Kitchen Nightmares / Tropes E to N

Kitchen Nightmares Trope Examples
A - D | E - N | O - Z

E

• The Eeyore:
  • Akira, the owner of SushiKo, was driven to such depression and self-loathing by the restaurant's financial problems that he refused to so much as wear a chef's jacket while working, feeling himself unworthy of it. One of Gordon's therapeutic techniques for him was trying to persuade him to put one on whenever possible.
  • Makis, the owner of the Greek at the Harbor, let the restaurant go to seed after coming down with a severe depression due to accidentally overhearing his son say he did not want to inherit the restaurant after his father retired. While the son changed his mind after seeing how much the restaurant meant to his father, Gordon still has to do a lot of work to get the two to make up. Thankfully, he succeeds, earning one of the most spectacularly happy endings in the history of the show.
• Epic Fail:
  • During the Casa Roma episode, it took an hour for Gordon to get his starter, and another thirty minutes on top of that to get his main course. This would be bad enough if the restaurant was busy, but Gordon was the only customer there. Then, in the subsequent dinner service, they only served main courses to 3 tables out of a possible 25. Not surprisingly, Gordon demanded that they fire their head chef before he'd even consider going any further.
  • In P.J.'s Steakhouse, Gordon tried a practice renewed-service to see if they could get customers 'excited.' The very first table served—the first—has their food stone cold. Seeing the head chef's attitude, one wonders if he wasn't deliberately sabotaging service.
  • To drive the point home that Pantaleone's was well past its Glory Days, Gordon served a public taste test between their pizza, a pizza served by the highest-end restaurant in Denver (which is not named), and a store-bought pizza. Pantaleone's pizza ranked dead last, behind the store-bought pizza.
  • At Leone's, Gordon requests that the staff cook one of everything from the restaurant's fifteen-page menu, and he comes back to find over one hundred dishes laid out for him in the dining room. He finds something off about virtually every dish, before ordering the chefs to sit down and take a bite. They admit that they do not like the food they cook, with one of them spitting out a poorly-prepared risotto.
  • Amy's Baking Company. The most infamous episode in the history of the show, and the one episode where Gordon just gave up and walked away. Between the two delusional and malicious owners berating and fighting with their customers, firing 100 staff in one year, and doing illegal and unethical things like deliberately over-spicing a meal to hurt a criticizing customer and taking the staff's tips, is it any wonder? Even Alan and Gen from Burger Kitchen weren't that idiotic.
• Even the Rats Won't Touch It: When trying to eat the barbecue shrimp in "The Old Neighborhood", Ramsay notes to the waitress Kristen that the shrimp is so bad even the fly bugging him won't touch it.
• Evil Counterpart: At one point in the Le Bistro episode, Gordon notes the similarities between owner/head chef Andy and himself: In addition to both of them being chefs that own their own restaurants, they are both British and have very similar cooking backgrounds. The big difference though is that Gordon cares about his customers while Andy does not.
• Executive Meddling: In-Universe, a recurring theme is chefs being forced to cook with substandard ingredients or techniques due to clueless or penny-pinching owners.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Gordon's reaction to the overly-pretentious Filet Mignon at Flamango's-
  Gordon: Next, Filet Mignon. Looking forward to a really nice, classic piece of meat...the Chef's dream, Filet Mignon. Something simple, something classic...[Beat as the unfinished Filet Mignon is shown being wheeled in on a cart by the now sharply-dressed owner]...and something that's not normally served on a trolley.

