Gordon Ramsay has made quite the name for himself thanks to his inventive insults and general all-round brashness in the kitchen.
It’s obviously worked though, as he’s managed to turn his unique personality into a multi-million pound empire, though whether he’ll leave any of it to his kids is another matter.
Ramsay’s best creation is possibly his Kitchen Nightmares series which, if you’ve never seen it, starts out with the chef visiting a terrible restaurant with terrible staff, tasting the terrible food and generally having a terrible time.
What then follows is quick bit of ‘overnight’ DIY SOS where the restaurant gets transformed. Ramsay transforms the menu and everyone’s lives are transformed, considerably for the better. It’s a winning formula.
However, it could be argued Ramsay often likes to push things in the restaurants he visits, or at least exaggerates his reaction to certain things. It’s TV after all, so a bit of acting is necessary, right?
Well, one restaurant who featured on the programme didn’t take too kindly to Gordon’s theatrics, and are suing the celebrity chef for making their restaurant look bad.
Check out the scene here:
The owners of Oceana Grill, in New Orleans, are claiming Ramsay made their restaurant look bad during a 2011 episode of Kitchen Nightmares.
Of course, 2011 was some time ago now, but Kitchen Nightmares reportedly posted a clip from the episode on their Facebook page just last week, thereby digging up the past and making their restaurant look bad… again.
The clip included an extended scene of poor Gordon vomiting dramatically after taking a whiff of a container full of old shrimp. It also showed diners complaining about the food, sending meals back to the kitchen, as well as Ramsey finding three dead mice in a trap, reports Daily Mail.
The restaurant’s parent company, Cajun Conti, claims the TV show embellished the scenes to create more drama for the episode.
The company tried to stop the episode airing at the time, and also filed a suit which ended in an agreement that footage from the episode couldn’t be remixed in the future without a $10,000 payment to the restaurant and a disclaimer saying the footage didn’t represent current restaurant conditions.
The restaurant group is now claiming the recent Facebook post violated the agreement.
Fox NetworkThe new lawsuit reads:
During the episode’s filming, defendants went to great lengths to over-dramatize and even fabricate problems with the restaurant in order to increase ratings.
The footage intentionally portrayed Oceana and its employees in a patently false and negative light, as it depicted the appealing restaurant as an unsuccessful, unsanitary and mismanaged restaurant.
Kitchen Nightmares ended in 2014, and seven years after the Oceana Grill episode, the restaurant is still going strong.
Daniel Davillier, attorney for Oceana Grill, said:
The problem we have is the fact that it’s so misleading. People think it’s something current, when in fact it’s very old.
At the time of writing, Gordon Ramsay’s representatives are yet to comment on the matter.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.