The Wreckoning - June 7, 2007

The French chef was lying. Everyone watching at home could see that. All of the kitchen employees, milling about with eyes cast downward, knew it too. It wasn't just that the Frenchman, the head chef of a dismal, failing restaurant in Essex, England, was lying on national television--which was pathetic enough--it was that he was lying to his boss, which is unconscionable. The restaurant's owner, a Mexican-born entrepreneur, had his doubts. He was reasonably sure that the trays of potatoes laid out before him had been cooked in the deep fryer, rather than oven-roasted as earlier agreed upon. Although the evidence said otherwise, the owner was inclined to take his most valued employee at his word. Unfortunately for the Frenchman, there was another man standing next to his boss, a real chef--and not just any chef, the most famous chef in England--in his trademark short-sleeved whites. And he was having none of it. Gordon Ramsay picked up one of the shriveled, dehydrated, deep-fried nuggets and summed up the scene with his typical sailor-mouthed sagacity.

"You're talking to a professional chef, big boy. And as long as I've got a hole in my butt, those fucking potatoes have been in the deep-fat fryer. Don't fucking lie." The Frenchman's lame but honest confession was soon to follow.

There is only one food-related show that I have my DVR combing the farthest reaches of basic cable to locate. And it's the only show on television that can regularly bring me to tears. It is a British import called Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares that, until recently, BBC America had banished to an inexplicable 5:00 A.M. timeslot on Saturday mornings.

To Americans who recognize the name, Gordon Ramsay is the shouting, belligerent tyrant from Fox's Hell's Kitchen. To New Yorkers and restaurant junkies, he is the latest celebrity chef to open a Manhattan eatery (to puzzlingly mixed reviews). To the British, he is a bona fide superstar, ubiquitous on tabloid covers, cookbooks, and multiple TV shows.

He is a former professional footballer (a fact no writer, including this one, seems capable of leaving unmentioned) whose blunt, raw demeanor makes him perfect for reality television, or at least perfect for the Fox network. But anyone who has seen Hell's Kitchen has seen only the abusive, insulting, over-the-top Gordon. It's as if you can hear the Fox executives telling him to "Amp up the Gordon" until he is a raging parody of himself in the same way that The Donald's persona on The Apprentice was a crotchety, combed over, catch-phrase spewing caricature of the real Trump. And to anyone who thinks that icy school-matron, Anne Robinson, of The Weakest Link acts like that when she's kicking back at home, I have some exciting real estate opportunities in Florida I'd like to talk to you about.

To clarify the football thing--Ramsay showed promise as a junior and, in his teens, kicked around the lower squads of the Glasgow Rangers. A leg injury ended Ramsay's soccer career when he was sixteen. Since then, he's dedicated himself to the culinary world full-time. Ramsay's credentials speak for themselves. Only in his early forties, his family of London restaurants, anchored by the flagship Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's Hotel (where Gordon is still the head chef), has garnered an amazing seven Michelin stars.

The reason is simple. He knows how to run a kitchen, and therefore knows how to run a restaurant, and therefore, a business. The incompetence, laziness, disrespect and poor communication that get him so riled up on both TV programs have long been eradicated in Ramsay's kitchens. Troublemakers don't last long enough to mutter more than a few surly words on their way out the door.

But Kitchen Nightmares takes Gordon out of his own well run, successful restaurant and drops him into businesses that are on the verge of collapse. Indeed, the restaurants he visits are in dire straits. Invariably, they are at their wits' end, desperate to try anything that will save them from shuttering, including letting the country's top chef publicly inspect their nasty underbellies. The pride-swallowing that transpires on RKN is staggering and inevitable, even if Ramsay has to force it down their throats with handfuls of their own dreadful croque monsieur. The truth is, owners apply to have their restaurants featured on the show. They'll submit to a smack-down from a master, even on television, if it means avoiding bankruptcy and realizing a dream of owning a restaurant.

