'Kitchen Nightmares': The chef who quit during service

Have you ever noticed that every week the announcer tells us that "this week on Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon faces his biggest challenge yet?" Well, the announcer does (or at least something to that effect). I wouldn't really have called this week a "challenge," just a bunch of semi-incompetents working at a restaurant together.

The more I watch Kitchen Nightmares the more convinced I am that I could own a restaurant. Okay, I probably couldn't, but I am convinced that I could do better than the people at the two restaurants we saw this evening. I don't know where the show finds these people, but it thrills me to watch the incompetence on display weekly.

Running a restaurant might look like a really easy thing to do -- after all, you just hire a cook, get some local teens to wait tables and you're pretty much good to go, right? Yeah, not so much. However, in the cases of both restaurants tonight on Kitchen Nightmares it kind of looked like that's all the owners figured they had to do.

As much as I like Kitchen Nightmares, it probably wasn't a good idea for me to watch the show with a bad case of heartburn, especially when the restaurant in question was an incredibly greasy greasy spoon. And yet, just for you, I did it.

When I first realized that there would be two episodes of Kitchen Nightmares tonight, I was a little worried that the similarities between the two would be overwhelming. In actuality, watching back-to-back episodes served to illustrate how different the show can be. Sure, the restaurants were both disasters and the food was horrific at both places, but one restaurant had owners willing to change and the other not so much.

The way I see it, there are two reasons to watch Kitchen Nightmares, to see Gordon Ramsay yell at people and to see the filthy kitchens. Tonight really didn't feature either. Oh, it featured some yelling, and Ramsay called people and dishes names and yelled a little, but he really did not go after anyone the way I would have liked. I guess you really can't always get what you want.

I'm so happy that Gordon Ramsay was back to fixing restaurants tonight on Kitchen Nightmares rather than just patting himself on the back for a job well done. Last week's episode certainly had its place, but it was nice to get back to the meat and potatoes of the show -- bad chefs, incompetent owners, and filthy kitchens.

Who said that the television bigwigs don't listen? One of my greatest complaints about Kitchen Nightmares last season was that we didn't get to see what happened down the line at the restaurants Ramsay was fixing, and the new season started by rectifying that mistake. Tonight's premiere featured Gordon going back to six of the places he helped a year ago to see if they'd become successful.

I had hoped that the season finale of Kitchen Nightmares would be some sort of holiday themed episode, six moldy geese a-laying, that kind of thing. More »

I've figured out how to make Kitchen Nightmares obsolete: No one is allowed to open, buy or invest in a restaurant until they have spent at least six months waiting tables ... More »