For all your quarantine binge watching needs

March 14, 2020 9:20 PM

You've finished rewatching The Wire, you can't bring yourself to really give Game of Thrones another go, and you're still at home, trying to wait for a return to normalcy while trying to remember how to make pasta from scratch in order to pass the time. What to do next? Why not watch the entire run of Kitchen Nightmares? FilmRise, the distribution company that controls the rights to the series have uploaded it, in it's entirety, to YouTube.

Unfortunately, not all episodes are available in every country (for me, sadly, the Amy's Baking Company episode doesn't play in Japan), but a decent amount of the episodes seem to be available. Enjoy/cringe/recoil-in-terror-at-humanity, it's all right there.

posted by Ghidorah (31 comments total)

Oh. My. God.
posted by Automocar at 10:14 PM on March 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

Just a word of warning, the show follows a pretty regular format which involves Ramsey taking apart the restaurant’s kitchen around the end of Act 1.

The producers revel in focusing on every unsanitary and health code situation they can find, which may put you off of your lunch for a while. Caveat emptor.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:19 PM on March 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

It’s cool, I don’t have any food, I tried to stock up but all the store had left was canned sardines
posted by Automocar at 10:44 PM on March 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

None at all available in Canada as of me posting this.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:59 PM on March 14, 2020

I work on a kitchen. So ya. But I'd love Gordon to come around to kick ass.
posted by clavdivs at 11:38 PM on March 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

Brit here, so I was aware of Gordon Ramsay and his UK TV career, but he/it weren't ever my thing. Until a friend sent me a link to That Episode of the US show. I still don't watch his stuff religiously, but whenever I find Kitchen Nightmares US during channel-hopping I watch it to the end, like it's Pulp Fiction!

I'm fascinated by how artificial his presentation to just-next-to-camera and his hand gestures can be, considering he's been doing TV for yonks! More than that though is the thrill of those moments/episodes where you really get the sense he's not just going through the motions by following the format and instead his pride in his profession shows through. It's clear that the two most important things in the world to him are the diner/dining experience and the food-in-itself. The difference between him acting appalled and being appalled is palpable.

I'll have to get on these!
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 1:26 AM on March 15, 2020 [7 favorites]

I can't find any available in Australia.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:26 AM on March 15, 2020

Bumholes, nor here in UK either. I shall have to content my sudden itch with such illegitimate uploads as I can find instead #breakingthelawbreakingthelaw
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 1:33 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Normally, I don't like the show, but somehow it feels just right now.
It's not just the lousy response to the corona virus in some places I'm angry about. There are other things happening in my life where I am building up anger at incompetence I can't get out. Thanks for posting!
posted by mumimor at 1:33 AM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine told where his mum was served a vegetarian sandwich Gordon Ramsay made himself, and she had no idea who he was

I appreciate that there is at least one person out there for whom Gordon Ramsay is "nice chef who made a very good sandwich"
posted by Merus at 2:23 AM on March 15, 2020 [13 favorites]

I'm always feeling, Blue, you can watch all of it on 4od.
posted by glasseyes at 2:25 AM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

He's still so stilted on camera. It's somehow much worse on US shows but definitely there in the UK stuff too. So strange!
posted by ominous_paws at 2:28 AM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

If anyone has a Roku, FilmRise has its own channel(s) there and has licensed at least some episodes of the show to other streaming channels.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:51 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh god this brings back terrible memories. Of being in an emergency waiting room in Sydney with my partner who was in terrible pain, it turns out from a slipped disc. Sitting in a little hard plastic chair, 3 feet from a guy who was oozing mucus from every orifice and slumped barely conscious against the wall. Waiting our turn for a couple of fucking pain pills, the good kind, because my partner was in a very bad way.

And on the waiting room TV in this hospital; Kitchen Nightmares. Hours of Gordon Ramsay on repeat, yelling at people. Hours of Gordon Ramsay uncovering disgusting unsanitary food conditions. The man next to me throwing up on the chair between us. Gordon Ramsay pretending to be Nice Dad for 30 seconds to offer the restaurant some hope, before yelling and swearing again just as soon as he was around the corner. Fucking nightmare alright.
posted by Nelson at 7:18 AM on March 15, 2020 [6 favorites]

Fuck Gordon Ramsay.
posted by terrapin at 7:24 AM on March 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

Their goal is to discourage visiting restaurants, thus improving social distancing, right?
posted by joeyh at 8:19 AM on March 15, 2020 [8 favorites]

Hard to watch. The American version is so OTT dramatic and emotional it's embarrassing.
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 10:06 AM on March 15, 2020

Trust me, it's just as strange going in the opposite direction. We accidentally started a UK episode of KN and we were dumbfounded at how civil and polite Ramsey was.

My kids' figured out the US version was all for show and, thankfully, it wrecked reality shows for them going forward.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:38 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

I ordinarily hate this show, but the Amy's Baking Company episodes were pure gold.
posted by Annabelle74 at 10:44 AM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

I watched a few of these but was disturbed by my own schadenfreude. The guilt outweighed the pleasure.
posted by Jode at 12:32 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm always a bit mystified that no one Ramsey belittled and screamed at in his various television shows seems to have reached their limit and kicked his ass.
posted by slkinsey at 2:03 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's RAW!!!
posted by stripesandplaid at 4:45 PM on March 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm always a bit mystified that no one Ramsey belittled and screamed at in his various television shows seems to have reached their limit and kicked his ass.

