It's too bad that The Restaurant's season has come to such an unceremonious end. I was just starting to care about the characters. Of course there are the three stars: Rocco, Jeffrey Chodorow, and Mama. But it's the little guys that are keeping the show semi-interesting. There's Carrie, the yenta waitress who spreads gossip like a bad strain of strep throat; Carol, Chodorow's Hadassah pitbull whose bowler hat hardly contains her frizzy hair; Sarah, Chodorow's sweet taskmaster with the British accent; Uzay, Carrie's co-conspirator and "celebrity waiter"; and finally, Gavin, the new resident asshole who just bought a first class ticket on a power trip from hell.

When we last saw Rocco a week ago, he was babbling about how he was going to take control of his restaurant by cancelling all his plans and devoting all his energy to the kitchen - for three days. To prove this point, we found him sleeping with his beautiful girlfriend in a booth in the dining room. Yes, it isn't coming to New York without possibly sitting in a dried puddle of Rocco's man juice.

As snow descended on the little bistro that couldn't, Rocco attended to personelle matters by firing emotional line chef Gabe. With tears in his eyes and dreams of culinary fame dashed on live television, Gabe did the oh-so-awkward move of going to pat Rocco on the shoulder and then holding back when he remembered that he had just been fired. I could sense a collective cringe from the twelve people across the nation who were actually watching.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey, fresh from an outing to the Men's Warehouse casual sweater department, hopped on a plane to Miami to sample the food of potential Rocco replacement, Marc Randazzo. While Chodorow and crew launched an assault of uninspired jokes ("You know how in boxing there's a KO and a TKO? Well, you just earned an SKO - standing kitchen ovation."), his wife had a foodgasm with some cheesecake that resulted in her confessing that she's both a lady on the street and a freak in the bed. Actually, she just said that she was a dessert freak.

Things weren't quite as sunny in NYC as Rocco made his latest cameo appearance in the kitchen. He put some wood into the gas stove, which is kind of, I don't know, illegal. Suddenly, Rocco's browbeaten assistant rushed into the kitchen to alert him that Yvonne, his fiance, had fallen off a scooter in the snow and was in ambulatory care at the hospital. Happy to have an excuse to not cook, Rocco bolted from The Restaurant, leaving newbee Gavin at the reigns.