→ October 4, 2007
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Kitchen Nightmares: Original recipe versus extra snarky.

The American version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, just titled Kitchen Nightmares, is off to a solid start in the ratings, so we’re likely to be treating to quite a bit more swearing and family drama over the rest of this season. Although it’s entertaining, it can’t hold a candle to the BBC original.

The main difference revolves around food: the original version did, and the American version doesn’t, with food almost an afterthought in the way the U.S. show is edited and presented. It’s clear that Ramsay spends some time – perhaps a lot of time – in the kitchens of the restaurants he visits and in redesigning the menus, but the show gives us almost none of that content, instead preferring to show us arguments (which are many and varied) and “confessional” clips, the staple of the American reality show perhaps known as the best opportunity for the morons in each show to either 1) claim that they didn’t actually excrete the shit that hit the fan or 2) show some fake tears.

Episode #3 (The Mixing Bowl) was a perfect example. The restaurant’s manager, Mike, is an obvious fraud; Gordon sniffs him out in about ten seconds (although Gordon was outright hostile at that point, making fun of Mike’s weight, which I thought was out of bounds and out of character for the BBC version of Gordon) and at the end tries to convince the chef/owner to fire the guy. Mike spends all his confessional time either claiming that his various screw-ups weren’t his fault or crying. I understand that the producers and editors can make someone look bad through selective editing, but they can only make you look bad if you do bad stuff. I’ve been in my share of restaurants, and the only time I’ve had a chef or manager sit down at my table to chat was when it was a relative of mine. Mike was sitting down left and right, and giving out 50% coupons. You can cry all you want and claim it was some teenaged waitress’ fault, but it doesn’t take a lot of tricky editing to make you look bad.

But what we saw remarkably little of in this episode was actual cooking. The BBC version emphasizes the food; nearly every restaurant Gordon goes to is failing because the food isn’t made from fresh ingredients, is too complicated, or outright sucks. (“What the fuck were you thinking when you put apricots in the mashed potatoes?” has become something of a running joke in our house – well, at least when my daughter’s in bed.) The show shows a lot of the food, both before the revamp and after, and the bulk of what Gordon is shown doing is either working with the chef or creating a new menu, and usually we get a healthy dose of both. There’s certainly some drama on the BBC version, with chefs walking out and one episode with a hilarious bit of sibling rivalry, but what we’ve seen in the first three episodes here trumps the worst of the BBC series.

The production of the U.S. version also leaves a bit to be desired. I could do without the confessionals, which add nothing other than showing that Americans – at least those who work in restaurants – are immature little twits. (In other news, Kitchen Nightmares is the #1 rated show in France.) The free restaurant makeovers are a bit of a joke; in the British version, most of the improvement comes from hard work, not hitting the decorating lottery. And Gordon feels a lot more scripted. Not only is he generally more ornery, but even his asides to the camera seem like they’ve either been written for him or they’re the result of numerous retakes. The spontaneity of the original isn’t there. Finally, the U.K. version’s final segment, running five to seven minutes, includes a second visit by Gordon to the restaurant about a month after the initial trip, and he often has to review some of his major lessons or to just air someone out a second time. And sometimes business is just wonderful and it’s all hugs and roses (and f-bombs). But the U.S. version skips that; just one of the three episodes has had a real second look, two weeks after Gordon left and without Gordon there at all.

I haven’t deleted my Season Pass to the U.S. version, in spite of all of these flaws. I like Ramsay and I want to hear what he has to say between f-bombs. I’m also strangely riveted by one particular type of drama – seeing what an unaware or meek boss will do with an employee who is lazy, incompetent, or both. And I hold out hope that they’ll cut the gimmicks and let Gordon and the food rule the show. Gimmicks wear thin, but good food never does.

Filed Under: Food, Media
→ September 14, 2007
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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.

Filed Under: Cooking, Media Tagged With:
→ September 7, 2007
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Those Holiday Inn commercials.

So in first place on the list of “worst current commercial campaigns” has to be the Holiday Inn ads with the three blond guys making fools of themselves, right? What exactly is the message that Holiday Inn is trying to send here?

  • “Only dorks stay at our hotels.”
  • “If you don’t want to talk to people like these guys, stay somewhere else.”
  • “Holiday Inn: We’ll make you uncomfortable in every sense of the word.”

Avis did something like this a few years ago, albeit not quite as bad, with their campaign “What if we didn’t try harder?” After which, you’d get 15-20 seconds of a customer having a very bad experience at an Avis rental car outlet.

Marketing and advertising are certainly inexact sciences, but to me, a good ad should have two or three things: recall, a positive message about the brand or product, and perhaps a call to action depending on what the commercial is advertising. The worst ads have great recall but leave the viewer with a very negative impression of the brand or product. The Holiday Inn ads are unmistakable – as soon as I see any of those three idiots on the screen, I’m flying for the remote – and they’ve made it clear to me that Holiday Inn is the antithesis of cool. And yet these ads have been running for over a year, and I’m sure we’ll be inundated with them again in the playoffs. Good luck cleaning up that brand image after you’ve spent a year and a half defecating all over it.

Filed Under: Media
→ August 18, 2007
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Rick Hurd on the A’s.

Just wanted to point out a very well-written article on what’s behind the A’s struggles this year. Hurd does a nice job of laying out some possible drivers and examining them in turn, and he does it all in a very non-judgmental tone. It’s an insightful article without the “look at me!” tone that has really turned me off of so much of mainstream sportswriting.

Filed Under: Media
→ July 15, 2007
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Those annoying Verizon FIOS commercials.

So in a past life, I worked for a couple of high-tech firms (mostly in the networking arena), so I’m a little bit familiar with some of the jargon – familiar enough that those new Verizon FIOS commercials, with their talk of “dB hot” and “true qualm” (whatever the bleep that is), set off my BS detector. And it turns out that I’m not alone. Turns out that Tom Wright-Piersanti thought the commercial was a little too slick, and he had enough technical knowledge to root out the truth behind those terms. It’s a good read if those commercials have gotten under your skin as they did mine.

Filed Under: Media
→ June 13, 2007
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Go Islanders.

Not that I’m any kind of hockey fan – the NHL ceased to exist for me when the owners lied about how much money they were making and the players bought it – but I have to give credit to the Islanders for making some attempt to bring bloggers into the arena on a wider scale without marginalizing the mainstream sports media. The sports blogosphere is a mixed bag; it’s full of bad writing and uninformed analysis, but at the same time, it’s capable of the sort of narrowcasting that the MSM can’t handle, it’s got a real-time no-bull ethos that the MSM definitely can’t handle, and it has the potential to be incredibly fun … and we know that the MSM looks down on fun.

But what I also find interesting is the strategic value of this move. Credentialing bloggers, even on a limited, separate-but-equal basis, is a way of co-opting them. Bloggers tend to revel in their excluded nature; they are not part of the mainstream, and often the teams/leagues won’t even acknowledge them (putting them in company with Al Jazeera!), et cetera, giving them a rebel’s cachet that I think is a huge part of their appeal. But access will almost certainly blunt some of that edge; when you meet a player, for example, it’s a lot harder to tear him to shreds for his on-field (-ice, -court) incompetence. It’ll be interesting to see if criticism of the Islanders from credentialed blogs starts to fade, or at least soften, or if we start to see a divide between credentialed and uncredentialed blogs. Does taking a credential mean you’ve sold out? And will this pay off for the Islanders in improved coverage, or at least reduced criticism? I’m betting this wasn’t as ad hoc a decision as the Isles’ PR guy would like us to believe – that it is, in fact, part of a strategy to bring bloggers into the fold.

Filed Under: Media