What An Idiot / Kitchen Nightmares

These moments of idiocy are enough to make Gordon Ramsay lose his fucking mind.

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General Idiocy

• Plenty of restaurant owners are so convinced that their concept is flawless that they can't do corrections or follow criticism to make the restaurant better suit the local/regional demands. As most episodes of the series start, the business is bleeding money due to a combination of diner discontent with the food, unappealing marketing/decor, poor sanitary standards and/or bad leadership.
  You'd Expect: After an owner(s) calls out to Gordon for help, they'd fully embrace his changes. Gordon is not only a prominent television personality, he's also one of the highest-ranking Michelin star chefs and owns multiple successful restaurants. This is a huge opportunity to have a triumphant restaurant practically overnight.
  Instead: The owners act like they know better than Gordon and fight against his changes, even though they're the ones bleeding money and the ones who called Gordon in the first place. It seems that just because the changes were made by Gordon's team and not themselves automatically makes them "bad" in the owners' eyes. Some even assume Gordon will just tow the line with the restaurant concept they're using and Gordon's crew will give out unconditional renovations for the restaurant in question.
  Additionally: A few owners partially or completely reverse the changes after Gordon's visit and suffer for it.
• In nearly every episode, the restaurant owner does an interview with Ramsay's production crew before he arrives, talking up the quality of the food and their ingredients. However, this is often juxtaposed with employees complaining about poor sanitary conditions in the kitchen, rotting food or a combination of both.
  You'd Expect: That given how Ramsay is the host of a program that is broadcast throughout both the UK and US (to say nothing of international distribution) and the episode will be shining a specific light on the restaurant's sanitary practices, the owners would do a once-over of their pantry and freezers to ensure that rotting food or bugs aren't present. While this may take some work, there is literally no other downside to ensuring that the food you have is fresh, even if you know that it's just going to be needed for that one specific week of service. This is particularly true in later years of the series, where Ramsay's examination of the freezers is a Once per Episode segment and anyone with a cursory knowledge of the show would know that it's bound to happen.
  Instead: The owners do nothing to check the food stocks.
  The Result: Ramsay predictably finds moldy, rotting and slimy food, up to and including rotten meat and vegetables, in most episodes of the series. When confronted with this, the owners will often proclaim that they never believed such a thing was possible.

