TV is the New Reading

‘Kitchen Nightmares’:

Nice place to visit, but you

wouldn’t want to eat there

The camera finds an image of five-star chef Gordon Ramsay under siege, with a couple dozen carving knives flying at him. He plucks one from the air midflight, calmly sharpens it and whips it back at the camera, which shatters in a direct hit.

The opening sequence of “Kitchen Nightmares,” airing Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on FOX, is not the only thing about the show that is eerily repetitive from week to week.

There’s something strange about the motivations behind someone allowing a crew to come into a place of business and film in lurid detail the reasons no one should ever have anything to do with it. And then, over the course of a week, let some rude British guy berate and humiliate you based on criteria you’ve never set, let alone met. Then, after changing everything completely, expect you to maintain all his changes.

Yet restaurateurs do so. Especially some really awful ones. Honestly, these people seem to lack some fundamental observational skills – especially since the last few have claimed to be such people-oriented restaurant owners. It’s incredible that in all of this chummy closeness with the customers, they couldn’t ask “Say, what is it about this place that really isn’t working for you?”

Of course, if they had that level of self-awareness, one imagines they wouldn’t allow the cameras in there in the first place.

Quick fix

In that so many of the problems seem to revolve around taste, quality and presentation – Chef Ramsay routinely rakes the clueless owners over the coals for the graceless flop that comes out of the kitchen – it’s interesting to me that so much of the focus ends up on the look of the restaurant and the complete reimagination of the menu. After all, if they were barely able to manage the stuff they’d been serving forever, how would they manage a complete change? One place couldn’t even manage fish, and Ramsay plunked several different cuts of steak down in front of the hapless chef and said “This place is going to be known for great steak – grill it!”

What? The entire staff was poorly prepped for this change and of course there were all of the personality disorders of the owners, who go from praising Ramsay to cursing him and questioning his abilities – at which point I just want to scream at the screen: “Everyone with a five-star restaurant raise your hand!”

Obviously Ramsay isn’t doing any of this from the kindness of his heart. He’s there to make the most dramatic television show he can, so he belittles the owners, catches them in lies and makes the most uncharitable assessments of the food he possibly can. He finds all of the worst aspects of the kitchen and displays them in glorious technicolor. And he is in almost unstoppable attack mode.

He then confronts the owners themselves and works to convince them that they’re not only terrible chefs but inadequate human beings until they start to just crave his goodwill.

What the ... ?

So Ramsay undertakes his massive makeovers, very quickly runs the staff through all the changes and keeps everyone on the edgiest of edges all night long. And he arranges for a lot of people to stop in and the staff is running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

And if you’re not sure what that looks like, take a peek at the “before” version of the restaurants. Oy.

There’s all these confrontations leading up to the most successful re-openings ever, causing the owners to make 180-degree turns on their assessment of Ramsay before Ramsay runs off to torture another restaurant owner and his kitchen staff.

I’ve never been in a restaurant as bad as the ones on this show. I’m not entirely convinced that even the restaurants they’re in are as bad as they’re being shown to be – the editing team re-uses a lot of footage and one imagines that they’d use as much bad footage as they had.

But as mindless entertainment goes, I guess it fills a void until “Project Runway” returns this week over on Bravo.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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