(Click here for Part I, or continue reading)

It's a recurring fantasy of mine--one that pops into my head every time I endure a restaurant's bad food, clueless service, or incompetent management--that Gordon Ramsay is eating at the table with me. How sweet it would be to have the chef who picks apart failing kitchens up and down the whole of Britain on Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares unleash his blunt, unnerving and devastatingly accurate appraisals on some of Los Angeles' more egregious offenders. The morons at Memphis would never know what hit them. The children playing "restaurant" over at Lincoln would cry in their smoked mac & cheese. And the douche bags at Geisha House wouldn't hear a word because the DJ's phat beats have made them oblivious to any criticism of their tasteless, gummy food.

If Ramsay mouthed off to Sang Yoon, the surly chef-owner of Father's Office in Santa Monica, Sang would no doubt want to smack the Scotsman in the head with a ketchup bottle. Unfortunately, because of Sang's tyrannical barring of all condiments from his restaurant, he'd find himself empty-handed. (In a street fight, the smart money would be on Ramsay anyway.)

Asking myself, "What would Gordon say about this place?" has proved to be an illuminating exercise. I can almost hear his voice reprimanding an indifferent manager or frantic chef:

"Get your starters out in ten minutes."

"Give customers a good, inexpensive lunch"--one that showcases a few highlights from the dinner menu--"and they'll come back for dinner."

Sound advice. Anyone who has seen even a few episodes of Kitchen Nightmares picks up a couple of Ramsay's main bullet points because so many of the kitchens he investigates suffer from identical problems. The restaurants of Los Angeles are no different. We have chefs who have lost control of their kitchens and chefs who never learned to cook. We have owners who hate their staff and managers who hate people. We have cooks who are drunk, waiters who steal and bartenders who want to be anywhere else but behind a bar. So in the interest of promoting the idea that Los Angeles has finally earned the right to be called "A great restaurant town," I've served up a few of the rules laid out by Ramsay and pointed them at restaurants that should take heed.

Simplify the menu. Simplify the dishes. The menu is almost always the first problem that Ramsay identifies in a struggling restaurant. Too often a kitchen simply can't keep up with the demands of preparing a menu that is too intricate and too extensive. He gets them to trim their daring, multi-page menus to a single sheet. Better to do a few things very well than a bunch of things badly. As for local places that should pay attention, Señor Fred's 31-page, leather-bound, 3-ring binder looks like something found in a law library rather than a Mexican restaurant. Some streamlining is in order. Lose the blackened salmon, forget the shrimp cocktail shooters and work on perfecting your crab enchiladas.

But the biggest perpetrator of the over-ambitious menu (aside from the comically vast offerings of Jerry's Deli) has got to be Boneyard Bistro in Sherman Oaks. Their challenging menu, coupled with their stunning inability to execute it, led to a thorough thrashing months ago on this website. Chef/co-owner Aaron Robins trained under top chefs Albert Tordjman, Arnold Wong and Charlie Trotter. About half the menu reflects this pedigree, featuring inventive small plates like wok-seared fiddlehead ferns and pork dumplings in beurre blanc sauce. The other half is dedicated to Robins' passion: traditional barbeque. Sound incongruous? Well, nothing puts me in the mood for a rack of babyback ribs like some Thai-spiced calamari or herb goat cheese crostini. It's a bunch of busy silliness. I haven't mustered the courage--or the interest--to go back, but a check of their website shows a menu that has not contracted, but grown, now encompassing an array of artisan cheeses. The ambition of the menu alone is not a problem. Nor is Robins' ability to cook it. The problem was that when I ate there, chef Robins was more interested in glad-handing customers and basking in the front of house than in the preparation and assembly of his fussy dishes. That task was left to the restaurant's anonymous cooks, who clearly weren't up to it. As Gordon would put it...

A chef belongs in the kitchen. A maître d' belongs in the dining room. One has no business in the other's domain during service. There's plenty of time to compare notes and discuss what went wrong after the final dish has been served and the last bill has been paid. Had chef Robins been a little more concerned with the food coming out his kitchen, I might not have been served a rancid helping of baked beans. Ramsay runs a tight kitchen in his own restaurants. He is addressed as "chef." All the cooks under him know what the food is supposed to look, taste and smell like. In one sagging kitchen on Kitchen Nightmares, he took Polaroids of the dishes when they were finally made properly and posted them for the staff to use as a guide. Photographs of food may look tacky on a menu, but serve an invaluable function on the walls of a kitchen.

This goes hand in hand with another rule that seems obvious, but is woefully neglected: Taste your food. Often. That's right, stick a spoon in there and check that what you are making tastes (A) good; and (B) like it's supposed to. In one of the greatest moments of Kitchen Nightmares, a young chef in Yorkshire made his signature dish for Gordon without noticing that the scallops had gone off. The result sent Ramsay vomiting out the back door. The chef confessed that he almost never tastes his food. Sadly, he is not alone. It goes without saying that no one in the kitchen bothered to taste the beans I had at Boneyard. That privilege was left for me alone.

It's usually around this point on the program that Gordon is forced to bust out a cooking lesson. For the Yorkshire restaurant, that meant having the chef and second chef each make a plain omelet. While the assistant's attempt resembled an omelet, the head chef's looked as if an eight-year-old had tried to surprise mom with breakfast in bed. Before conning your way into a head chef position, know how to cook. It seems a reasonable requirement for handling a kitchen. Also, don't run before you can walk. This kid was gunning straight for elegant and sophisticated creations without knowing the basics, like how to make a roux. Or scramble an egg. (Note: In a terrible act of commerce, the omelet incident was edited out of the American broadcast. I watched the show in its original form while visiting in England.)

