"Seascape (Kitchen Nightmares)", 10-10-2007

Either you like Gordon Ramsey, or you don't. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't like him. He believes in making chefs the same way he was made -- through a heaping helping of personal abuse. Epithets like "Donkey!" abound, comparisons are made to a chef's palate and a cow's backside, and four letter words are liberally used (but conservatively bleeped for American television).

We get to see a game-show like version of this process on "Hell's Kitchen", where Ramsey takes ten or twelve (supposedly) trained chefs, puts them through their paces in producing quality meals, eliminates a chef every week, and the sole survivor gets a prize at the end. You've seen it before.

What you probably haven't seen (if you don't have BBC TV) is "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares", Ramsey's series in the UK and the one that he starred in before the demons at Fox put him in charge of Hell's Kitchen. Usually, four to six times a season -- British TV has shorter seasons -- Ramsey would come to some English restaurant that was on its last legs. Through some good advice, some hands-on planning, some tough love and the occasional boot up the backside, Ramsey would do his best to give the owners and chefs the tools they needed to create a successful business.

Fox, happy with Ramsey's ratings success, imported the concept to the United States and called it "Kitchen Nightmares". It's still an hour and still focuses on failing restaurants, this time American restaurants. Can Ramsey help the turn around?

What viewers of the original "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares" know is that that culprit behind any business which crashes is the loose nut behind the wheel. Either,

a) the owner is incompetent, or
b) the chefs are incompetent.

This time, with Seascape, a restaurant in Islip, New York, Ramsey's got his hands full.

The situation: Seascape was an extremely successful restaurant which could serve 300 customers with lines out the door -- in the late 60s-early 70s. The owner-operator is deceased, and the restaurant is now run by the wife of the late owner and his son.

Ramsey meets everyone. The widow is a nice Greek lady, who is chagrined that her son will not step up and crack the whip. The son is a real nebbish, who really wants to avoid conflict at any cost.

As for the chef and the sous-chef...the less said the better. The chef boasts of his thirty-eight years of experience and is highly put out that Ramsey has been invited to Seascape. He thinks it's an insult. Furthermore, the chef simply doesn't listen to the owner. The attitude of the chef, frankly, is "if you don't like the way I do things, then fire me".

The sous-chef is a joke, who doesn't seem to be able to do the basic work of a kitchen and is there for a paycheck. The customer base is down to a trickle of oldsters who probably come for nostalgia reasons.

The show moves, as always, to Ramsey ordering a signature dish. The food is cold, and he suspects that it was never fresh, but frozen. Everything tastes wrong.

In the meantime, Ramsey looks at the decor. The structure of the restaurant is beginning to decay and crumble. Furthermore, there is a smell that the waitress frankly tells Ramsey is sewage. At least, Ramsey gives her points for her honesty.

Ramsey then comes to see how the kitchen is run...or not run. One of the eternally-suffering patrons complains that the food is cold. The waitress, an oldster herself, takes it back. The chef waves it off. The food is warm. Ramsey, always a hands-on chef, feels the plate. "The plate is cold!" he shouts. The chef ignores him. Ramsey rolls his eyes.

Before the chefs return the next day to do their..."work"...Ramsey arrives for an inspection of the kitchen. It's not merely bad, it's worse than Ramsey could imagine. He finds the frozen food he was served the night before. One of his pesto side dishes seems to be about to get up and walk on its own. The grease traps are full and there is some undefinable substance affixed to the walls. Ramsey says he wonders how Tweedledum and Tweedledumber managed to avoid killing one of the patrons over the years. (He is not speaking figuratively.)

He also locates some unidentified pork slab that's the Salmonella Ballroom. Ramsey confronts the owners with the health hazard (which miraculously, scored 95 on a health inspection) that is impending. The owner claims he cleaned the kitchen -- indeed, the owner does all the cleaning as the staff simply won't do it. When the chef is confronted with the pork slab, he claims that it's his lunch! Ramsey can't believe what he's hearing. He orders that the restaurant be "shut down", which means that he wants it closed until the most obvious faults can be rectified. The senior customers there are sent home. One asks where he'll be eating, then, and the waitress tells the poor feller that wherever he eats today, it won't be at Seascape.

The next step is for Ramsey to demonstrate some simple yet tasty dishes that might help get the palate of the restaurant on track. The chef, however, is like an old tomcat, still angry that a leaner breed is in his territory. He flat out refuses to taste Ramsey's dish, claiming that he knows what the dish tastes like. And when they try to cook the dish, they burn it to within an inch of his life. Their attitude: "whatever".

It's time for tough love. Ramsey tells the owners that if any progress is to be made, Jim Carrey and Owen Wilson have to be fired. It's time for the owner to grow a pair of jooblies. The nebbishy owner inhales, then tells the chefs to leave. Honestly, they actually seem stunned that they were fired.

Unfortunately, Fox wants to make "Kitchen Nightmares" a cross with that CBS show where people who are crippled with 47 kids get new houses. So a decorating crew comes in and fixes up Seascape, while the owner apologizes to Ramsey. Yes, he knew the kitchen was a mess, but he's afraid of conflict so he simply does what needs to be done, to the best that he can do it.

In what was undoubtedly a move by Fox, Ramsey takes him boxing, the idea that if the owner can harness his inner Balboa, he can get the guts to actually run a restaurant. Critics say that the BBC Nightmares is better than the American one, because overseas the focus is on the food and not the personalities. With this little excursion to Apollo Creed's gym, those critics have a point.

However, the owner admits that his father, the former owner of the restauarant, was a man who always put him down and never complimented him. He's lost his self confidence, and you actually feel sorry for him.

Ramsey finds a new head chef. Service is iffy -- the staff haven't had a full restaurant in years, and when there is a conflict between the new (more competent) chef and the ancient waitresses, the owner steps in to take charge again after more prodding from Ramsey...and a hug.

It seems that Ramsey managed a miracle. However, the footnote at the end -- when Ramsey usually comes back weeks later to see if the changes have stuck -- states that five weeks later, the owner got an offer "he couldn't refuse" and sold the restaurant. If he's sleeping with the fishes, he's probably getting some peace and quiet at least.

A couple of comments. There's nothing worse than incompetent people who brag about their years of experience. All it meant was that he managed to escape the chopping block for 38 years, not that he was competent. There's a saying in the teaching business -- "have you been a teacher for twenty years, or have you been a teacher for one year, twenty times"? I suspect Doug the Chef was a chef for one week -- 1,972 times.

As for the owner, I'm glad he sold the restaurant. Frankly, management is a discipline where one is required to mediate conflict, and if you can't get people to follow your orders, you don't belong in management. As my wife said, that guy didn't belong as the owner of a restaurant.

Who knows what has become of Seascape? Is it now a Jiffy-Lube in Islip, New York? If so, I can guarantee you they have enough grease.