We know, Chef. We know...
"Let me just tell you now: I would never, never have put a spoon of anything in my mouth if I knew this was taking place."
— Gordon Ramsay, to the staff of the Grasshopper
We know that owning a restaurant isn't easy, but by God can these kitchens be nasty. There is a reason for why the phrase "I have eaten here!" is often uttered by Ramsay upon discovering what you're about to read through.
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General
- The filthy kitchens and, by proxy, the rotten/spoiled food. Now if you work for your city's health departments...
- Even worse, a number of these kitchens have clearly posted "A" ratings from their local health departments. There are only three explanations: either they cleaned up solely for the health inspectors and let it fall apart the rest of the time, the inspectors didn't do their jobs, or there was bribe money involved.
- Another big source of it is Gordon's tendency to investigate all kinds of gunk with his bare hands, and even grab it to show the owners. This is the kind of confidence in your immune system that years of doing these jobs will give you.
- Any times roaches, dead mice or even live mice are involved in the kitchens. It usually leads to bad thoughts all around. Especially in the case of finding three dead mice in a trap that wasn't cleaned out in an Indian restaurant.
Specific Examples
- The first-ever restaurant seen on the show, Bonaparte's, managed to set the bar incredibly low, after the head chef made Gordon throw up by serving him expired scallops. This leads to Gordon inspecting the kitchen and finding all manner of rotting produce, including a bowl of unidentified brown gunk that he described as resembling a "sheep's turd infested with ants". As if that weren't enough, when Gordon revisited the restaurant, he found that it had somehow gotten into an even worse state, with expired mussels, a fridge full of broken eggs, and rotten strawberries and tomatoes on display. Little did Gordon know this would be merely the beginning for awful kitchens in the show...
- The Old Neighborhood. Where to even begin? The restaurant really stood out when Gordon first arrived. The wallpaper was peeling, old antiques lined the rafters, the booths reeked of decades of accumulated body odor, dead mice and droppings were everywhere, an old pair of shoes was underneath a seat in a private booth, piles of garbage were stuffed into the waiting area seats... that's not even getting into how nasty the food storage area was, let alone a kitchen that was caked with years of dirt (one of the owners claimed to have cleaned for five days prior to Gordon's arrival, which if true, barely made any noticeable impact to the condition of the place). Gordon was especially angry when he shut the kitchen down. Needless to say, the cleaned and renovated business was a massive improvement.
- In the UK Ruby Tate's, the owner decorated the restaurant with art done by "a local artist", one piece featuring a pair of panties stuck to the canvas before painting. Gordon absolutely thought it was disgusting and various diners comment on it, hoping the panties were at least CLEAN when they'd been used in the painting. Owner Allan Love actually had the audacity to defend its presence in the restaurant, but Gordon gleefully got it out of there during his remodeling.
- In Casa Roma, Gordon comes across a fridge that was so nasty he had to throw up when he saw watery beef, sticky moldy ham, and 3-month-old ribs. A blacklight test in the bathroom showed that there were urine splatters all over the walls and even the ceiling.
- At Grasshopper, Ramsay gets food that was very nasty and discovers that much of the food they are serving is expired.
- In the Secret Garden episode, Ramsay gets a salad with garlic shrimp, goat cheese, and strawberry. Not exactly a good combo.
- Gordon's inspection of the Secret Garden's kitchen turned up a container of potatoes in the fridge that was infested with live maggots. The sight of it was enough to send him running to the restroom to vomit.
- Chappy's, where Gordon finds a shrimp on the floor of the walk-in that has decayed to the point where it's just a bunch of moldy goo in a shell. One of the waiters also recounts an incident where Chappy dug a piece of cake out of a trash can and served it to a customer who was complaining about the quality of the food.
- One episode of the UK version
has Gordon visit a family-owned bistro where he is served a "freshly cooked" duck cutlet covered in a sauce made from orange squash and a spoonful of gravy... and a lamb-shank that has a shelf life of 1 year and doesn't need to be kept even refrigerated thanks to an ungodly amount of chemicals. This is one of the few meals that he refused to even touch after learning where it came from. - When inspecting food storage at Dillon's, Gordon discovered pests all over the place and multiple blatantly rancid ingredients, including a salad bag filled with flies and half a rotten tomato. Rotten meaning Gordon poked a slug out of it. Note the use of the word "half"; the other half had been served as a tomato rose. Nobody objected to Gordon shutting the restaurant down. Following on from his inspection, Gordon summed it up like this:"FROM GREEN BURGERS, TO FUCKING FURRY CUCUMBERS, TO FUCKING RANCID POTATOES!!!"
- Making matters even worse, the amount of rat droppings were enough to cover the underside of everything the vermin could hide underneath, flies had managed to infest nearly every bag of greens (which explains why the dining room was constantly swarming with them) and the infestation of roaches of every size was so bad that they had even managed to make home inside of the freezers! It was like a scene out of Creepshow when Gordon tore open the rubber of the fridges, only to be greeted by a horde of the damned things that had managed to breed there! No wonder he had the entire place steamcleaned and threw away nearly all of the food upon calling a sanitation crew!
