Chef Gordon James Ramsay is often portrayed in the media as a hot headed man with a short fuse. The media seems to have a field day just by highlighting Ramsay’s penchant for language (laced with obscenities). However, there is a softer side to Ramsay that we don’t know about. It is only on television that Ramsay swears, just to add to the quotient.
One of his first forays into television was with Kitchen Nightmares. This show has truly helped him to rectify and repair his image as a profane speaker. This show is currently being aired both in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Kitchen Nightmares was started in 2004 on Channel 4 in the UK. The objective of the show is to identify struggling restaurants across the country and help them to improve. Gordon Ramsay identifies one such restaurant every week and spends the entire week in that restaurant. He provides tips and ideas to the people who work there and tries to improve the condition of the restaurant. While doing so, he often finds himself at loggerheads with the restaurant personnel. You can see tempers literally boiling in the kitchen. One can encounter a lot of similar emotions in this show.

Kitchen Nightmares is not just about cooking. Chef Ramsay teaches the restaurant people about marketing, advertising, and much more. The UK version of the show has run for five seasons so far, while the US version is in its third season now. The US version became quite popular after restaurants in South California and New York City began to prosper, after a week with Ramsay. Ramsay puts in his best efforts and tries to be as supportive as possible. Most of the restaurants Ramsay had been to showed great improvement. As a matter of fact, one restaurant showed a forty percent increase in profits. In both the versions of the show, some of the restaurants were revisited by Ramsay to check on the degree of improvement.

The revisits have been compiled into a new series called Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares Revisited. Many commentators have observed that ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ follows a refreshing and a completely new concept. Ramsay seems to be at home while working and he marshals his ‘troops’ perfectly. When a dish is not proper, Ramsay will have a few words to say. His comments will in a derogatory fashion designed to motivate the cooks to perform better, and thus avoid his barrage of insults.

This show has also been subjected to a lot of criticism, but all allegations have been refuted convincingly by Ramsay. He won a libel suit in the High Court against a newspaper that alleged Ramsay faked many scenes. ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ has won the Best Feature award two times at the BAFTA awards (British Television Awards), and has also won an International Emmy. All five seasons of the UK version have been released on DVD along with the US version. For Ramsay, this proved to be an interesting start to his television career.

Please have a look in our DVD section if you wish to purchase Kitchen Nightmares.