The Fox-ified American version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares loses some of the soul of the original, but even the programming goons of Murdoch Inc. had enough good sense to preserve most of what was right about the show’s winning formula. Predictably, the sincerity of the BBC series is sacrificed in the name of forced dramatic fireworks, glitzier production value and sneaky product placement in the American counterpart.
The Fox incarnation is sticking so much to its own narrow ideal of what works and what doesn’t, that it’s in danger of becoming repetitive. We’re three episodes into the Fox series and have yet to get out of the state of New York. One of the dives, Dillons, is in midtown Manhattan while the other two, Peter’s and The Mixing Bowl, struggle like dying fish out on Long Island.
More specific, it doesn’t take Gordon (or anyone with half a brain forced to spend a week in these temples of dysfunction) long to suss out that the core and most debilitating problem with all three restaurants is a clueless, egotistical, emotionally stunted manager. Invariably, Ramsay discovers a manager who has little regard for the fact that his employer, the restaurant’s owner, is about to lose the business to creditors.
This man will ruin your restaurant.
These goombahs treat their bosses’ restaurants like their own personal social clubs – glad-handing customers, giving away a crippling amount of free food and ensuring that their own appetites are sated before worrying about the needs of anyone else. They show up when they feel like it, take cash directly from the till or, even more offensively, from hard-working servers. The weepy manager of The Mixing Bowl, Mike, after deducting half of a server’s tips to himself, has the audacity to tell her: “How much money would you be making if it weren’t for me?” The answer: a hell of a lot more than she’s making now, douche bag.
The reasons the restaurants were failing in the BBC version, while always having a few similar causes like over-ambitious menus and cuisine prepared too pretentiously for the locals, still showed a great deal of variation from one another. There was the one chef who was terrific until he starting drinking halfway through dinner service every night. There was the kitchen that couldn’t function properly because the owner, a true pack-rat, couldn’t bear to throw away any of his useless machinery or piles and piles of redundant tableware from his cluttered kitchen. Or there was Mamma Cherri, of Mamma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack in Brighton, who so micromanaged her kitchen that her chef did little more than reheat food cooked by Mamma days earlier.
The American show hasn’t found as many colors yet, perhaps because it is afraid to. The restaurants I’ve worked in over the years were seriously debilitated by things like cocaine in the stock room, employee theft and, in one case, a narcoleptic owner who was also a compulsive liar. Now that’s some good TV!
For their part, the restaurant owners bear much responsibility for letting things get so bad. Consistently, they are unconfrontational, myopic and stuck in the past. Gordon tries to get them to cut the dead weight, find their balls and kick some ass. Helping those who have lost confidence in themselves has always been the real reason Kitchen Nightmares is such a great show. It’s the Dr. Phil of dinner service.
There are two other unfortunate changes and one glaring omission in the American version that hurt the show noticeably. Almost always Gordon calls for a much needed face lift of the décor. In the British show, the entire staff–owners and managers on down to line cooks and busboys, closed the shop for the day, rolled up their sleeves and got busy with the paint brushes. There was something wonderfully Zen and democratic about the do-it-yourself nature of this. It was also the only way the cash-strapped BBC could make the remodeling happen. But for Fox, the staff goes home and overnight Gordon’s “Design Team” (a.k.a. art department) comes in and does a whirlwind professional makeover. The results of course are that the show gets the emotional value of the staff coming in the next morning to see their place of work transformed. The tears flow like cheap champagne.
And then there are the new kitchens. If any equipment was upgraded or replaced on the BBC show, the owners paid for it…as they should. But in the American world of product placement, the gang comes into work to find a brand new, state of the art kitchen waiting for them. It’s like Christmas morning forty minutes into every episode. The statement this makes about America can’t be ignored. There is no sweat, no sacrifice, no agonizing penny-pinching. There is only entitlement.
The effectiveness of Gordon Ramsay’s week in residence at the British restaurants is highlighted by his return a few weeks (or sometimes months) later to see if his improvements are still in play. Sometimes they are. Sometimes, the players have reverted to their former selves because people aren’t always capable of change. Old habits die hard. This too is what makes the show great. The American show doesn’t do this follow-up and it is a shame. Knowing that there’s a good chance that all of Gordon’s time, expertise and energy get slowly washed away adds an extra level of drama to the proceedings–a lot more drama than, say, the Fox solution of bringing in an angry “bill collector” (mobster) just before dinner rush to stir up problems (and incite a fist fight on the sidewalk) as the case at Peter’s.
I will keep watching. The show has already been picked up for a second season. Let’s hope the producers let the gloriously self-destructive act of running a restaurant implode on its own without too much meddling.
Kitchen Nightmares: Fox Network, Wednesdays at 9, or it could be 8–I’m not sure. I Tivo the fucker.