We're spending the week in anticipation of Friday's Kitchen Nightmare episode, the makeover of Prohibition Bar & Grill in Everett. Gordon Ramsay guides owner "Rishi" Brown toward a new persona.
Gordon Ramsay's first success came as a 15-year-old soccer star in his native Scotland. He left sports to study hotel management and wound up joining London's reigning celebrity chef Marco Pierre White as a cook. Stints with the likes of Albert Roux, Guy Savoy and Joel Robuchon followed. Before long, Ramsay had his own place, then another and another, all operating at the perilous, unforgiving upper levels of gastronomy. His restaurants have been awarded over a dozen Michelin stars. Along the way Ramsay also wrote half a dozen cookbooks that have sold 4 million copies.
To promote the books and the restaurants, Ramsay owns and manages a media company that produces his various TV shows; in addition to Kitchen Nightmares (2008), US audiences have seen him in Hell's Kitchen and the F Word. Ramsay is 46 years old, retains his boyish good looks and tousled hair. He's married (his father-in-law was his longtime business partner) and short of temper; he can intimidate kitchen underlings with a barrage of obscenities, but turn on a dime, seducing his dining room guests with upper class British charm. (He's also easy to parody: here he is as a Swedish chef.) His onscreen persona is that of a very talented (and mostly quite personable) chef who is passionate about good food and cares deeply about people.
What threw him for a loop in Everett, at Darlene "Rishi" Brown's Prohibition Grille, were two anomalies. First, a chef who had apparently given up. Second was Rishi's side business: teaching belly dancing. (There's a belly-dancing clip in Monday's Cornichon post.) Solution: get Rishi to drop the belly dancing and fire the chef. Easier said than done: it required her to be more assertive and take more responsibility than she was used to.
We've mentioned before that "reality" shows have very little to do with the realities of actually working in a professional kitchen. You won't learn how to make restaurant food by watching Kitchen Nightmares (although Ramsay does a brief demonstration in the clip that follows); the shows are more like mini-confessionals, unscripted before taping and given the semblance of a coherent narrative and dramatic arc in the editing room.
Anyway: here's another preview clip. A couple of Cornichon's colleagues make cameo appearances:
Prohibition Grille, 1414 Hewitt Ave., Everett, 425-258-6100.
Kitchen Nightmares airs Friday at 8 PM on Fox TV
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