Cat Smith stood over a hot skillet, debating what to do with her scallops. The bivalves were nearly finished cooking — and that was just the problem. The risotto set to accompany them wouldn’t be ready for another five minutes, according to the chef preparing that dish.

As 20 or so cameras captured her every move, Smith had to think fast. She took the scallops off the heat and put them on a plate, half-cooked. She would finish them off when the risotto was almost ready.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay was not pleased. What was the point in taking them off only to throw them on again “two minutes later”? he asked her after flipping over the partially browned discs with an air of exasperated disgust.

The moment landed Smith, a private chef and small business owner from Baltimore, on the chopping block in just the second episode of “Hell’s Kitchen,” a cooking reality show that airs Thursdays on Fox.

The experience seems to have been more than Smith, who spent 16 years in the Air Force Reserves, bargained for. “I went into it thinking, like, ‘OK, I’m an Air Force veteran. I’ve been through basic training, I can deal with yelling,” she said. But more unmooring than Ramsay’s famously tough tone was his own personal force field. He walked in the room, and suddenly she forgot everything she’d ever known about cooking.

Smith might seem like an unconventional person to appear on the show, which has been on the air for 20 years and can feel like a cultural throwback to an earlier, yellier era of kitchens.

Over her own more than 20-year career in hospitality, she has challenged the prejudices and biases of the food world. After working in the kitchens of Guy Fieri’s Baltimore Kitchen & Bar in Horseshoe Casino as well as Magdalena, she founded the advocacy group Just Call Me Chef in 2018 to champion Black women in the field. Together with business partner Kiah Gibian, she now runs Our Time Kitchen in Old Goucher, which offers affordable kitchen space to minority women and people of marginalized genders running their own small businesses.

Despite her résumé, Smith says she’s often felt excluded from food world circles because she doesn’t own a restaurant. “It’s kind of almost like that ‘You can’t sit with us’ energy,” she said.

Friend and fellow chef Amanda Mack said she understands the struggle to get taken seriously in the food world while unattached to a big-name restaurant. “People like us, who are inventive and creative, it’s challenging to put ourselves in a box and in a category,” she said.

And Mack, for one, wasn’t at all surprised to see Smith compete on “Hell’s Kitchen.” “She is all about hustle,” the Crust by Mack founder said. “Going on ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ gives her an edge over everybody else.”

The only surprise: that Smith was able to keep her appearance a secret for so long.

Smith said the audition for “Hell’s Kitchen” was a grueling process involving rigorous health and background checks. Before she even found out whether she’d been cast, she spent days locked in a hotel above the Connecticut casino where the show is filmed.

The producers stipulated that her look should stay the same throughout filming, so she opted to leave her wig collection at home, wearing her hair short and blond. When she finally found out she made it onto the show, she was elated.

Three episodes have aired so far this season, and Smith has had high highs and low lows.

During one early challenge, contestants were told to prepare a dish representing their home state, so Smith prepared her own take on the Baltimore coddie. Ramsay tasted it and pronounced the dish “rustic, charming, you on a plate.”

“Everybody was like, under the comments, ‘he’s flirting with you,’” Smith said with a laugh. But the next episode witnessed the half-cooked scallops fiasco and Smith was nearly sent home.

Though Bunny’s and Sally O’s chef Jesse Sandlin hasn’t watched “Hell’s Kitchen,” she empathizes with Smith. As a Season 6 “Top Chef” contestant, Sandlin felt mentally drained by the weekslong isolation of filming and the pressure to perform. “I mean, I hated it,” she said.

“There were no books to read, there was no music to listen to. You’re around these people all the time. The mental aspect of it was incredibly difficult,” she said. She made some missteps in a few challenges and was eventually sent home, but even after returning to Baltimore, she felt depressed and weighed down by self-doubt. She didn’t know whether she wanted to cook again.

Sandlin was distressed to hear that Smith faced the wrath of Ramsay. “His whole shtick is being this giant asshole, right?” she said. “Those competition reality shows are so hard because people think that’s how everything went down,” but the results are edited to tell a certain story, even for the most talented of chefs.

While it was hard to watch Smith get reprimanded by Ramsay following the scallops fail, Mack said she’s proud of how her friend took responsibility for the situation, rather than pointing fingers at others in the kitchen. “One of the reasons I love Cat, she is very composed, she is very accountable,” Mack said.

Smith ultimately prevailed for at least a few more episodes, though she can’t say exactly how many. But the moment was dramatic enough that her mother cried when they watched it together at a screening at R. House.

As she’s viewed the finished episodes at watch parties around Baltimore, it’s been painful to watch herself struggle on screen. On Reddit, she saw, someone commented that she was “one of the worst chefs.”

“I just felt so bad and embarrassed,” she said. Nearly getting sent home in the second episode deflated her; in subsequent challenges, she struggled to regain her confidence. At times, she regrets not fighting harder, knowing that some of her fellow cast members may have been kept on for the drama they brought to the season. As is typical in reality shows, Smith felt betrayed by those who spoke badly about her in confessionals. After filming, Smith created a group chat hoping to bring together the contestants. As the episodes have aired, “the energy in the group chat has shifted.”

Still, she’s proud to have represented Maryland — and her hometown of Baltimore — and is considering how to make the most of her time on the show.

“Everybody’s just hyping me up, like, ‘Take your moment, get your 15 minutes, lean into it,’” Smith said. ”I’m trying to figure out how to do that.”