Kitchen nightmares has great radicalizing potential because you can see just how much the owners fucking suck in every episode, how inept they are at their jobs and how much they rely on their employees to know what to do
E: it’s still reality show slop carefully edited to present the same narrative arc in every episode but you can’t edit out the fact that the dipshit owners are the ones causing the problems
Yeah I actually think by and large Gordon’s work shows how incompetent petit bourgeois are.
While 10% of the time a cook or chef is burnt out and producing subpar food, 90% of the time the owner and management are at fault (huge menus, stupid concepts, power tripping.
Also say what you will, when the owner in Amy’s Baking Company pockets the tips Gordon goes hard that it’s illegal and immoral to do so (even asking customers what they think, lol).
btw the couple from Amy’s Baking Company later bought a house on the West Bank
Holy shit you can’t make this stuff up lmao
it just immediately made sense that these would be the exact kind of people who would do that
I loved Kitchen Nightmares for exactly that reason. Spent a long time in restaurant work (never for a small business tyrant, but corporate restaurants managers can be petty dictators also) and seeing an authority figure come in and excoriate the people in charge and directly tell them that their failures were their fault alone and not due to their overworked employees being incompetent or lazy or whatever was so cathartic.
I never worked for a restaurant, but watching that, I always wanted to have a foul-mouthed, highly respected Scottish chef yell at my bosses.
I work at the computer touching factory and i would like to have a foul-mouthed, highly respected Scottish chef yell at my bosses.
I’ve been a cook forever and ge really for small business tyrants. Kitchen Nightmares is cathartic as hell for me.
My favorite one is a restaurant called Sebastian’s from early in the show’s run where the owner was a piece of shit who made terrible pizza from frozen dough, but the end of the episode shows him having a ”change of heart” because they wanted to have a happy ending.
If you went online, you could easily find out that the guy continued to be an insufferable small business tyrant, went back to using frozen dough and the restaurant went bust not long after the episode. It was hilarious how forced the ending was.
The funniest episode of all time is the burger restaurant run by those Australians. The episode itself is hilarious but the family money comes from being descendants of one of the most infamous highwayman mobsters in Australia, and the protagonist of the episode, the owner’s son, later went on to run crypto and NFT scams
That happened to a lot of the restaurants. The ones that lasted were the ones where the owners were overall not that bad and very willing to listen to Ramsey, but just needed a few adjustments, like modernizing their menu or something.
His kimchi grilled cheese video is a masterpiece. The idea is awful enough but the execution is somehow even worse. Cooks it on an open fire, burns the bread to black, cuts it open and says “beautiful, the cheese is melted” as we are shown a shot of the cheese clearly not melted in the slightest. Makes me want to try to get on Hell’s Kitchen just to make it and have him scream at his own recipe.
I had never seen the video before, just watched and you weren’t lying in the slightest. It’s like two slabs of cheese between thick bread with soggy kimchi. It burnt so quickly on the outside. Like what I don’t understand is why he didn’t do a second take???
also he put so much oil on that fucker that the us marines want to know his location
He’d already buttered both sides of the bead before oiling the pan smdh head
He got clowned on for years about not being able to make a grilled cheese so he did a second video to silence the haters and fucked it up again.
It’s gotta be an intentional joke at this point there’s no way he would release two separate videos of him fucking up a grilled cheese.
Wait, does he have multiple examples of when he’s made absolutely abysmal grilled cheeses? I remember seeing one where he had VERY thick bread and several types of cheese with very high melting points, and when he’s “done”, it’s just two pieces of hot bread with barely-warm cheese between them, and he struggles to eat it. I don’t remember there being kimchi in it.
One thing I like about KN and Hotel Hell is that it makes me feel less bad about being crappy with managing my finances. Like I might be dumb for not putting my money into good investments or whatever, but at least I’m not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt
Rich people are fucking terrible with money it’s infuriating, especially when there’s people who could make $20 go a long way. I understand the bourgeois reaches a certain point where money is so abstract they stop understanding how much it’s worth. Like if you’re making $2 million a month in dividends and rentals, you can’t conceptualize food having value because it’s easily available to you.
But then you have dumbfucks like Musk blowing $50 billion on a shitposting website. Or Trump can’t keep a casino open. Or whoever came up with that stupid juicer pod thing and got a ton of money from venture capital. Then there’s the petite-bourgeois you encounter in everyday life who dreamt of owning a gym/restaurant/art gallery/boutique/etc. and consistently fucks that up because they have no life experience or actual skills. Just fail kids blowing their trust funds on the dumbest shit you can think of.