The young chef also committed a horrible misjudgment of his target market. The restaurant was in Silsden, West Yorkshire--a blue collar town, filled with hungry appetites for simple well-prepared fare, not for the likes of his signature dish: scallops on black pudding with hollandaise sauce and Parma ham, which I must point out, sounds fucking awful. Know your customers. Know if you are in a place where value is prized over sophistication, or risk being branded an over-priced twat. For years, this was usually the case in the San Fernando Valley. The most interesting chefs in Los Angeles opted for West Hollywood, Beverly Hills or Santa Monica. To open a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, even in Studio City or Sherman Oaks, was to resign a business to a fate of large portions, unchallenging menu items, and dependency on the 5 P.M. blue-hair crowd or the 6:30 screaming children brigade as a customer base. If you stayed open past 9 on a weeknight it was either a miracle or because some hungry people had gotten lost on their way home from Magic Mountain.

Things have changed for the better, but there is still much room for improvement. The stretch of valley from Studio City to Tarzana is ready, willing and eager to support many more top-quality restaurants than are currently on offer. And Stanley's, Café Bizzou, La Frite and Mistral don't count. They're still content with the blue-hairs, which is a pity, because revamping the menus, hiring new chefs and overhauling their images could bring in a much more lucrative batch of discerning locals.

On the matter of image, Ramsay is unequivocal: keep your restaurant, your kitchen and yourself clean. This isn't just a health issue. A clean environment removes distraction, increases working space and demonstrates a sense of pride. From pride comes confidence and confidence, in turn, breeds respect. A chef with soiled whites or dirty fingernails is about as reassuring as a dentist with blood on her shirt. Many restaurants on Ramsay's show start their big turnaround with a much needed top-to-bottom scrub-down and a new coat of paint--a cheap and amazingly effective solution to help set things right. This, of course, is after he's forced them to purge their refrigerators of the slime and fuzz-coated mysteries that the staff thought they could ignore into oblivion.

Fans of a drunken, late night slice from Damiano's on Fairfax should be grateful the lights are kept so low. I once ate there when they had inexplicably turned the lights up bright. The memory of the splattered walls and creepy-crawly floor is not an easy one to shake. You know how the stunning detail of hi-def cameras accentuates the low-budget production values of a Telemundo sit-com set or the frightening plastic surgeries of certain thrifty celebrities? Well, many restaurants hope the obfuscation of dim lighting, screens and planters deflects roaming eyes from a multitude of sanitary shortcomings.

Get rid of dead weight. A chef is the most important employee, but the rest of the staff can make or break a restaurant. Kitchen Nightmares gives the slackers and malcontents nowhere to hide. The appalling conditions of the chosen restaurant are achingly clear in the first two minutes. Gordon wastes no time in corralling the entire staff and pointing out the direness of the situation. Inevitably, Ramsay is the only person taking things seriously from the start. The first person to see the light is usually the owner, because that's who stands to lose not just his business, but often his house, car and credit rating as well. The rest of the staff starts to come around in an order based directly on their dedication, ability and respect for the business. The ones still giggling, or smirking or rolling their eyes as the chef begins to regain his authority--well, there's your dead weight.

On a similar note, it is patently proved on the show that friends, family members, and former lovers make terrible employees. Boyfriends, girlfriends and best mates are even worse. It's hard to crack heads and bust ass with people you have to see outside of work. A restaurant must have authority. It must have someone firmly in charge. If your flight-attendant girlfriend designed the décor, and your restaurant now looks like one of the Embassy Suites coffee shops she frequents while criss-crossing the nation, then it's up to you to do something about it, even if it hurts her feelings. Losing your business hurts a lot more.

The L.A. Times printed a story in the Food section recently spotlighting a few husband-wife teams that are running some hot restaurants right now. Almost without exception, those partnerships (Hatfield's, Fraîche, Marché Modern) involved the husband as head chef and the wife as pastry chef. This goes against the old European model of husband in the kitchen and wife running front of house. But the chefs in the Times piece share a crucial distinction from the ones featured on Ramsay's show--they all have their shit together. It makes a difference.

When a restaurant is failing, the owners--who are not always the greatest business people--get a call from the accountant saying things are critical. The accountant's suggestion, which desperate owners are too timid to refute, is to raise prices. Unfortunately, raising prices doesn't fix problems, it only pisses off your few remaining customers, because they're paying top-tier prices for a subpar experience. Another way Ramsay suggests cutting overhead is to forget frozen and buy fresh. Fresh is cheaper anyway. Many restaurants resort to outsourcing food in order to compensate for a struggling kitchen--pre-made ravioli, store-bought cakes, even frozen bread. But it is so much cheaper to buy fresh produce and large, inexpensive cuts of meats--like a gorgeous ham--that can yield dozens of portions and a variety of menu options. This doesn't substitute for steaks and lamb chops, but it takes some of the pressure off the kitchen.

Last plate goes out like the first, and vice versa. And if the chef starts to find her legs again and reasserts control of her kitchen, she won't want the crutch of those frozen ingredients anymore. She'll learn that the more care and effort that goes into food, the more it hurts when it goes wrong.

Finally, and although he's never said it exactly, don't open a restaurant that looks like this:

...but considering he's chastised restaurants that look like tombs, dry cleaners, youth hostels and porn theaters, I don't think Gordon would disagree.

* "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares", BBC America, Thursdays 8pm E.D.T. New season starts in July. -- Fox network has announced they'll be screwing up an American version starting in the fall.

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Note: The eyesore in the photo is Romanov Steakhouse and not, as I thought during its recent construction, a full-service carwash/rug bazaar. It is also the subject of an upcoming story on The Wreckoning. Stay tuned...