Below Deck’s Fraser Olender and Hayley De Sola Pinto Reveal Why They Wouldn’t Work With Chef Rachel Again: ‘Two-Faced and Backstabby’
Below Deck chief stew Fraser Olender believes that chef Rachel Hargrove didn’t have his back last season and essentially threw him under the bus to Captain Sandy Yawn.
Olender and stew Hayley De Sola Pinto both said they wouldn’t want to work with Hargrove in the future, sharing that some of the reasons were not aired.
De Sola Pinto said, “I just sometimes found it quite difficult in the galley. It’s quite tense,” she revealed in an Instagram Live alongside Olender.
“I was always just trying to communicate. But then feeling a bit like, ‘Ooh, ooh,’ and maybe feeling a bit uncomfortable,” she added.
Fraser said Chef Rachel wasn’t being truthful about him on ‘Below Deck’ Season 10
Olender seemed to work well with Hargrove on Below Deck Season 9. But something changed for him toward the end of season 10. “After the end of season 10, I don’t think I’d work with her again. Or, just watching it back and seeing how two-faced and backstabby Rachel was,” Olender said. “She never tried to help me in the flesh.”
Yawn often leaned on Hargrove to assess service and the interior. But Olender said Hargrove didn’t give him any support and blamed the interior when the food wasn’t coming out fast enough. “She wasn’t saying the truth. There’s so many things that I think were not true,” he said. “I was being blamed for the service being off. And we were there standing at the galley waiting to go and there was no food coming out. And yet that’s our problem?”
De Sola Pinto said Hargrove’s remarks “instantly” made Olender “look bad.”
“Exactly. If you work in service. You know that if your service is there, which we always are, I’m ready to go. But the food isn’t coming out. And whose fault is it really? Is it interior?” he asked.
Fraser was ‘easier’ to blame for ‘Below Deck’ interior problems
De Sola Pinto thought it was “easier” for Olender to be blamed for any fumbles. “And also, I took it,” he said of the criticism. “I would be like OK, do whatever you need to make myself feel better. But it’s just incorrect. I just took it a lot of the time and I would just accept people sort of firing things at me, even though at the time it was very, very weird. Because what happened in reality is not exactly how things are portrayed afterwards. Or at least I don’t like hearing a side of the story that’s just totally false.”
“You never had a chance to stand up for yourself after watching it. And say your piece,” De Sola Pinto said. “And I think that would have annoyed me a little bit as well if I experienced somebody speaking about me in that way when I’d been nothing but nice to them. I would really want the opportunity to say my piece.”
Some of the reasons the stews don’t want to work with Chef Rachel were not shown
“The whole season if you watch it back and someone’s lied about you and has been horrible about you, it just makes you kind of think that you’ve just been taken advantage of,” Olender said.
Earlier in the discussion, Olender said some of the issues he had with Hargrove occurred off-camera. “People don’t see this stuff,” he said. “There was so much that wasn’t shown that should be. And every season is not shown and should be. But I think people like to protect certain cast members, but I don’t think that’s a fair representation of reality.”
