Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ Season 8 On Fox, Where Gordon Ramsay Tries To Fix Dysfunctional Restaurants For The First Time Since 2014

For the first time since 2014, Ramsay and the crew of Kitchen Nightmares heed the call to fix restaurants that are in trouble. It could be decor that’s outdated, crappy food quality, or owners at odds with the staff or each other. Ramsay and company come in, assess and try to fix, with Ramsay’s signature loud, yelly TV persona at the center.

KITCHEN NIGHTMARES SEASON 8: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Gordon Ramsay walks outside a restaurant and says, “I’m Gordon Ramsay and it’s no secret that over the past few years, things have been really challenging for all of us in the food service industry.”

The Gist: The first restaurant in this new season is the Bel Aire diner in Astoria, Queens. Brothers Kal and Peter have taken over running the restaurant from their parents, who bought the neighborhood staple 25 years ago and are ready to retire. But Kal, who runs the kitchen, thinks that Peter, who runs the front of the house, isn’t pulling his weight, and the conflict has gotten so bad that there have been months where they haven’t spoken. Add to that the fact that their parents, Archie and Patty, refuse to sit back and let their sons run the place, and you have the recipe for a highly dysfunctional diner.

Ramsay walks in and flips through the voluminous menu to order some dishes. He sees some strange stuff for a diner, like coq au vin, which neither the waitress serving him nor Kal can even pronounce. He orders a lobster BLT and goes to the lobster tank (!) and pulls out the lobster himself. All the food is terrible; even the coffee stinks. When he calls Kal over, he finds out that Peter isn’t even there right now; he’s helping his fiancee run her restaurant.

During the dinner rush, Ramsay observes the dysfunction firsthand, with dishes coming back, undercooked burgers, not-grilled grilled cheese, and other mistakes. When he goes into the basement, where there food is stored, he finds some of the worst conditions he’s ever seen: unlabled food, cooked meat that’s been in the fridge for an unknown period of time, chickens that stink so bad that both he and the sound man throw up. That’s when the chef unfurls his signature line on this show: “SHUT IT DOWN!”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Kitchen Nightmares Season 1 -7. It seems like the proto show that launched other similar shows like Restaurant Impossible.

Our Take: We wrote about Kitchen Nightmares many years ago, and we know a bit about how the sausage is made on this show. Ramsay amps up the drama whenever he can, either using his screamy side — the “SHUT IT DOWN” shtick — or his snarky side, like when he eats a clump of lettuce in front of the waitress because that’s the only part of the lobster BLT that was edible.

The vomit-inducing health code violations he seems to find in kitchens like the Bel Aire’s sometimes feel like a setup, and we’ve spoken to restaurant owners who swear things like raw and cooked meat in the same containers would be something they’d never do.

So what we’re trying to say is that we know that Ramsay and the show’s producers exaggerate their findings at times. Ramsay said there were “black bits” on the fries, when they looked like every plate of diner fries we’ve ever had (and we’ve had thousands). Did he really vomit at the smell in the storage area? Who knows?

The show wisely sticks to the format and style that made it a hit in the late ’00s and early ’10s; in fact, except for Ramsay looking older, it looks like nine years hasn’t passed between seasons, that’s how much in the groove Ramsay and his crew are. But if you’ve ever watched the original (and much calmer) UK version of this series, you know that Ramsay’s goal is to find the dysfunction and fix it, and those are always the most affecting parts of the US version’s episodes.

We always chuckle at the “renovations” he and his crew make to a restaurant, because they’re never to the taste of the owners. Here, they wisely only renovated a corner of the massive diner, putting in a couple of auto-themed booths and some brighter lights at the counter. And the idea that every menu needs to be reduced to one page doesn’t always fit, especially at a diner, where you can get breakfast, lunch or dinner any time of the day. Take out the coq au vin? Absolutely. But a diner menu is big for a reason; if you look at the Bel Aire’s current menu, you know they went well beyond Ramsay’s one-pager in the time since the episode was filmed in May.

Sex and Skin: None, thankfully.

Parting Shot: An update two months after Ramsay’s visit shows the Bel-Aire functioning better and Archie and Patty giving their kids more space. Then we see the scenes from the next episode.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the sound guy that is shown barely able to contain his vomit as Ramsay goes through the putrid basement food storage area.

Most Pilot-y Line: Gordon shows the brothers how to run a restaurant by showing him the well-organized walk-in at… Gordon Ramsay’s Fish & Chips in Times Square. That’s a bit different than a diner that serves all sorts of food, don’t you think, Gordon?

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re not going to deny that watching Kitchen Nightmares is entertaining; seeing Ramsay scream his way through a dysfunctional restaurant, then try to fix it, was a winning formula for a reason. But we wish that with the intervening time, the show would have shifted gears a bit and showed less rotting food and more about the root of the dysfunction at the restaurant.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.