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.  

Gamboling With Hogs

Television in the UK can be pretty diverting. If there isn’t a brat show, in which a plucky nanny will transform an incorrigible little monster into Mummy’s Lovely Little Gentleman, there’s often a medical marvel one with a title along the lines of The Boy Who Gave Birth to Himself. There are the Gordon Ramsay Unhinged shows, in which himself screams at failing restauranteurs or young chefs who aspire to work at one of his 7500 restaurants around the world, and other, kinder/gentler fix-it shows in which, for instance, a purported expert explains to a hotelier why he’s going bankrupt. On a slow night, you might have to settle for marveling at how poorly other Brits eat, or how filthy their homes are, or even try to content yourself with a real estate show in which disgruntled couples from Scunthorpe are shown properties for sale in parts of the world where the sun actually shines for more than 20 minutes at a time some days.

‘Twas in the UK, among all the above-referenced riches, that I first saw Wife Swap, which I remember now is available in this country too, and more than diverting enough for an evening on which you’d planned to watch the latest episode of Friday Night Lights, but NBC didn’t broadcast it for reasons no one bothered to convey to you.

The idea’s very simple — and, I’d have thought, apparently wrongly, deeply offensive to feminists. For two weeks women of very different styles and circumstances, live with each other’s husbands and children. During the first, the transplanted wife is required to act as a surrogate for the departed wife, and to abide by the husband’s rules. In the second week, she theoretically gets to rewrite the house rulebook as she sees fit. As you can well imagine, what almost invariably happens is that, after a week of having things pretty much as he’s accustomed to having them (except, in many cases, for Surrogate Wife’s frequent expressions of horror and disgust), Hubby snorts, “No [bleeped] way!” when presented with new rules. At this point, he and Surrogate Wife start slamming doors and calling each other names and making the children whimper piteously, and we out in Videoland are wonderfully entertained.

Commonly, the two hubbies are able sometime after the second commercial break to glimpse some small trace of wisdom in what their Surrogate Wives are telling them, and the kids come to love their stand-in moms nearly as much as they originally loathed them. Finally, the two couples sit down face-to-face, the two hubbies — meeting for the first time — give each other looks that say, “If you so much as touched her, I’ll pull your fucking esophagus out through your fucking ear,” the two wives bristle at each other’s suggestions that they’re imperfect mothers, and everybody snarlingly denies that he learned anything at all from the experience.

In this past week’s episode, a snooty rich black woman social climber who gave her two terrified daughters a daily grade on, for instance, how expeditiously they got from the car into the house after school, moved into the home of a body shop owner whose womenfolk liked to roll around in the mud. Meanwhile, White Trash Mama, at the home of her snooty rich black temporary husband, had to wear pantyhose for the first time in 20 years for dinner, and later to teach a class in ladylike deportment. Over at White Trash Towers, Mr. Body Shop was literally burning in the fireplace the Nice Clothes Ms. Snooty had tried to insist he and his two fat daughters wear to dinner the second week. Sparks a-plenty flew, and make no mistake!

Are you thinking what I’m thinking — that the whole thing would probably have been a lot more interesting, and maybe even led to actual bloodshed, if white folks had been the snooty ones, and the blacks those who enjoyed gamboling with the hogs? But the actual football scenes in FDN are comically unconvincing, and the main character in Breaking Bad — the meth-cooking chemistry teacher just trying to do right by his loved ones before the cancer finishes him off — is aloof and humorless. I’m finally learning, after all these decades, that it’s a chump’s game to expect perfection from even the best TV.

Hypermasculine Me

Somewhere in America, a restaurant is failing, and losing more money every month. It is failing because the food is crap, or rubbish, or looks and tastes like used diapers. This is so because the chef has Lost His/Her passion. The owners have no money left to send the children to college. Indeed, Dad is hoping, though it shames him to do so, that Elder Daughter will consent to a few months of call-girling just so the restaurant’s suppliers won’t stop supplying it.

The world-famous chef with a face that the English press has cruelly, accurately described as resembling a scrotum, but dazzling blue eyes, rides into town. He samples the restaurant’s food and pronounces it…crap. It is unmistakable to him that its chef has lost his/her passion. He tours the kitchen and is appalled by its filthiness. He wouldn’t let a rabid dog throw up in it. The restaurant’s owners want to kill him, and each other, and themselves. There is a commercial break.

WFC says the chef must regain his/her passion, the kitchen must be cleaned, and a new, simpler menu must be devised to replace the existing one, which offers 382 different dishes that the passionless chef either can’t cook very well or hasn’t even heard of. Everyone hates the WFC, whose umbrage at the restaurant is such that he actually bounces up and down as he spews profanity. One of the restaurant’s owners would rather quit the business then endure another moment of the WFC’s verbal abuse.

WFC stops spewing profanity long enough to devise a new, more streamlined menu featuring fresh local ingredients. The chef’s passion begins to come back. In the dead of night, WFC’s team of decorators comes in and makes the restaurant slightly less ugly, or ugly in a slightly more current way. Seeing this transformation, the restaurant’s staff is moved to tears.

The restaurant is relaunched. Local dignitaries and tastemakers are invited. But on this night of nights, this do-or-die night, the kitchen can’t cope. Diners are shown wondering what’s taking so long for their appetizers to arrive. Meals are returned to the kitchen, where the newly re-impassioned chef utters one of WFC's favorite words. WFC’s prodigiously furrowed brow grows even furroweder. It appears as though his heroic efforts are all for naught. This time, he has bitten off more than even he can chew!

But wait. His exhortations to the chef to Take Command finally sink in. The kitchen catches up. In the dining room, local dignitaries are observed enjoying the restaurant’s food more than they’d have dreamed possible. At night’s end, the restaurant’s staff baptizes WFC in grateful tears. At the end of the tunnel, they have glimpsed light. WFC rides off into the sunset, his blue eyes twinkling deep in the furrows.

Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is ever thus. It is thus in the UK, where I saw it first, and where no bleeping takes place when the great man calls his would-be beneficiary a fucking disgrace with bollocks the size of fucking chick peas, and it is thus now in the USA, where, with the sublime, if no less predictable Friday Night Lights, GRKN has made Friday night a wonderful time to stay home in one’s home theatre.

In other news, I’m not the world’s most masculine guy. I grew up playing with Barbie rather than balls and bats. I’m not good with tools and have never driven a motorcycle; I couldn’t be less handy on a bet. I’m really good at divining what certain facial expressions connote. I have no qualms whatever about asking directions, and enjoy wearing women’s clothing. I am soft-spoken and sensitive. But commercials for the impending release of Sex in the City II have begun airing, and I am suddenly feeling hypermasculine and heterosexual, for I tremble with loathing at the mere sight of them.

I watched the first one because Claire was a big fan, and at the end pronounced it six hours (or so it seemed) of absolute torture. I can’t stand Bruce Willis. I would sooner watch twice every action film Bruce has ever made — plus the entire oeuvre of Steven Seagal — than 10 minutes of this.

Anyone up to some hunting, camping, or fishing?