- Ironically, this is the one area that the infamous Amy's Baking Company did right: during his visit, Gordon comments that the kitchen had been meticulously cleaned before his arrival, and there was no sign of rotten food anywhere to be found. The attitude of the owners, however, was beyond sour and spoiled...
- And that's not to say it was completely devoid of Nausea Fuel, either; it manifested in how Amy cooked the food. At Gordon's lunch meal, there was a pizza with a crust that was raw, a Blue Ribbon Burger that disintegrated into grease and chunks at one bite, and a salmon burger that was, in Gordon's words, was "like dry cat food." The ravioli was the only thing not inherently awful, but between being cooked from frozen yet advertised as fresh and having... shall we say, an "inventive" sauce applied, even it was inedible by Gordon's standards.
- The heating unit in Oceana's, where Gordon discovers a tin of shrimp that smells so foul it makes him vomit.
- At Sushi-Ko, the restaurant was so hard up for money that they were re-using chicken yakitori skewers that weren't cleaned properly. On top of that, Gordon also discovered unrefrigerated jars of mayonnaise in the kitchen and a fridge that, even though it was broken, was being used to hold vegetables and dairy products at unsafe temperatures.
- At Blackberry's, Gordon is served chitlins for lunch, and its presentation and smell are so disgusting that Gordon asks his servers to pray for him before he eats it. For the most part, it's all Played for Laughs.... until Gordon takes his first bite. He rushes to the bathroom immediately after spitting it out. Cue Shelly, the restaurant owner and head chef, laughing uproariously over his plight.
- At Spanish Pavillion, Gordon asks to inspect the lobster tank after lunch. He's horrified to discover that a dead lobster had gone unnoticed inside the tank. Gordon reminds the staff that now the entire tank and the live lobsters within it (which had been feeding on the dead lobster's flesh) could be contaminated.note
- It didn't get any better in the walk-in freezer, where Gordon found all manners of spoiling food, including yet another dead lobster he found to be sitting and expired in a vat of cream sauce.
- To say nothing of the live birds flying around the kitchen.
- At The Galleria 33, Gordon watches the head chef drop a cutlet of raw chicken on the floor and then throw it onto a hot skillet anyway without a second thought. He's so stunned that for a minute, he can't even yell. Naturally, Gordon stops him from cooking it any further.
- The same thing happened at Finn McCool's with a chicken wing. The sous chef tried to defend himself by claiming the hot oil will sterilize it.
- At Mike and Nellie's, aside from finding the kitchen full of rotting food, with some still left in the oven after hours, the thing that most disgusted Gordon was the carpeting, which he thought reeked of dead bodies. As such, it was one of the first things he tackled as part of the restaurant's makeover.
- At Hannah and Mason's, Ramsay finds all manners of rotting food, including stale desserts and expiring lettuce. At one point he discovers a "bread pudding" that is revealed to be a cup full of slimy shrimp, which is so far past expiration that it's begun bubbling. Ramsay, however, draws the line when he discovers cooked chicken stored in the same bins with raw chicken.
- At Mama Maria's, a customer becomes extremely sickened after unknowingly consuming a rotten lobster tail. Ramsay and the cooks smell the ammonia after discovering this potentially fatal mistake and the paramedics are called in. Luckily, the customer makes a full recovery.
- And earlier that day, before the lobster incident Gordon is presented the dessert tray during lunch. On the plate he finds solidified butter and mold on the brownie, and the cannoli didn't look any better for the wear. The general manager tried to excuse it, insisting it was for "display only" and not meant to be served. This pissed off Gordon to no end as the man had the nerve to argue with him over such an obvious health hazard, and was further insulted when the man tried to excuse the presence of the tray by saying "That's what you're here for".
- Fiesta Sunrise had one of the worst-maintained kitchens, complete with cockroaches and a walk-in fridge loaded with old refried beans sitting in buckets with the consistency of wet cement. Gordon went ballistic over this discovery and put it on full display to the diners that night to show them the quality of what they were eating. Unsurprisingly, everybody left after getting a good look at where their refried beans had come from.
- At Levanti's, Gordon is furious to find a bucket of pasta sauce with mold festering on the rim. The servers are horrified when they realize that what they thought was basil was actually a serious health hazard. Gordon is quick to make sure the customers don't take another bite of spoiling food.
- At Fleming's, Gordon finds the walk-in freezer filled with improperly stored foods, but he goes absolutely ballistic when he discovers cooked duck sitting on the same tray with raw, defrosting meat, as in the duck was swimming in the blood-filled juice from the uncooked meat. Even the head chef is rightfully shocked at this, and Gordon immediately orders that every duck dish be cancelled and returned to the kitchen.
- At Finn McCool's, Gordon gets served a shepherd's pie with almost more grease in it than meat, complete with a lingering shot of oil pooling in a spoon. This one gets special mention for being one of the few dishes that made Gordon throw up without being made from spoiled ingredients.
- At El Greco's, none of the food, all of which had been microwaved, was particularly appetizing upon first viewing. Perhaps the least appetizing dish of all was the stuffed zucchinis, smothered in a mystery sauce on a bed of rice. Gordon compared it to something out of an Alien movie, and even the kitchen staff knew it didn't have a prayer in impressing the Michelin-star chef.
