Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

So I’ve gotten hooked on a BBC show (seen on BBC America on DirecTV) called Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. The commercials originally sold me on it because it looked comical, but it’s more than just funny. The premise is that foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is invited to visit certain failing restaurants around the UK (invited by the restaurants’ owners, that is) and spend a week there to try to straighten them out. Needless to say, these restaurants are universally – to borrow one of Ramsay’s favorite expressions – in the shit. The food is usually horrendous. The menus are overcomplicated and overlong. The kitchens are terribly run, and often not even clean.

The episode I caught last night – “Clubway 41” – was one of the more shocking ones. The Blackpool restaurant had won an award as the best restaurant in the town from the local tourism board, but Ramsay found the food disgusting, from the salmon, strawberry, and watercress salad to the pork medallions in a brie and nectarine sauce with parsnip crisps (which Gordon managed to bend in half without breaking). It turns out that the chef had gone to culinary school in the 1970s and hadn’t been in a kitchen since, leading to a rough exchange between Ramsay and the chef where Ramsay airs him out for his inability to perform basic cooking tasks like making a casserole or cooking mussels. Ramsay went back several months later, only to find that they’d cancelled their dinner service after just eight weeks; he tries to relaunch it based around simple-to-cook comfort foods and short-order meals, but the restaurant appears to have closed not long after that. There was some controversy over this episode, as the chef-owner and the tourism board both took issue with how they were depicted, but I find it hard to be sympathetic to a chef who clearly can’t cook and who admits that the food on the night of the first relaunch was prepared by the TV show’s chefs, not by himself.

I just find the fact that these complete kitchen incompetents think they can run a restaurant kitchen amazing, and the lack of common sense on the part of most of these owners and chefs – like the one owner who wouldn’t pay her chef for prep time and bought all ingredients at the local Tesco – provides for a lot of unintentional comedy. And the best news of all is that there’s a U.S. version coming, debuting Wednesday night at 9 pm on Fox, just called Kitchen Nightmares, with at least one controversy already underway. If you like cooking, the restaurant business, or f-bombs, I highly recommend you watch it.

Comments

  1. This show has been aired for a couple seasons here in Finland already, and I find it fantastic. its good to hear its available in the states now too. I find Ramsay extremely hilarious, but also helpful in some way. A couple of my favorite ones are the one where he helps out the lady with the Caribbean-style restaurant in London, and the episode where he totally remakes the course-side restaurant at a country club. The best part of his show is that one sees how some of these smaller mom and pop shops differ in food preparation from an establishment that has an aim of actually cooking real food. So many of these places use the deep-fryer, the freezer, and the microwave far too much for anyplace that should present itself as a restaurant. I also enjoy another show of Ramsay’s which I can only assume comes from the US, probably food network, entitled Hell’s Kitchen. It doesn’t have as many of his food tips, and his swearing and anger go a bit over-the-top, but it still has that Gordon Ramsay stamp of humor.

  2. i’ve proclaimed the us version the best show on television. perhaps i am evil-hearted, but i love watching ramsay smack down incompetent owners and chefs that are convinced their way of doing things are effective. it is so blatantly obvious that what they are doing is not working, yet they often bitterly defend their positions. leads to classic buffoon drama which normally ends with ramsay yelling “are you mad?!” or “you’re a f*cking moron!”

    juicebucket long island dude (peter, brother of owner) from last week needs his own show. complete disaster of a human being.

  3. It’s good to know I am not the only one addicted to that show. Unfortunately, there won’t be any new episodes for a while. After watching the entire first U.S. season, I can’t help but wonder one thing. Why on earth would you open a restaurant if you didn’t know anything about running a restaurant? All of these owners invest their life savings and they have no clue what they are doing. Geeze. That’s just asking for trouble. That’s like the Ford family trying to run a football team. Oh wait…