Service started around 5 or 5:30 until 9, sometimes 11. “They’d mike us, and then we’d do prep all day ’til around 2:00 and then we’d do the ‘confessionals’. I’d get ready and fall asleep right by the door so when they came I was completely ready. “I’d wake up at 5:30 and wake everybody else up so they didn’t have to wake us up with alarms and sirens. “For 28 days,” she laughed, “you get about an hour-and-a-half to two hours sleep a night. Sure, it was hell, but how did you survive it? Not that she didn’t relish the experience of being famous for 15 minutes and then another 15.

“I love it,” she declared, clearly in her element. Heather says it was a natural progression: Port Jefferson High School to the Culinary Institute of America to sous chef to “Hell’s Kitchen” to Red Rock to Seattle to California and back to Long Island in a restaurant where she’s already started changing the menu.

So how did a girl like that end up in a place like this after a gig like that? I found this out last weekend when I walked into the re-imagined Monterey Restaurant and was shocked to see cute little Heather cooking up a storm as head chef.

She is now the head chef at a new restaurant in Long Beach, Long Island and happy as a clam inventing seafood recipes for people who live in the beach town and know their fish from their seafood. Heather West, who won Season 2 of “Hell’s Kitchen” when she was just 26 years old, was - according to the show - supposed to become the head chef at T-Bones, a fancy steakhouse in the Red Rock Casino Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas.

Heather red rock casino