I don’t watch this show, the Wife is the TV viewer in the family, but by default I sit and either work, surf the Dope, or read while something is on. She’s a reality TV show junkie. Dance/Skate/Sing With the Fattest Washed Up Ex-somebody being her favorite show.
Except for this one. And I ask you Doper fans of this show: How has this obnoxious cretin survive past seasons without someone burying a skillet in his head?
Ok, I’ll accept that he’s a Big Time Chef - regardless of whether he is or not, and he may be just a telegenic hack - that’s not the point. The Point being, ho-leeee crap, how does he get away with treating people like that? Are folks so whorish and hungry for fame these days that they’re willing, nay - enthused to be subjected to this kind of abuse?
It might be helpful to search out previous discussions of the show for more insight.
Those Dopers who have worked in the food service industry say that the atmosphere in the kitchen is often like that but this is of course played up more for the draaama.
If I’m going to watch a bunch of immature talentless attention-whores getting significantly more than 15 minutes of fame, there better be abuse involved.
I believe that Ramsay turns up the drill sergeant routine for this show. He’s very different on his other programs, such as Kitchen Nightmares even when dealing with really appalling chefs (like that “executive chef” from the Bonaparte’s episode of Kitchen Nightmares), much more supportive and encouraging.
I’m curious to see how Fox plays him in the American version of KN - will he be the fairly nice guy that he is in the UK version, or will he be amped up in the form American audiences are used to?
Aside from that, yep, real kitchens can be manic places run by wanna-be dictators.
RL kitchens are high pressure during services and most head chefs tend to do a lot of yelling, but it’s generally not all smackdowns all the time like HK makes things appear. You’ll typically see three or four major screwups during the course of an evening which will cause the head chef to meltdown briefly and what you see on HK is those three or four most manic moments selected out from hours of actual service and edited together to make it look like the entire night was an unmitigated disaster.
I think we can also pretty well take it as a given that Ramsay is encourged to play up the drill sergeant routine, throw food, dump plates on people’s heads, etc, because, let’s face it, that’s the whole hook for the show. There are times when I think he’s genuinely pissed off and other times when I think it seems a little forced – like he’s mailing it in a little, pretending to be more irate than he really is.
If you want to work at a high level in the RL restaurant business, you do need a thick skin and temperamental chefs are part of the territory but it’s not that manic 24/7. They’re just culling the most “dramatic” moments to make a better show.
I don’t watch the show all that often, but when I do the dinner service never seems to go well. The narrator is always going on about the diners waiting 45 minutes to an hour and a half for food, etc. This is obviously not a problem suffered by actual restaurants, right? I mean if the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant was in any way indicative of a high-class restaurant experience, no one would go. So are these abysmal dinners the result of untrained chefs unused to the stress or what?
Yeah, exactly. This was really clear in the late episodes of the first season, where old pros Michael and Ralph, free from the losers they’d had to work with previously, were able to complete an entire service without breaking a sweat.
We watched it for the first time last night. In fact we watched Kitchen Nightmares right after. My guess is that he was spotted on Kitchen Nightmares with his potty mouth and temper and some suit thought that this would be good TV. On KN, he does get frustrated and loses it on a regular basis, but is there to solve a restaurants problems.
On HK, he is being deliberately overly critical and overly dramatic. There are also a number of wrenches purposely thrown into the mix. Last night we saw the rancid crab (I suspect was a plant), and the need for one of the ‘chefs’ to run out to get water from a truck across a parking lot.
As witnessed in the show from 06/19, it appears to be done to ‘force’ the contestants into making mistakes. One of the ladies accidentally dumped spaghetti in the trash, then realizing that they needed it fished it out and rinsed it off.