The cheftestants arrive back in the kitchen to find a panel of judges, including past cheftestants Mike I. (boo!), Bryan Voltaggio (yay!), and Spike (boo!). I could have lived my whole life not ever seeing Mike I. again. The other judges are Beth Scott, a chef named Nora (I would rewind to find out who she is, but she's barely in the episode, so let's move on), Padma, Tom, and Eric Ripert. Holy giant panel. Padma calls time and the teams get to cooking their breakfast dishes. The way this first round works is that two teams will be declared safe based on breakfast dishes. The remaining teams will have to continue on and cook lunch. And.... go!

Amanda and Stephen are making a Hollandaise sauce and they decide they'll know it's done when it tastes good. Yeesh. Hollandaise is a pretty fragile sauce and not something you just want to wing. Lynne is confident about their dish, because she makes it in her class all the time. It looks pretty messy, though. Tiffany has, as she stated earlier, taken the lead on their dish, a crab cake Benedict (which I would totally order and kind of want one right now), and she feels the pressure of Tim relying heavily on her. Andrea and Kelly want to win the breakfast round so that they can be declared safe and not have to cook any more. Ed interviews that their dish is very challenging (so probably not the best choice since Beth Scott said they need something that is easy to reproduce in their chain). Apparently, all of the components need to come together at the last minute, which seems like poor planning. Also, Alex's pancakes are looking quite... charred? And Ed disagrees with how Alex wants to plate the dish, thinking that it lacks finesse. In the end, they don't quite get all of their stuff on the plate, including the Hollandaise sauce they created. Oops.

Weird interstitial: Angelo and Tamesha flirt while cooking. Ed thinks he only likes her because she's young and green. Tamesha laughs in an interview that there's no way she'd get with Angelo. I feel like a rube mentioning this, but isn't he married? So that might be an obstacle.