Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA

Gordon Ramsay. Famous Michelin Star chef, turned TV star and restaurant developer. And full time potty mouth, judging by his attitudes on Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

The structure of the show is simple: Gordon visits a failing restaurant, eats a terrible meal, tells everyone what they're doing wrong, argues with the owner, someone cries, Gordon shouts, restaurant gets a brand new makeover and the customers come flying in again. However, whilst this is the general plot of every single episode in the series; individually, they're actually incredibly enjoyable. 

Like most reality television programmes, the staff Gordon goes to meet are bursting with character and are very easy to critise, whether it be a xenophobic widow, stubbornly fighting from her kitchen's corner or a delusional Italian, skimping on the salmon and charging at the Chef, and at times they will drive the audience to insanity. The good kind of insanity though; the healthy rage that can only be stemmed from watching a fully grown man spit in a celebrity chef's face and being too many countries away to deal with it. 

Many of the episodes are purely frustrating, but this doesn't stop them from being infuriatingly addictive, and they seem to get more shocking as the series goes on. Disgusting kitchens, horrified customers and uncooked food must all be seen and sorted by Gordon, who in turn seems even more frustrated than us. One of the more surprising elements of the episodes, however, are when he stops being the loud mouthed chef, and becomes a friend to the owners instead. Usually once the tears have flown from the broken hearted, and penniless waitress' face, Chef Ramsay becomes more Jeremy Kyle than anything else, and does his best to fix up the staff and the shredded families involved in running the establishments, instead of simply taking over and doing it all himself.

He does do a reasonable amount of cooking in the show; though unfortunately, most of it is done off camera, and the meals are simply laid out on the nearest table on the morning of the restaurant's 're-launch' to be studied and copied by the other chefs. The major revamp of the places themselves are out of his control as well, and usually the entire eatery is made-over in a little under 12 hours. A little unrealistic by anyone's standard.

One of my personal favourite elements to the show is the sheer volume of crumbling restaurants in America, as the series spans over 4 seasons, each having it's own variety of revolting and revolutionary failures. The only downside is, we don't get to find out if Ramsay's changes actually work. Many of the episodes end minutes after the re-launch is over, showing us just one night of his good work, before he leaves to visit another state, and if I were to criticise the show at all; it would be this. Show us what happened next, Gordon. We need to know!