Television Nightmares
Do you want to lose weight? Then I recommend that you watch Gordon Ramsay’s new Fox show Kitchen Nightmares during dinner. As the good Gordon might (and often does) say, “Oh my God!”
Now my husband Mark and I are fans of Ramsay’s other show Hell’s Kitchen. But other than the presence of Ramsay himself, everything that makes Hell’s Kitchen so much fun — the competition among chefs whom you get to know and root for throughout the season — is missing from Kitchen Nightmares. What’s left (at least in episode 1) is numerous nausea-inducing scenes featuring rancid food and roughly gazillion roaches and flies.
Of course, by the end of the show Ramsay and his team of miracle workers turn the dive-of-the-week into a restaurant you wouldn’t be afraid to dine in.
What I can’t figure out is what the Manhattan restaurant featured in week 1 (Indian restaurant Dillons, reborn as Purnima) was doing in business before the makeover. Doesn’t New York City have restaurant inspectors? I sure hope so, because that’s where I live.
And now it’s time for a limerick:
Restaurant Nightmare
By Madeleine Begun Kane
I must flee this buffet. Please, let’s go.
A mouse just ran by and … oh no!
I spotted a roach
As it tried to encroach
On my sole. What’s that thing on your toe?
(You can find more of my food humor here and more of my media humor here.)
Tags: Dining Out Humor, Flies, Fox Television, Gordon Ramsay, Hell's Kitchen, Insects, Kitchen Nightmares, Media Humor, New York City Restaurant, Restaurant Inspection, Roaches, TV Humor, Weight Loss Humor
I just watched that episode and I think the British version is superior. The difference was that the production was obvious. Come on, the only way you could transform a restaurant in one night like that is to have premeasured everything before you even started the show and to have a massive crew put it together. In the British version, the changes to the actual restaurant are usually much more subtle.
The other difference was that Ramsey spent a lot of time on what was wrong with the restaurant rather than fixing the problem. There was almost no time dedicated to fixing what was wrong with the kitchen staff. You don’t see much of the good side of Ramsey, in which he praises when people get things right.
The big thing I missed was his return to the restaurant 1-3 months later to see how things are going. Not all of the restaurants he works with stay with his transformation and some do go under despite what he does.
It will be interesting to see whether this show will be the new standard or a deviation from his normal show.
If your restaurant’s failing then go
And apply for chef Ramsey’s new show.
With his ranting and raving
He’ll go about saving
Your business and lots of your dough.
Thanks sigg for your limerick and comments. I didn’t even know there was a British version. It sure sounds better to me, based on your description.
85 bins of food cooked too long
Look at that meatloaf; now that is just wrong!
Fat people with smiles
Shoveling their piles
Please let me go, I just don’t belong.
Your post reminds me of the time that my previous wife (who was admittedly a stunning red head who also happened to speak fluent Spanish) and I were dining with longtime friends in a “fashionable” Italian restaurant in Rhode Island.
After being seated in the proper manner that one would expect from such an establishment and handed our rather fancy menu’s (complete with tassel), my wife opened hers only to find a cockroach staring her in the face from the fold in the page. With a grand flourish she rose, throwing the menu to the floor all the while swearing in perfect Spanish and stomping on the poor menu in efforts to squash our uninvited dinner guest. Considering that my wife’s family was German on both sides, you can imagine the added surprise on the diner’s faces who witnessed this event.
Needless to say, we went elsewhere with half the restaurant’s staff and manager following us out to the parking lot offering us their first and third born sons if we’d forgive them and come back in.
We didn’t
Bugs in the menu
A reevaluation of circumstances
VE, thanks for your fun verse.
Kirk, wonderful anecdote. Thanks.