The continual filming of material that can be later be used as evidence in an assault trial is probably enough to dissuade any physical altercations with Gordon.

Not that the upped aggression in the U.S. episodes isn't for show, but somehow I doubt the lower-key approach used in the U.K. episodes would work on certain American restaurant owners.

(Random thought: do the owners have to sign an agreement not to fire or otherwise retaliate against any employee who says Bad Things about the restaurant/owners?)
posted by gtrwolf at 4:48 PM on March 15, 2020

Geoblocked in Australia. :( You lift me up just to smash me back down again. In a lot less than the 42 minutes it normally takes... :)
posted by adamt at 7:25 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

On the surface Ramsey comes off as a complete asshole (and maybe he is). When I first watched this series, I was working for a man who was most definitely an asshole. At first I couldn't figure out what separated the two men and why I liked Ramsey. My conclusion was that there is a huge difference between being an asshole who is petty and often wrong (my boss) and being an asshole who is almost always right (Ramsey). A Ramsey dressing-down gives someone an opportunity to actually improve. Since the show is heavily edited, I could be wrong about Ramsey, but I think my conclusion may be right in general.
posted by Brocktoon at 7:54 PM on March 15, 2020 [9 favorites]

Ramsey is wrong all the time though. There's a couple of articles of folks who've done followups on the restaurants he intervened for and the results are not good. Now maybe that's because he was starting with doomed restaurants, fair enough. But the premise that having some vulgar Brit yell at your staff and owner for a week and everything's gonna work out is bullshit.
posted by Nelson at 8:38 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Nelson, I've seen the stats about the number of restaurants that appeared on the show and later closed (some before their episode even aired), and I think it's hard to understand just how delusion some restaurant owners are. For some of these restaurants, maybe, the situation was a person who just didn't know what they were getting themselves into, and Ramsey (and the subsequent exposure) helped them out. For others, though, I can't tell you how many deluded assholes I've known that talked themselves into opening a bar or restaurant, then decided that there was no earthly way that they bore any responsibility for its failure. For a lot of those cases, I imagine their response to Ramsey was an internal monologue of "who the hell is this guy, this internationally recognized chef, to tell me how to run my restaurant?!"

When the underlying cause of failure for a restaurant or bar is the owner themselves, no, having a vulgar Brit yell at you for a week isn't likely to fix things.
posted by Ghidorah at 12:24 AM on March 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

There's an entire blog devoted to the fates of the restaurants: Kitchen Nightmares Open or Closed (that's been supposedly updated in late 2019, so fairly current.)

Yes, most of the places are closed, but IIRC the ratio of closed to surviving is certainly no worse and possibly better than the "standard" ratio of restaurants being able to stay open. Between what we see of the places in "revisit" episodes and what the blog authors discover on Yelp and FB, it's pretty clear that, yeah, a lot of the places just couldn't/wouldn't stick with Ramsay's plans. And the comments are actually (mostly) worth reading - not a few commenters point out that while the producers obviously selected restaurants for maximum drama and fucked-up-ness, one entirely possible practical goal was to get the places to make enough money to get out without a mountain of debt. Which may have worked in quite a few cases (although we'd never really know, since we don't have detailed knowledge of their accounting after the makeover) - even a bunch of the surviving restaurants have new owners.

So of course it's a reality show and it would be . . . naive to totally buy into the premise the show pushes, that Ramsay will transform everything into sunshine and flowers and puppy dogs in a week. And as long as you keep that in mind, I don't know that I'd call Ramsay always wrong.

(And that blog comes up with some interesting bits - like at least a couple of the owners are mobbed up or have criminal records, or one of the owners supposedly moved on to being a high-end escort after the place closed, or a daughter of an owner now has a viable but not major acting career.)
posted by soundguy99 at 6:28 AM on March 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ramsey is wrong all the time though. There's a couple of articles of folks who've done followups on the restaurants he intervened for and the results are not good. Now maybe that's because he was starting with doomed restaurants, fair enough. But the premise that having some vulgar Brit yell at your staff and owner for a week and everything's gonna work out is bullshit.

What are you faulting him with being wrong about there? Certainly most of these fucked restaurants and businesses were fucked years before they even filmed a thing, there's nothing he could've ever done besides give them a nebulous boost on TV, but the premise of the show is such that often they won't even have the chance.

He's still right about the majority of thing he is yelling about and a lot of the shit he ends up yelling about is stuff they drill into you when you like, get the license to serve food and drinks. The new teen server might know more about food safety than some of these clueless business owners.

90% of his advice is "clean the kitchen and all the illegally stored food you have rotting into eachother," "serve good food instead of shit," "make your restaurant look nice instead of like a post apocalyptic luby's."
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:36 AM on March 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

I like Kitchen Nightmares, but I really love Restaurant Impossible. They're both trash, but somehow Robert Irvine comes off as genuinely interested, and half the time he's fixing the ownership and staff instead of the restaurant. It's a kind of manufactured heartwarming I can get behind.

I tend to avoid the Ambush episodes, though. Those feel much more mean-spirited.
posted by Errant at 1:25 PM on March 16, 2020

Oh yeah, and doing a little rewatching and then re-reading on that blog I linked above, even a bunch of the restaurants that are now closed managed to stay open another 2-5 years after the episode. And considering almost every place is (supposedly) somewhere between a month to 6 months from going under with the owners losing houses and life savings and so on and so forth, if Ramsay changes enough to keep the place going that much longer then how wrong is he?
posted by soundguy99 at 9:18 PM on March 17, 2020 [2 favorites]