The problem I had with it is that it just brought to mind that everything I’ve heard about Gordon Ramsay is that everywhere he goes he’s got hookers acting as the furniture in his hotel for as subtle as he is. Seeing his wife made me just think, “Well so here we parade out the victim.”
I like both the UK and American versions of Kitchen Nightmares because of their differences.
Like you said the US ones always get a free make-over and that’s probably because the budget is bigger and Americans love make-over shows. Also Ramsey seems to be encouraged to more pissed off that he actually would be.
The UK version seems to have Ramsey being himself i.e. nicer than the US version.
The F Word is my favorite of his shows because he seems to genuinely cheer on the cooks and is happy when they succeed and I really love the out of the restuarant type stuff. There was one episode, early on in my viewings, where he went to Jeremy Clarksons home to make lobster with him and that just sealed the deal for me loving that show.
For each reason I have to dislike HK, there is also a reason why I like it.
If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant kitchen, or any sort of food service establishment (including retail), you’d understand.
Watching it brings back memories of some very verbal, very talented managers whom I hated while I worked for them. It didn’t occur to me until years later how grateful I am that they taught me what they did because they made me who I am today.
Ironically enough, no. True Beauty has the freakiest “beautiful” people going. I’m not sure any of them are attractive…I saw them parade out for the intros and had to change the channel.
Hell’s Kitchen is designed to wear the contestants down and make them perform poorly, including sabotage (bad scallops that Ramsay happened to catch?). The first show had them learning a new dish every 45 minutes until 3AM, then had them get up at 6AM. When they keep this up for the couple of weeks that this is taped will be a little grating.
On the whole I prefer Ramsays UK shows as the US versions are just adversarial and played for drama and sensationalism. The UK versions seem cooperative at least.
Top Chef is a competition among professional chefs (for the most part). Apparently Master Chef, which is based on a UK version, is strictly for amateur cooks.
Heads up, Tuesday’s ep is two hours long, if you need to adjust your recordings be aware!
I read an article on this a few months ago. He sold his Hollywood location but licensed the name, closed his New York location for lunch and was considering closing his Dubai location.
He made several miscalculations (like banking on the NYC location for a booming lunch business with professionals, not realizing the days of the 3 martini lunch are long gone) and spread the business way too thin even before the economy tanked. He and his father-in-law put in 5,000,000 (I don’t recall now if it was dollars or pounds) of their own money to keep the business afloat until things start to turn around.
As to the attractiveness of the “cast” (because they’re really cast members- “the crazy dude”, the “bitch”, the “past-her-prime-but-trying-to-hang-with-the-kids-lady”, etc), Autumn is unnaturally beautiful for a regular person. It doesn’t hurt that during all the early wake-up calls, she’s braless under her tank top.
No. In the new show, he takes amateur chefs and turns them into real chefs. I would LOOOOOOOOVE to get on that show. Just a week of his tutelage would up my coooking chops!
That may be because they’re doing that bizarre thing they usually do, which is to show last week’s episode in its entirety, and then the new one. Annoying!
I don’t think so – at least, the TV guide I looked at listed two different ‘challenges.’ One was making lunches, I forget the other.
HEADS UP: not just two hours tonight, but the time slot is shifted by the President’s speech. So add some buffer time to those recording settings.
I missed the last 20 minutes (thanks, Mr. President!) Can anyone gimme the bullet?
For Corkboard (and I tried to warn y’all):
They actually had a semi-good dinner service, with only smallish screwups. Most notably, Scott spent a ton of time trying to nanny Salvatore who was on the fish station. But Scott was on meat, and sent up a whole bunch of wrongly cooked steaks and especially wellingtons. (Including one that was mostly raw.)
At the end, Gordon complimented them, singling out Salvatore (for his well cooked fish) and Nilka (for her meat) for special praise. Then he told each of those two to come up with one nominee for elimination.
Nilka nominated Autumn, pretty much for a single mistake but in truth because she doesn’t like her.
Salvatore agonized over the decision, but in the end nominated Scott as he really had to – we weren’t shown anyone else doing anything decidedly bad.
After questioning the nominees, Gordon ordered both of them to take off their jackets, but it was the usually screw with their minds trick: not eliminated, just switched to the opposite teams.
In the departing moments Autumn is pissed and predicting the women will rue the day they ousted her, while Scott makes optimistic statements on looking forward to cooking with the women and how he can shine on any team.
The end.
I was wondering if it was back-stabbing for Salvatore to nominate Scott for elimination, given that Scott had mentored him.
Perhaps I just never hung around in the right circles but is the phrase, “threw under the bus”, really all that common? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use it nor ever used it myself; I don’t think I’ve heard it in any other TV show; and yet in Hell’s Kitchen, it seems to be said at least once a week (generally by the female cooks). Maybe it’s a phrase popular among women? Or is it more likely that it’s a pet phrase of someone on the production team who feeds it to the contestants as a line to use for the sake of drama?
It was used quite often by political pundits during the Jeremiah Wright brouhaha in 2008, as in Rev. Wright threw Obama under the bus, Obama threw Rev. Wright and even Obama threw his grandmother under the bus (for saying she had once harbored racist feelings). I think that’s when it gained popularity.
Starving- thanks for the summary. They were cracking me up with the music they kept playing while Scott spoke, as if he was chosen to be a leader to the rest of the unskilled morons so they could learn from him.
Threw under the bus- in my industry they’ve been using that term for years. I first heard it about 10 years ago, around the same time that “it is what it is” wore out its welcome.
Basically what happened is that the Know-it-all from the red team traded places with the Know-it-all from the blue team.
Was that genuine mentoring? Or the kind of manipulative mentoring one does when they are really just tooting their own horn. I’m not certain.
Scott’s conceit is hillarious. I love the production on Hell’s Kitchen. Every time they showed Scott talking about how great he was, there was presidential music playing in the back ground. Kinda subtle. Even more subtle is that, at the end of the show, when he had been humbled a smidge, his last camera interview didn’t have that presidential music anymore. Just the regular music that plays in the background for everyone else.
I know you all are going to think I’m nuts, but I really did notice this. I promise it wasn’t all in my head.
I noticed that they played heroic music for Scott too, so at least our craziness is shared. 