Or whoever came up with that stupid juicer pod thing
The juicero founder is a comfortable millionaire with a succesful company selling seeds and a 900 dollar “sprouter”. The CEO who ran the thing and brought the ridiculous thing to market now runs a private equity firm. There are no consequences for the wealthy.
I think a lot of rich people who buy restaurants have no clue about how much work running one is let alone how bad of an investment they are, they just think it’s like a fun hobby that makes money or something. At least one KN episode shows one of the owners literally doing nothing except hang out with customers drinking alcohol on the restaurant’s dime (yeah, I used to watch this slop quite a bit).
I like how he puts his name on a shitty frozen food line lmao
What if… alright hear me out now… what if… you don’t treat people who are already painfully miserable like shit just because you didn’t care for their mac n cheese
He said something about a fast food chain that led me to believe he can’t tell good food from bad, par course being a brit and love of bland overly simple food. We just assume he knows how to cook, manage a kitchen sure, manage time sure, actually make something yummy and be able to tell that it is good idk.
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I respect the hell out of Anthony Bourdain, but when he said he loves In n’ Out, some of that went away.
In n’ Out is probably the worst food I’ve ever had in a restaurant.
In n’ Out is probably the worst food I’ve ever had in a restaurant.
I’m not trying to be an In n Out defender but I’ve had many, many worse meals going out than an In n Out burger. I’ve found it to be consistent but YMMV.
I think there’s plenty to like about it
I agree but that opinion catches a lot of heat around these parts.
There have been some close seconds like White Castle’s microwaved burger-flavored sponges and Lebanon, NH’s attempt at Italian food, but not only was the food bland as shit, the entire experience was gross, and after choking down that horrible sauce on those fries that make high school cafeteria fries seem good, I felt nauseous for hours.
Then there’s the excuse “for that price, you get a good amount of food”, which seems elitist to criticize, but because it wasn’t a last resort, I’d rather have just not eaten anything than to have eaten that.
In CA people are were always ranting about the food there, nah, those little hole in the wall greasy spoon burger joints, that’s the ticket.
I’ll take a greasy hole in the wall over most chains any day. Literally or figuratively.
Look up the Juniper Hill Inn episode of Hotel Hell. You’ll have a better understanding of Maoism.
I’ve stopped watching hotel hell because it makes me too angry. Kitchen nightmares is as far as I can go since the petit bourgeois owners are 20% less rich and fascist than their hotel hell counterparts. There’s nothing Gordon Ramsay hates more than seeing kulaks suffer.
The Juniper Inn episode has got to be the shittiest fucking kulak I’ve ever seen. Steals staff’s tips. Calls his friends who he let stay for free to ask them to send more tips (not disclosing he stole them). Had “$300,000 worth” of antiques and fine art that turned out to be worth fuck-all. Lived in an RV worth a few hundred thousand parked out in front of the hotel he insisted be called a “motor coach.” Didn’t pay some of his staff for weeks. Blames his employees for his mistakes and throws them under the bus anytime something goes wrong. Upsells store-bought food (he tried to pass off half a chocolate cake from Kroger’s or whatever the fuck for $75 back in 2010ish).
Like the list goes on and on and this owner and his boyfriend manage to sink to lower and lower lows so they can be even worse pieces of shit. Ramsey just walks out at one point early in the day he’s so pissed at these doofuses.
There was one episode where he shits all over someone for doing a ‘grilled caesar salad’ which puts grill marks on a whole head of romaine and then dress it like the salad, ten years later one of the Conde Nast acolytes at Bon Appetite (a white woman who remained while all their brown coworkers left over blatant exploitation) did it unironically as a recipe and is trying to build a martha stewart empire off being the caesar salad lady
Just saw that clip on YouTube. It wasn’t clean, either. Guy was just out there serving people dirty grilled lettuce drenched in sauce.
goes into a restaurant where the head chef is a chain smoking felon who gets paid 11 dollars an hour “Y DA FAWK INT DIS FOIV STAH QWALITY YA FUCKIN TWIT!!!”
150 years earlier and his show would be him going on plantations and helping slave masters. Its the same vibes today.
If this was his actual line that would be way better. But he goes into every kitchen and complains its not a gastropub.
