What Did Hannah Ferrier Reveal About Chef Mila Being Fired from ‘Below Deck Med?’

Now that Chef Mila Kolomeitseva from Below Deck Mediterranean has left the yacht, chief stew Hannah Ferrier has some thoughts about working with her for two charters.

Kolomeitseva never seemed to recover after serving food from grocery store boxed ingredients, plus she freely let the crew know she had a negative view of homosexuality. Although Kolomeitseva managed to make a few meals to please, she overwhelmingly struggled to provide the five-star experience yacht vacationers expect.

Immediately following the second charter, Captain Sandy Yawn fired Kolomeitseva. Yawn let her down easy because she empathized with the chef. “I’ve been let go. It doesn’t feel good,” Yawn tweeted in response to a comment. “My contract was not renewed on a boat and I’ll never forget how that felt. Treat others as you want to be treated.”

Ferrier actually felt protective of Kolomeitseva

When Ferrier talked to Bravo’s The Feast, she said she felt protective of the struggling chef.  “I’ve worked with female chefs in the past and I think it’s such a different dynamic,” she said. “Because I feel like when I’m going head to head with a man, it’s like — all’s fair in love and war.”

“And I know this sounds bad, but I couldn’t treat a female chef the same way as a male… I’m naturally so much more protective over women than I am men,” Ferrier continued. “So I wouldn’t go for a female chef the way I’d go for a male chef.”

While Ferrier said the experience made her not want to work with a female chef again, but she added never say never. “I did say that I wouldn’t really want to work with a female chef again,” she said. “But I said that with a female captain — and then Sandy and I have managed to work out our issues.”

It was up to Ferrier to sound the alarm

Clearly, the crew and charter guests could see that the food wasn’t up to superyacht standards. However, Kolomeitseva muddled along and tried to make meals work with short cuts. When she couldn’t make homemade pancake batter, she used a box of Aunt Jemima instead. Not really five star.

Ferrier said that although the writing was on the wall, it was up to her to sound the alarm. “When I see things like that coming out of the galley, I have to say something because if I don’t no one else is going to,” she explained to Bravo’s The Daily Dish. “Sandy’s upstairs driving the boat, the second and the third stew, it’s not their place, the deck crew wouldn’t know good food if it hit them on the face. So if I don’t say something, no one does.”

She knew Kolomeitseva wasn’t going to make it from the beginning too. “I wouldn’t say I was hopeful, because I kind of think you know what you know,” she said. “Watching Mila’s food for the first few charters, I didn’t really have a whole heap of hope that it was gonna go from that to Michelin, you know?” 

How did the crew react when Kolomeitseva was fired?

Cameras only caught stews Aesha Scott and Anastasia Surmava saying goodbye to Kolomeitseva. Otherwise, the chef slinked off the yacht alone.

“It was definitely not one of shock, that’s for sure,” Ferrier told Bravo’s The Daily Dish when Yawn fired Kolomeitseva. “And it was honestly just relief. People think that I kind of enjoy or I get off on giving someone a rough time. It’s like, I would really prefer if just everyone was good at their job and just shut the f**k up most of the time. Like, that would be the ideal situation for me.”

Yawn agreed that the crew was relieved after Kolomeitseva left. “They were like, ‘Oh thank God. We’ll work twice as hard just get her off the boat.’ I took Hannah’s third stew and she was still like, ‘I got this. Just get her off the boat.’ When I saw what Hannah went through in the galley with her, I was like, oh my gosh,” Yawn explained to Decider.

“Hannah did an amazing job and Hannah didn’t share all of that with me, which I wish she would because I could actually make her life a little easier,” Yawn continued. “But, wow. She went through a lot. Oh my god and Mila’s ego! Come on. Seriously? Even when I told her that Anastasia is going to cook, she goes and pulls the lamb out?”