Cooking Shows: Kitchen Nightmares

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the first season of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I don't like Hell's Kitchen at all, though. Cooking competition shows like Hell's Kitchen and Top Chef are pretty unrealistic, designed to entertain, but might be accurate in the pressure felt by the cooking line on a busy Friday night service. Still, there's a lot of artifice involved. For a great story about the ultimate cooking competition (which most restaurant chefs disdain) check out Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef. The first section covers the Certified Master Chef exam, a grueling 8-day cooking test that has a 30% pass rate.

But back to Kitchen Nightmares. I didn't like Gordon Ramsay's schtick on Hell's Kitchen but I think it's well-suited for this show in which he goes to failing restaurants and tries to turn them around (the word is he's more toned down in the British version though).

The first couple episodes made me sort of afraid to ever go to a restaurant again after seeing the rotten food the places were serving and the bugs and broken coolers. The next few were more focused on the strife between the personalities and the resistance to change despite the obvious failings of the current menu.

What I find funniest is when the chefs at the restaurants balk at Ramsay's menu suggestions, claiming he's a fraud and they're much better chefs than him. Ramsay may come off as an ass but he's got three Michelin stars to his name and only 68 chefs in the world can claim that. Well, 67, since Thomas Keller has six stars.