Dreamers. That's how restaurant owners start. By the time Ramsay gets to them, they have segued from the world of pragmatists to that of survivalists. This is rock bottom. Ramsay is the intervention.

The format of the show is simple and winning. Every week, Ramsay visits a new restaurant that is on the brink of failure. Normally we find him striding through the freezing streets of Blackpool or Essex or Glasgow recounting to the camera a little backstory of the restaurant he is about to enter. The situation is always critical. Either the owners are about to lose their lives' savings or the bank is threatening to put the place in receivership (or sometimes, both). Ramsay walks in the front door, usually during the (non-existent) lunch rush, shakes hands with the owners, chitchats for a bit, then dashes into the kitchen to meet the chef and kitchen staff. He doesn't linger. The only way to judge a restaurant is by eating there, so that's what he does. Gordon sits down in the dining room, places a framed photo of his wife across the table and orders up whatever the chef or owners feels are the restaurant's best dishes. The results are unfailingly grim--salmon with strawberries (strawberries?), rubbery shrimp, rancid scallops (which sent Gordon puking into the alley), a dizzying mess of reheated soul food, and a liquidy crème brulée have been some of the lowlights.

More often than not he sends the food back, speaking in a low voice about what's wrong with a certain dish so as not to frighten actual paying customers who might be dining nearby. He's not being a food snob when he offers his appraisals; the food looks positively awful most times. For the mound of American soul food, however, the dishes were tasty, but presented in an unappetizing heap and supported by frozen or pre-packaged ingredients. The chefs are always appalled when the food comes back barely eaten and you wonder how on earth they could be. Typically, the chef feels that the food he sent out to England's top chef was up to the usual standards if not better. Sure they are nervous; Ramsay is a star after all. And here Gordon gets his first sense of where the problems lie.

The two biggest culprits, of course, are either the chef or the owner. In the case of Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack, owner and chef were the same person, even though Momma employed a full-time head chef to stand idly about the kitchen, plating and defrosting, while Momma, an American immigrant, ran about the kitchen, delegating poorly and trying to be everyone's friend.

After a few episodes, you start to see how Ramsay operates. One of the first questions he asks when he enters the kitchen with the owner, chef and staff gathered about him is, "Who is in charge here?" Instead of a response, what comes is a wave of nervous smiles, uncertainty and half-answers. Okay, now we're starting to get somewhere.

A kitchen runs like a ship. The chef is captain. Substitute "Yes, sir" for "Yes, chef" and you have 90% of the conversation that takes place in one of Ramsay's kitchens. The chain of command is unquestioned. Roles are clearly defined. The mood is efficient and relaxed because people know what to do, and when they don't, the reproachful, confident voice of the captain tells them. The kitchens on RKN are either noisy, disorderly places or tensely silent because no one is communicating.

But in most cases, captains do not own the ships in their charge. They collect paychecks just like the rest of the crew. That is where the owners come in. The restaurant owner, at the end of the day, is the boss. But she hires her chef to run her kitchen, write the menu and in the best cases, present food that uses all of his skills and expertise to put the period on a statement that she's already started writing. Ramsay has a gift for showing them the power of this synthesis. When the two most powerful forces in a restaurant support each other (often by not interfering in the other's domain and only intervening when necessary) an amazing thing happens. Confidence is born.

Many of the restaurants on the show suffer from similar problems: menus that are far too elaborate and extensive, apathetic employees, internal bickering and dismal communication, but if there is one single malady that lies at the heart of each case from which all other problems are born, it is that somewhere along the way, somebody, usually the chef, has lost confidence. Gordon helps them find it again. He helps them find the joy of cooking that got them into the kitchen in the first place--the simple satisfaction of preparing something delicious and saying, "Here, taste this." And this is usually the point in the show when my eyes mist over.

