm to herd goats into a pen, milk one, and drink its milk. And THIS is where Sunny and Claire really started looking like they wanted to kill each other. Once again, the boys worked well together to complete the challenge quickly, but the girls had no strategy whatsoever. They were just running around bickering at each other like an old married couple. “NO! STAND OVER THERE! BRING THE *#!@% GOAT FOOD OVER HERE TO ME!” It was pretty awkward. I didn’t know if I was watching Chefs vs. City, or a really bad episode of The Marriage Ref.

When the goats were herded and milked, the teams headed to Tap Tap in South Beach to prepare and eat a bowl of conch stew and 10 conch fritters. The stew is incredibly spicy, because it’s made with several habanero chilis (which are 100x hotter than jalapenos and, coincidentally, 700x hotter than Guy Fieri). Aaron cry-babied his way through the stew, while Chris powered down the 10 conch fritters and yelled at him whenever he tried to drink water. On the other side, Claire bravely sucked down the entire bowl of stew, AND the rest of Sunny’s conch fritters because she couldn’t finish them herself. Uh, way to pull your weight, Sunny.

I’ve got to hand it to Claire here. She’s a tough competitor, and completed the difficult challenge with a minimum of whining and fuss. As Paris Hilton would have said when she was moderately relevant in 2006, “that’s hot.”
