• fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    20 hours ago

    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

    • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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      21 hours ago

      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).

    • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      17 hours ago

      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.

    • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      18 hours ago

      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.

      • CthulhusIntern [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        17 hours ago

        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.

      • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        16 hours ago

        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