Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay opened his first restaurant in Chelsea, Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road, in 1998 and has gone on to create an empire of restaurants worldwide. After a couple of documentaries about him, his first television series in the U.K., Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, premiered in 2004 and has aired five seasons so far. An American version of the show, Kitchen Nightmares, debuted in 2007 and will be returning for a third season in 2009.
The premise has Ramsay show up to failing restaurants where he's given a week to help turn them around by trying to break the owners and staff of their bad habits and failed mindsets. He tries their food, watches them in action, and then offers suggestions ranging from new menu items to complete restaurant revamps.
Much like American Idol judge Simon Cowell, Ramsay is both brutally honest and usually correct in his assessments. He appears to sincerely want people to succeed, but he won’t lie to them. He has quite a foul mouth, but with this uncensored version I found myself no longer noticing the profanities. Another similarity between AI and RKN is the participants’ self-denial. Some of the people Ramsay encounters resist change, likely because it is an admission of their own mistakes and failure, but if their ideas were so good in the first place, they wouldn’t need his help.
The beauty of the program is that there’s no guarantee Ramsay can save the restaurants. By the time he arrives, it may be too late to recover from the mounting debts and limited abilities of the owners and chefs. He leaves them the tools to help improve their situation and then returns a few months later for a visit to see how things are going.
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