Specific Examples

• The infamous "Amy's Baking Company" episode.
  • Tired of the "cyberbullies" trying to bring them down on their Yelp page over how bad their food is, Amy and Samy Bouzaglo, the owners of the ABC Cafe in Scottsdale, Arizona, call in Gordon and the show to help prove those "haters" wrong. After reacting horribly to a Yelp review written a few months earlier, they bring in the show's cameramen to set up for filming and let them watch a dinner service. A pair of customers, who have been waiting for over an hour for their food, complain to Samy about the terrible service and threaten to leave.
    You'd Expect: That Amy and Samy would do their best to avoid causing a scene, particularly as they're being filmed for a television show. They could either reassure the customers that their food will be coming or just let them go.
    Instead: Samy harasses the customers and refuses to let them out unless they pay for their food, which they never even received. Amy overhears this and threatens calling the police to arrest them if they don't pay up.
    Even Worse: This goes From Bad to Worse when the customers make their way to the door but Samy blocks their exit, physically preventing them from leaving. A stagehand has to break up the fight while Amy dials 911.
    The Result: The police arrive and force the restaurant to close for the night. Nobody is arrested, but the producers wind up paying for everyone's meals.
  • Later, Gordon shows up, enjoying a sample of their baked goods (which were actually bought from another store). He then tastes the rest of the food, which he finds to be terrible, and witnesses how deplorable these two are to both customers and employees (to the point where Amy fires one of their waitresses because she asked a simple question, and when Samy tries to get her back, she walked off, tired of their crap). Having seen enough, Gordon demands that they meet back here the next day to try to patch things up.
    You'd Expect: During a moment without the stresses and watching Gordon tear into them, Amy and Samy would realize that they were too harsh and maybe need serious help from both a psychiatrist and an anger management counselor. At the very least, Amy would take Gordon's criticism of her cooking into consideration, on the basis that a guy with nearly thirty years of culinary experience and fourteen Michelin stars probably knows what he's talking about.
    Instead: Amy completely blows off all of Gordon's criticism, claiming that the dishes he tasted are very popular and no one else has ever complained about them. The next day, she and Samy simply don't show up at the restaurant, giving Gordon a chance to find out more about these two via a couple of fired employees, and when he finally confronts them, they still refuse to believe that what they're doing is wrong.
    The Result: Gordon decides he's had enough, and he walks out for the first time on the show. Note that this had never happened before. Even the infamous Joe of Mill Street Bistro couldn't drive Gordon out of his restaurant, but the owners of Amy's managed to.
    Even Worse: After this, Amy and Samy had a public meltdown on their restaurant's Facebook fanpage and Yelp profile. It was so controversial that Forbes used it as a case example for what businesses should not do on social media.
• In "Burger Kitchen", the titular restaurant's owners, Alan and Gen Saffron, took £250,000 of their son Daniel's inheritance to finance their failing business without telling him about it or giving him any choice in the matter. Daniel is understandably furious with them as a result.
  You'd Expect: Alan and Saffron to at least understand why Daniel's so unhappy.
  Instead: They don't, and at one point, Alan pretty much says "I stole £250K of my son's money! Why is he so pissed off with me?" Wow, what a mystery.
• In "Sebastian's," Gordon forces the eponymous owner to replace his confusing and over-complicated menu, which relies on cheap mass-produced ingredients (which Gordon had earlier referred to as "the most disgusting bought-in crap I've ever tasted"), with a simpler one focused around pizza. Sebastian complains that the new menu is generic, but Gordon points out to him that his menu wasn't working, and that the new one plays better to the kitchen's strengths.
  You'd Expect: Sebastian to stick with Gordon's menu for a while and see how it pans out. After all, having a "unique" menu isn't going to matter much if nobody's ordering anything from it.
  Instead: Sebastian orders his staff to ditch Gordon's menu and revert to the old one halfway through the relaunch service, even changing orders that customers have already made from the newer menu without asking their permission.
  The Result: This leads to Gordon telling Sebastian that he's never met anyone he believes in as little as him, resulting in a massive fight between the two. Even after he returns to the restaurant upon recovering himself and goes ahead with Gordon's menu for the rest of the night, Sebastian continues to stay with his menu following Gordon's visit, and is rewarded by the restaurant eventually closing.
• After forcing the staff at Seascape to clean up the filthiest kitchen he'd ever seen on the show until that point, Gordon announces that they'll be featuring a striped bass special on that night's menu, and cooks a sampler for the owners and the head chef, Doug, to taste.
  You'd Expect: Doug to actually taste the sampler, if for no other reason than to get an idea of what the dish he's meant to be cooking that night is meant to taste like.
  Instead: He refuses to taste the dish, making a dismissive comment that he knows what striped bass tastes like. Gordon asks Doug again, and he snaps back that he's positive that he doesn't want to taste it, leading Gordon to react with Tranquil Fury at someone refusing to taste his food, something he says no-one has ever done before.
  The Result: Gordon is clearly looking for any excuse to get Doug and his sous-chef Charles fired after that point — which the two are kind enough to provide by completely screwing up that night's service, and being generally dismissive and contemptuous of Gordon's advice. Sure enough, the next morning, Doug and Charles find themselves out of their jobs.
• In "Park's Edge," two friends opened a restaurant despite little experience. They failed to do the research and ended up getting in trouble with the law for their violations.
  You'd Expect: They would apologize to the community and hire a lawyer to help them make sure they know all the zoning laws and what they need permits for.
  Instead: As he mentions to Gordon, Richard accused the community of singling them out for being two minority business owners in a majority-white neighborhood, angering the residents even further.
• In "South Brooklyn", co-owner Kelly puts in the full financial investment into the restaurant and makes her head chef, Rey, a co-owner reasoning that the work he puts in would be the equivalent of a financial investment.
  You'd Expect: She'd be careful with her investment and either use a joint account for the business expenses, or put just in her name due to having put the full investment in.
  Instead: She gives Rey full control of the accounts.
• "Bonaparte's":
  • Gordon orders Tim, the restaurant's head chef, to cook him a sampler of his signature dish, scallops with ham and black pudding.
    You'd Expect: Tim to make sure he's using the very best ingredients that he has to hand, given that he's a young chef at the start of his career, and that what he does next will be broadcast on national television for any employers to see (even considering that this was in 2004, in the pre-YouTube age).
    Instead: He unknowingly prepares the dish using expired scallops, and when Gordon eats it, he lasts all of ten seconds before having to run outside and throw up. It's probably only because of his inexperience that he gets a What Were You Thinking? speech from Gordon instead of being immediately fired for this potentially lethal mistake.
  • Despite that and many other blunders during the episode, Tim manages to lead the kitchen through a successful Valentine's Day dinner using a bistro menu, and Gordon leaves Tim with words of encouragement.
    You'd Expect: Tim to keep with the system he used on Valentine's Day (which, aside from Christmas Day, is generally the busiest day of the year for restaurants), now that he knows he can run a kitchen if he puts his mind to it. Likewise, you'd expect the restaurant's owner, Sue, to keep a close eye on Tim in the future, considering how filthy the kitchen was at the start of Gordon's visit.
    Instead: By the time Gordon revisits a month later, the restaurant has deteriorated to an even worse state than when he first arrived, with guest numbers having dropped back to almost nothing, and the kitchen being both filthy and full of rotten food. Sue fires Tim, but it proves too late to save the restaurant, which closes a few months later. Tim himself lampshades this trope after his firing, saying that it was "beyond recognition, how fucking stupid some people can be", and making it clear that he was referring to himself.

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