Chef Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares from Fox Broadcasting: A Review

To my complete surprise, I recently found myself checking into Hulu.com, an online TV watching site, and viewing nearly all the available episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, the Fox reality show in which Gordon Ramsay, the world-renowned chef and restaurant mogul, saves failing restaurants within a week's intensive intervention.

Though I have generally had no interest in the reality TV show genre, and have never owned, or intend to own, a restaurant, I must admit that I have found this to be a fascinating show of some actual value.

Despite his international celebrity, Gordon Ramsay is truly not a snob. Though at times way over-the-top, and more than plainspoken, he is at root empathetic, demonstrating true warmth and concern about the restaurant personnel and owners he encounters.

Much of his success in diagnosing and improving the often disastrous circumstances of the restaurants featured in this show can be attributed to Ramsay's ability to combine his immense hands-on expertise as a chef and restaurateur; with a sharp instinct for human behavior and motivation. Performing a good deal of stove-side psychotherapy, Ramsay seems to know that while true bad luck and inevitable mistakes can create serious problems in a business, self-delusion on the part of a business owner is most often the more damaging cause.

Ramsay often finds himself in a psychological wrestling match with the owners of these failing restaurants. He is unintimidated by, and is, in the end always forgiving, of those who seek his help but also display false self-confidence or arrogance in the face of disaster. Ramsay intuitively knows that thin ego defenses are what are keeping these owners, chefs, managers and cooks from admitting that aspects of their businesses are falling to pieces. However, though he sometimes has a rash and harsh approach, his goal is never to truly "break people down," he just wants them to regain their sense of passion and get on the right track in terms of the food they cook and the basic business decisions they make. Ramsay diagnoses just what is wrong and then, though his own meat and potatoes kind of therapeutic intervention, which oddly can involved a kind of inadvertent individual, group, and or family therapy, he gets these folks to be honest about their own mistakes and shortcomings so that they will take and implement his very pragmatic cooking and management advice.

If one reads excerpts from Ramsay's autobiography, Roasting in Hell's Kitchen (William Morrow Cookbooks, 2006), one can fully comprehend that his intuition is based on hard won experience. Ramsay put in years of work under a number of world-respected but impossible chefs. He has had plates of food thrown at him and witnessed many kitchen melees. He also managed, it seems, to escape letting other people's psychological confusions and defenses damage his own sense of self. You can read excerpts of this book at

http://www.fox.com/kitchennightmares/.

Though the immense outlay of money, the huge overhead, and the practical pitfalls that can besiege a restaurant owner presents very particular challenges, any business can suffer from at least some of what we find in Kitchen Nightmares.

These shows provide an unexpected lesson in how much human emotions, unrealistic expectations, and interpersonal interactions, along with basic luck and circumstance effect the prospects of a small business. I recommend watching these episodes for all small business owners.