If Entourage is aspirational, then Kitchen Nightmares is positively life-affirming. Momma Cherri's chef, Brian, had wrestled control of the kitchen away from Momma by the end of the episode in order to save the business. The results were extraordinary. Gone was the frozen food that Momma had being preparing ahead of time--sometimes two weeks ahead--to survive a hectic dinner rush. In fact, gone were the freezers entirely, all thirteen of them. In their place was enough counter space to make meals fresh to order, and enough fresh (and less expensive) produce to let Momma's excellent, but neglected recipes shine. Brian, it turns out, has been working in restaurants as long as Ramsay has, but because Momma would do most of the cooking ahead of time to save money, he treated his position as "head chef" as just another job--showing up a half hour late and grinning and moonwalking about the kitchen while Momma tried to do everything.

It is shocking how often cooks laugh and giggle when Gordon is dishing out an instructional reprimand. It's happened on numerous episodes; and it infuriates Ramsay to no end. Rightly so. Too often, Ramsay's diagnosis is that staff are treating their place of work as a laid back place to chill-out, serve up a few dishes, and collect a paycheck. In this case, it's the owners who have lost confidence, and therefore, lost the respect of the people they employ.

"In my kitchen, if you're thirty minutes late, you're at home for the day, looking for a new job," Gordon tells Brian, who had trouble finding a babysitter. But the person really at fault here is Momma, for allowing this behavior to become the norm. So Ramsay bans her from the kitchen during service. She has to stay on the dining room floor, and again, something amazing happens. She soars. Her personable, charismatic nature makes her the perfect host, while her intimate relationship with the food makes her an excellent ambassador for a cuisine that might occasionally need some explaining to the people of Brighton.

Ramsay only stays for a week in each restaurant. So the real test of whether or not anyone has taken his advice to heart comes on his surprise return visit, which he makes a few months, even a year, after his initial week. In the case of Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack, the return was a triumph. Momma was working the front of house with the confidence of a business owner who is turning a profit. The waitresses were showing up early so as to be dressed and ready for their shifts on the dot. You got the sense that they didn't dare do otherwise; Momma was too on her game now. Bookings were rolling in. And amazingly, the new efficiency had allowed Momma to trim the staff, rather than expand it. In the kitchen, Brian was handling all the mid-week cooking himself, and thriving on the responsibility.

Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack represents a success story. Sadly, however, most of Ramsay's return visits find that old habits are hard to break, and that people, despite a temporary enthusiasm to do otherwise, rarely change. The show is a stark reminder of the harsh realities facing small businesses. When he returned to a place called D-Place in Essex, he found that all the progress he had made, including teaching the chef how to make a club sandwich (seriously), was erased when the loan company showed up a few weeks later, demanded the keys and barred the owners from returning. The only staff member remaining from Ramsay's initial visit was the incompetent chef, who informs him that the club sandwich is now their best seller.

On one episode, Gordon noticed a quick and sudden decline in the food quality about two hours into the dinner service each night. What Ramsay finally discovered, was that the diluted fruit punch the chef kept sipping wasn't cut with water, but booze. By the end of the week, the commis chefs were forced to hold down the kitchen because the head chef had been hospitalized with liver failure. When Ramsay returned several months later, the restaurant was hanging on, and the chef, thankfully, was in rehab.

In the next installment of The Wreckoning, I'll examine how some restaurants that I've written about, and a few that I haven't, could benefit from Ramsay's advice.

Gordon Ramsay. The restaurants of Los Angeles could learn
a thing or two from the man in short sleeves.

As for BBC America's bizarre viewing time, that seems to be changing. A "new" season (probably the series that ran last year in the UK) premieres on Thursday, July 12, at 8:00 P.M. Until then, repeats of earlier episodes are keeping the timeslot warm. The Saturday morning broadcast appears to be over with, thank heavens. And this fall, Fox will unleash the American version, with Gordon bringing his spot-on observations and sailor's mouth to dismal restaurants here at home. One hopes the network will let Gordon be Gordon this time.

Coming soon: Part Two...

Posted by Aaron Black at 5:43 PM