I Watch Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares So You Don't Have To

Somewhere in America (or in the UK, where there are separate series), a restaurant is failing. Once prospective diners lined up around the block. Now bored, lonely servers refill salt and pepper shakers that don’t need refilling and gaze forlornly into the empty parking lot while the chef/owner weeps quietly in the kitchen and contemplates suicide. But help is on its way, in the form of the television personality and restaurateur Gordon Ramsey, with his ravaged forehead, excess of nervous energy, and bullying manner. He greets the failing restaurant’s chef/owner and servers cordially, and asks to sample the former’s cooking. He finds it appalling, to the point of spitting out half-chewed mouthfuls of it. The chef/owner is of course mortified with embarrassment, the servers, who have come to regard the chef/owner as an asshole, quietly vindicated. They beam delightedly as Chef Ramsay spits out the chef/owner’s signature dish.

Chef Ramsay asks to see the kitchen and to watch the chef/owner at work. He notes that the chef/owner seems to lack…passion for cooking, and is horrified to discover that the restaurant’s refrigerator is full of malodorous spoiled foodstuffs that are likely to make ill anyone who eats them. Much of his commentary is bleeped out. After rubbing the chef/owner’s nose in the kitchen’s deplorable hygiene, he bellows, “Shut it down!” and there is another commercial break.

Chef Ramsay and the chef/owner, whom Chef Ramsay condescendingly now addresses as Bigboy, snarl at each other. Bigboy has never hated anyone or anything as much as he hates Chef Ramsay. But now Chef Ramsay’s unseen staff devises a wonderful streamlined new menu for the restaurant featuring Clean Flavors, or, in the UK, Flavours. The servers smirk with pleasure as Bigboy is unable to deny that Chef Ramsay’s underlings’ cooking is far superior to his own.

But Chef Ramsay has only just begun. He has brought his decorators in too, and they have transformed the failing restaurant’s interior, removing many of the ghastly dust-collecting doo-dads and memorabilia with which Bigboy had been unable to part over the years, replacing the cruddy old tables ‘n’ chairs. The interior was admittedly ugly before. It is ugly in a different, more modern, way now, Chef Ramsay’s decorators not being very good. At the sight of his transformed interior, Bigboy is nonetheless moved to tears, and is consoled by one of the softer-hearted of his servers, who’s similarly lachrymose. This might be exactly what is needed to rekindle Bigboy’s long-missing passion! Now if he can only master the array of new dishes Chef Ramsay’s minions have devised — before tomorrow night, when — oops! — Chef Ramsay has invited everyone who’s anyone in town to the failing restaurant’s relaunch!

The mayor comes, and the local food critic. The kitchen, which hasn’t begun to master the new dishes, and is used to feeding six people per evening, is of course overwhelmed. Blood-pressure-raising music is played at a high volume. Bigboy is shown cursing and sweating into one of the new dishes he’s cooking for the first time. “Work as a [bleep] team!” Chef Ramsay bellows. Various diners tell the camera that they have been waiting 22 hours for their appetizers. The look on the local food critic’s pinched little face suggests that she intends to write something uncomplimentary on her blog, which is read by her parents and 11 others.

But now, with Chef Ramsay sputtering and gasping incredulously at their incompetence, the kitchen hits it stride. The packed house gets fed. One of Chef Ramsay’s assistant’s cleanly flavorful new dishes has wiped the smirk off the local food critic's face. Various diners are seen nodding at each other in delight. Yum!

As the last of them leaves, Bigboy has little recourse but to admit that Chef Ramsay isn’t the raging asshole he earlier seemed. He was in fact being cruel to be kind, just as in the Nick Lowe song! Has he not, after all, saved the restaurant’s bacon?  Twitching hyperactively in that way he has, bouncing on the balls of his feet, Chef Ramsay now tells an unseen interviewer in the parking lot that the restaurant may not go under, leaving no money for Bigboy's daughter's life-saving surgery, if Bigboy can retain his newly recovered passion for cooking, and can get his staff to keep Working Together as a Team. 

He removes his chef’s jacket and strides off, all 6-2 of him, presumably in search of another restaurant to redeem, other lives to save.  

Son of What's In a Namath?

Watching NFL football, as I do entirely too much, I often wish that every stadium employed a few snipers to pick off players who, after doing something notable, reflexively point up at the sky as though to cede some of the credit for their touchdown, interception, or fumble recovery to God. I believe that everyone is indeed entitled to his or her own spiritual beliefs — except childishly literal ones, such as that God is watching a meaningless game between two teams that won’t make the playoffs, and guiding the ball for the greater glory of True Believers.

I might be willing to make an exception for players with wonderfully wacky given names, my own favorite this week being D’Brickashaw (Ferguson, Jets offensive right tackle), with Plaxico (as in Burress, the currently incarcerated New York Giants wide receiver) residing perpetually in my personal Hall of Fame.

I’m amused by how many NFL stars’ invented names — LaDainian Tomlinson’s and Lavernues (don’t try to pronounce it!) Coles’, for instance — begin with what in Spanish, Italian, and French is the feminine definite article. Hats off to LeBron James’ mother — only 16 at the time! — for getting it right.

