Watching the Hells Kitchen show over the years, it seems like they can never get even half of the entrees out before the patrons leave.
I’m thinking that if one person messes up his part of the line, it ruins the entire table’s service; that, and Ramsey’s intensely high standards, keep things slow.
Are there any other reasons? Even considering the two disadvantages below, it still seems unlikely that it is so difficult to get out an entree within an hour.
Restaurant people, school me.
Heck, I’d like to know why so many of them appear to lack basic cooking skills.
I’m not an actual restaurant person, Well not someone that has run one.
I’d always heard it was due to Ramsay’s insistence that an entire tables order go out at the same time ‘fresh’ as it where. So there will be no sitting under the heat lamps for one meal while the other two are completed for instance.
This would necessarily mean you’d need good communication between the chef’s who are all preparing dishes with different cooking times to arrive at the finish point at the same time.
I don’t think they care about the entire table’s service as much as individual entrees. You’ll frequently see half the table enjoying their meal while the other half is eating crackers and bitching, so Ramsey doesn’t insist a whole table be served at once.
Curiously, you’ll often see food come back raw or burnt or dried out, or over-salted or under-salted, etc. If you take Ramsey at his word, he and his sous-chefs check & taste every single plate before it goes out or…
a certain amount of failure is practically written into the show for entertainment’s sake.
I’d love to be a diner on the show, but you can bet I’d eat first.
Bingo. Manufactured drama is an industry trademark in reality shows. If no drama exists the show is boring. If no drama exists they’ll create some, someway, somehow.
Imagine how popular The Apprentice or Celebrity Apprentice would be if everyone got along just fine. Snooze… So the writers whip up some faux crisis and tell the people to go at it with eachother for entertainments sake. Instant viewership.
It’s been a while since I watched, but doesn’t this only happen in episodes where the individual diners are able to choose which kitchen’s menu they want for the night? I can’t remember any times when the restaurant has been run the normal split-down-the-middle way that a kitchen served less than a full table.
I think there are a variety of reasons. Last season, Ben explained in one of the storage room interviews that he’s a head chef, so he’s expediting orders and hadn’t actually cooked in years, so he was rusty and thus slow. A few contestants over the years have confessed that they’d never worked in a kitchen that employed the brigade style and they were finding it very difficult to adapt.
Ramsay’s standards also play into it. I worked in a few kitchens when I was younger and the chefs would routinely cover up mistakes to avoid wasting food (the most common was extra sauce on overcooked meat or flipping it to conceal the side that was slightly burned), something Ramsay would never allow.
One thing I noticed is that there aren’t any dupes. The cooks hear the order once - when Ramsey says it as fast as humanly possible, and then they have to remember every single order. That’s why you get all the “I forgot to put that Wellington down” crap that shouldn’t happen, and that’s why the cooks get so shellshocked.
If they had dupes in front of them, I guarantee things would go much, much smoother.