Each week on
Kitchen Nightmares,
Gordon Ramsay undertakes overhauling an entire restaurant, both the front and back of the house. You would think that was challenging enough, but it turns out that he's even ready for a bigger task: overhauling an entire town.
After Ramsay's “I burnt my testicle” media hoax, it's hard not to take anything outlandish that he says with a grain of salt, but he said he's serious.
"I want people to nominate the worst eating-out town in Britain, and I'll go and sort it out.” And although he's recently decided to try to take British cuisine to the fine cooking of the world, Paris, he still couldn't resist getting in a small dig at his native cuisine, saying that finding a town with enough bad restaurants “shouldn't be hard to find; there are plenty of them."
He's got a few ideas where to look. "I wouldn't be surprised if it was a seaside town", he mused. "Somewhere like Bognor or Skegness. We'll see."
(The town of Skegness wasn't happy to make it on the list, and later sniffed that Ramsay had seemed to like the food just fine when he visited in 2004. A waitress in the town said that after a meal there, "[Ramsay] shook the chef's hand and said he had done a good job and he really enjoyed it.")
How does he spot a bad restaurant? "If I see a bowl of mints by the front door, I walk straight out again," he has said. "I mean, what does it say about the food? That the minute you've finished eating, you should want to wash the taste away with a ball of hardened Listerine?"
He's also suspicious of “overlong” menus "encased in laminated plastic so that it can be wiped clean of dribble from the p****d f**ts who stagger in from the pub at closing time on a Friday night.”
He has seen the above sin being committed at many Indian restaurants, and said the huge number of dishes “means is that they've got a massive vat of all-purpose curry bubbling away, into which they drop a bit of powder at the last moment to create the sauce flavor ordered. The maximum number of sauces a kitchen could create in one night is six, not sixty."
If you are a
Kitchen Nightmares fan – and can still stomach eating out at all after all you've witnessed on that show – keep those tips in mind when heading out to eat.
And if the town makeover turns out to be for real, we'll certainly keep those
Kitchen Nightmares fans updated.
- Leslie Seaton, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Sources:Telegraph.co.ok; www.skegnessstandard.co.uk
(Image courtesy of Fox)