Before my daughter’s birth, when her mother and I thought she would be our son, I wanted to name him Nimrod, after the mighty Mesopotamian ruler credited with having built the Tower of Babel, and mentioned in a Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band song I liked. Leslie argued that to do so would be to condemn him to relentless persecution on the playgrounds of his childhood. I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe it now. My guess is that D’Brickashaw Ferguson wouldn’t have been taunted much even if his name had been Lace Petticoat, whereas those who wished to torment me simply ignored my very commonplace given name and reworked my surname in an endless variety of wryly cruel ways. It’s not a child’s ordinary name that precludes his persecution, but his size and temperament.

Having come to understand that one of the NFL's most unusually named white stars, Peyton Manning, habitually contributes to the campaigns of Republicans, including George W. Bush, I think I will root henceforth for whomever the Colts happen to be playing against on any given week. For all I know, though, the opposing coach or quarterback or offensive coordinator might have a Palin in 2012 sticker on the bumper of his Hummer or Escalade. If a team were really interested in my support, it would arrange for a couple of key players reveal themselves to be gay or bisexual, and for none of their teammates to express distaste, in the manner of Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas’s fellow Cardiff Blues. But my guess is that anybody who thinks The Lord helped him recover a fumble is going to take Leviticus 18:22 pretty seriously.


[Hear my life-changing new album Sorry We're Open here! Facebookers: Read more All In Tents and Porpoises essays and subscribe here.]

Heightened Security and Withheld Apologies

Hip hip hooray for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for whose intention to blow up a Northwest Airlines airliner bound for Detroit we’ll all pay a high price in low-grade torment for years to come. We thought it was bad before, having to take off our shoes, being snarled at, poked, prodded, and provoked by jackbooted Transportation Security Administration thugs before being allowed to head for our respective boarding areas? Now it’s going to be much worse.

Stupid terrorists. Heightened Security caused one of my most heated early arguments with Claire, on our first visit to New York City. She wanted to go to the top of the Empire State Building. I, hearing that, because of Heightened Security, we would have to wait hours in line to be patted down, wanted to go elsewhere. We got well shirty with each other, to employ the vernacular of her country. And this mere hours after I’d had to see her little green eyes mist over with disappointment because nobody was being allowed into the Statue of Liberty for fear that someone would try to blow it up.

My impression is that the worst people in any given community usually wind up doing its airport security. It’s an occupation that calls out to those whose fondest memories of childhood are of bullying smaller, weaker classmates on the playground at recess, an occupation for those unable to pass the tests to become…correctional officers, an occupation for those who watch news items about the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and feel only envy — for those who inflicted the mistreatment.

Or maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe it isn’t actual former bullies in these jobs, but the vindictive formerly bullied.

In either case, the worst ones I’ve encountered anywhere, and my passport barely has room left for another stamp, are in Chicago. In 2007, before Claire and I flew back to London, the guy who was summoned to pat me down after I set off the metal detector (because my titanium right shoulder, substituted in 1995 for the one I was born with, always sets off the metal detector) seemed to have been advised that I’d raped his daughter on the way to O’Hare, and did his best to provoke me. All he got for his trouble was the most murderous glare I could muster, but even that gave him some small pleasure, as he was able to ask if I wanted to speak to his supervisor. When I said I might, he smirked triumphantly, and advised me that doing so would involve our missing our plane, as his supervisor took long dinner breaks.

Of course I deserved this treatment, having had severe arthritis in my shoulder.

About six months later, when we were going to fly down to Miami, we arrived at Chicago Midway early, so when Ms. Patricia Carswell, attending the metal detector, took enormous umbrage at my observation that she might think about appending “please” to her requests, and not snarling them, I had plenty of time to confer with her supervisor. I asked if he enjoyed being spoken to like a dog. To his credit — he was black and probably could have made something of my question that it certainly was not — he answered directly: no. I told him that we had that in common, and advised him of Ms. C’s fervent thuggishness. He gave me a form, which I dutifully filled out and mailed to the appropriate authorities. I wrote also to Mayor Daley Jr., pointing out that Ms. C was unlikely to leave visitors with terribly fond last impressions of the toddlin’ town over which he presided.

My guess is that, in The Current Climate, La Carswell, the sort of black person who seems to hold every white person personally responsible for the horrors of American racism, is herself a supervisor.

Let’s consider the above for a second. In describing Carswell as I just did, I’m not for a second forgetting that for much of America’s history, blacks could count on being treated with contempt or at best condescension by most whites. Maybe, then, I should shut up and accept my share of the responsibility for white America’s gigantic karmic debt?

Nope.

I’ll acknowledge that my dad firmly believed black folks to have natural rhythm, and probably wouldn’t have been very comfortable with my sister marrying one (not because he denied their humanity, but because he’d have expected her to be letting herself in for a life of harassment). But while Carswell’s great-grandparents were being exploited and scorned by white Americans, my own were being treated little better by their gentile neighbors in Germany and Russia. Carswell’s people lived in terror of being lynched? Well, my Russian great-grandparents lived in terror of drunken Cossacks burning down their homes and raping their daughters.

I think American racism was and is a monumental tragedy, as I think homophobia and xenophobia and misogyny have been tragedies. I have apologized to gay friends for having acted insensitively around them in my early adulthood. But I’m sorry. I don’t think I owe the Patricia Carswells of the world a syllable of contrition.


[Hear my life-changing new album Sorry We're Open here! Facebookers: Read more All In Tents and Porpoises essays and subscribe here.]