F

• Failed Attempt at Drama: In a Mexican restaurant, Gordon finds a whole mess of unacceptable ingredients in the kitchen, the last straw being a bucket of spoiled beans. When the stubborn owner doesn't react, Gordon marches into the dining room with the beans. He imperiously shouts "Ladies and gentlemen!" and slams the bucket on a table for emphasis - breaking the table. He has to rest the bucket on a chair while awkwardly attempting to keep the table propped up as he announces the closure.
• Failed Dramatic Exit: After closing down a kitchen (and reacting angrily when the owner acts as though the closure is Gordon's fault), Gordon shows the customers a container of mould-encrusted spaghetti sauce to explain why the kitchen is closed. He apologizes to the customers, expresses his disappointment, angrily heads back to the kitchen - and ends up stuck trying to push a pull door. ("Fuck'n door...")
  • A similar event happened during one of his mid-service testimonials. He left the kitchen to speak directly to the camera, and when he went to go back in to resume monitoring the service the door, which had closed behind him, was locked, leading him to mutter, "And now I'm locked out."
• Females Are More Innocent: Whenever a staff has a husband and wife team leading it Gordon tends to mostly aim his feedback at the male and the wife only tends to do better once the husband starts to also.
• Flipping the Bird: Abby of DownCity arrogantly does this to mark her walkout to Gordon while he's going through her freezer.
• Flipping the Table: Done in the US Season 2 episode "Fiesta Sunrise" by Don, the husband of owner Patty, during an argument with his stepfather-in-law Vic (the manager in charge of most of the restaurant's operation).
• Food Porn: Inverted with the unappetizing dishes. The camera lingers over them, but the effect is more like Fan Disservice than food porn. However, straight examples are not uncommon, as Gordon might come up with some recipes to help the restaurant's kitchen staff. There's also the occasional chef who's tied up by the managers, and Gordon will make it a point to have the chef cook for the managers to show their full potential.
• French Cuisine Is Haughty:
  • La Riviera was actually a top notch French restaurant with elaborate, delicious French cuisine (the manager invested in top notch kitchen appliance and produces while the chefs themselves had a rock solid career as chefs in prestigious establishments), but which Gordon fears put off the locals because of the menu's sheer haughtiness. Ironically, the head chef eventually returned to France and earned a Michelin star for his cooking.
  • Michel of The Secret Garden attempted to invoke this trope, but merely put his restaurant in jeopardy in doing so.
  • Le Bistro is a French restaurant that has the blessings of being located in an upscale Florida neighborhood. In winning over the approval of the community, they were able to remain in business to this day.
  • Averted with the other French restaurants that have appeared across the series: Cafe 36, La Frite, and Piccolo Teatro (the latter of which was actually in Paris!). While they may not have been haughty, they nonetheless have suffered from serious issues within.
• French Jerk:
  • Michel of The Secret Garden, whose attempts to invoke French Cuisine Is Haughty put his restaurant in jeopardy. Gordon was so disgusted by his arrogance that he called him a "French pig".
  • Averted with Andy, the head chef and owner of Le Bistro. While he's is extremely dour throughout the episode, and specializes in French cuisine, he's actually British.
• Freudian Excuse: In many episodes, Gordon discovers that the restaurant's issues are intimately tied to issues in the personal lives of its staff, forcing him into an impromptu therapist's role. For example, Peter, the owner of Seascape, allowed his restaurant's standards to drop sharply to the point that he didn't even care about reprimanding his head chef and sous-chef despite their obvious don't-care attitude because his father, the previous owner, never once complimented him and always told him he'd never amount to anything.
• From Bad to Worse: A staple of every episode. Many of the restaurants have dated decor, which is immediately off-putting to Gordon (and other potential diners.) Virtually 99.9% of the time, the food he samples is terrible, either because the chef is overworked, arrogant, or locked into the owners menu (or a combination of all three). From there is gets worse when he observes dinner service, which often ends with the kitchen shut down because they either completely fold under the pressure of having to feed an entire restaurant of customers, or because Gordon has gotten a glimpse of their fridge and freezer and found rotten food, opened food with no labels of when it was put in, or cross-contamination of cooked and raw food. Terrifyingly, Gordon has encountered fridges with all three problems. It's only after this and plenty of tough love and screaming from Gordon that things start to rebound.
  • The episode featuring the most of this trope is arguably Fiesta Sunrise. The first big red flag is that the awning still contains the residue of the name of the previous restaurant, which stuck on after the letters were removed. During a terrible lunch, Gordon discovers the menus have a Fiesta Sunrise sticker over the name Fiesta Garibaldi. Co-owner Vic shares they were from his prior restaurant, which failed and were reused at Sunrise with no edits whatsoever. As was typical, Gordon discovered appalling kitchen practices while observing dinner service and ordered a kitchen shutdown. But unlike other episodes, the bad still wasn't done. After cleaning out the rotten food, Gordon was prepped to do a bonding exercise with the family (Vic, Yolanda, and Patty) only to discover the kitchen was infested with cockroaches, resulting in another closure while they hired an exterminator. Just when it seems like things can proceed, Vic's kitchen staff reveal they're completely clueless at cooking fresh food and Gordon becomes to dejected and frustrated that he goes back to New York and brings in a chef from a top Mexican restaurant from the city to train Vic's cooks and oversee a mostly successful dinner service.
• Funny Background Event: A poster for Ratatouille can be seen during a scene from the Piccolo Teatro episode. Had it been in any other episode it would have been funny enough, but this episode also happens to take place in Paris.

G

• Generation Xerox: Encountered in "Burger Kitchen". Alan, the owner, gave Gordon a book he wrote about his abusive father ^note Abe Saffron, who happens to have also been one of the most notorious mobsters in Australia, whom he hated for trying to make him stay in Australia and work in his business. As revealed earlier in the episode, it seems that Alan's son, Daniel, has suffered a similar fate.
• The Generic Guy: If such a trope can be assigned to a restaurant instead of a person, The Olde Stone Mill. Despite the usual mix of misguided management and apathetic cooks, everyone was (by Kitchen Nightmares standards) rather mild mannered and willing to listen. Perhaps this is partly why The Olde Stone Mill is the oldest restaurant appearing on Kitchen Nightmares to still be open - it's the sole remaining restaurant from Season 1 (!!).
  • That being said, it sold twice, once in 2009 and once in 2018. It changed names when it sold in 2018, and is now DiNapoli's Stone Mill. Google reviews are mainly positive, Yelp reviews vary wildly.
• Genre Shift:
  • Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack (UK) was a very different episode than most of them. For starters, all the food was good to the point that Ramsay pretty much licked the plate clean, the owner was very happy he was there, and the only reason they were failing was due to a lack of experience in running a restaurant.
  • La Riviera (UK) had experienced, accomplished chefs, top-quality ingredients, great service, and an owner who had experience in restaurants through running hotels. The main issues were the overcomplicated and overgarnished food, an overly intimidating menu that most of the working-and-middle-class city denizens had no idea what the items were (and weren't interested in, being a small city surrounded by farmers), and the lack of patrons from the upper-class that did exist in the city.
  • Similarly, the Curry Lounge (UK) had experienced chefs, eager staff, and an owner with financial experience (also via running hotels). The big issue was the owner's attempts to make the restaurant stand out from the competition (a build-your-own-curry menu) resulted in bland food that overworked and underused the chefs (literally hundreds of variations, all going into the same three curries), who had to resort to dumbing down each recipe to get it out the door faster.
  • Fleming (US) started out almost as expected due to an outdated menu, outdated decor and a chef that seemed inept. However, Gordon loves the foil swans one of the waitresses makes. The owners barely argue with him and accept his suggestions. The chef was unskilled with and uninterested in the Danish menu the restaurant served, but once handed a Cuban menu that he enjoyed, he made excellent foods. The relaunch only has a minor issue with salad preparation, but the episode overall was relatively calm.
• George Jetson Job Security: When Gordon arrived at Oceana's, the young woman to serve him lunch admits to have been fired four times in the last year, only to be allowed back after each time. Ramsay is quite astonished, to say the least.
• Glory Days: There are a number of owners or chefs who were very successful early on in their career, only to fall on hard times and clinging onto their pass sucess.
  • One restaurant, the Greek At The Harbor, was in business for over 30 years. However, the owner had not updated the anything for a long time and lost his passion after his son mocked him and the restaurant during his graduation party. He was clinging onto the old days.
  • The Old Neighborhood had been in business for a long time, with the current owners, who use to work as servers, buying it from the old owners. The neighborhood changed from a family community to a young college town but the owners had not updated the menu since that time and had refused to even update the dining room as things worked before with no issues. Showing its age when the wallpaper was peeling.
  • When Gordon meets Nick Anderson, owner and head chef of Rococo's, it is very clear he is trying to recapture the days when he was a rather well-known Michelin Star chef. It's not going well when Gordon arrives, as his menu is full of outdated, overpriced items and he's hanging on to awards and award listings from when he was a top chef.
  • Pete, owner and founder of "Pantaleone's" isn't much better, clinging to decade-old five-star reviews to justify refusing to change his disastrous recipes.
• Good Is Not Nice: Ramsay's endgame is to save each of the restaurants he visits from bankruptcy. However, he'll throw everything that's wrong in the face of the owners and whoever is responsible around, often in a violent or humiliating manner, and call out each of the staff's failing so much some may end up crying. Those who put up with the yelling and listen to the message usually end up becoming better at their job.
• Grin of Rage: Attempted by Peter in the "Peter's" episode. When Ramsay starts dressing him down after experiencing the restauraunt (which he does in every episode), Peter starts acting like a character from Goodfellas, grinning and laughing at Ramsay while saying "this guy's fuckin' crazy". Gordon sees right through the cliched intimidation tactic, and isn't scared in the slightest. Keep in mind, it was found out years later that Peter was a former member of the Italian Mafia (which actually makes a lot of sense in hindsight), meaning that Gordon was actually in danger despite his casual reaction to Peter's implied threat. Of course, Gordon Ramsay is a black belt in karate, which is probably why he wasn't at all nervous.

H

• Ham-to-Ham Combat: The husband and wife duo in "The Fish and Anchor" frequently get involved in this against one another. It's one of the reasons their restaurant doesn't get so many customers.
• Happy Ending: Few and far between - sometimes the restaurant improves but can't pay the bills, sometimes it improves enough to break even and then goes out of business, sometimes the restaurant stays open but doesn't improve, only hangs in there on the new good publicity.
  • The Greek At The Harbor - according to reviews, business is booming, reviews are good, and Makis is slowly preparing to hand the reigns of the restaurant over to Eris.
  • Lido's is easily the most successful of the restaurants Ramsay has turned around. It continues to thrive now, and Lisa has since expanded to create her own brand of wine, too.
  • Le Bistro is also very much still in business, and doing great.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: In the D-Place episode, the head chef pointed to a piece of new kitchen equipment and said "I'm sleeping with that tonight; not Dave." Dave being his former rival and the restaurant's manager.
• Head Desk: Ramsay has only this reaction when the cooks of Fiesta Sunrise manage to set fire to a plate of nachos. He does it again in "La Galleria 33" after finding out how old some of the food is.
• Heel Realization: Many of the chefs eventually realize that their behavior is the cause of their restaurant's failure. They almost always change themselves for the better, at least until the end of the episode, anyway.
  • Some of the owners go through this as well, notably Peter from the Peter's episode.
• High Hopes, Zero Talent: Sebastian has ambitions about starting a franchise of namesake restaurants with his first as a launching part. An incredulous Gordon tells him that he can't run one restaurant properly and yet he's thinking about a second.
• High Turnover Rate: Sebastian says he's fired 49 people in the past year...but still has nothing on Amy and Samy Bouzaglo of Amy's Baking Company, who fired about a hundred — yes, a hundred — over the same period of time.
• Homage:
  • In the Spanish Pavilion episode, Gordon points out the lobsters in the tank from which he is expected to make his dinner selection have something wrong with them. One is suspiciously immobile and static at the bottom of the tank. Gordon voices a professional opinion to the effect that it just perhaps might be dead. Without missing a beat, the maitre d replies "No, it's just sleeping.'' There follows a terse discourse on how to identify a dead lobster. Gordon does refrain from commenting that it would remain dead even if you put five million volts through it, and somehow manages to avoid referring to ex-lobsters or "pining for the [ocean]", but you can feel it hovering, unsaid, in the air.
  • And at Ms Jean's Southern Cuisine in Pittsburgh, a waitress has the mortifying experience of telling Ramsay that three-quarters of the items listed on the menu are in fact not available. Ramsay requesting an item, only to get the reply "no", or "off-menu" or "not available, Mr Ramsay", goes on for quite some time. Gordon heroically refrains from inquiring "do you, in fact, sell any soul food here at all?". Then he discovers ribs are available as stated. Regrettably, the question of runniness is not entered into.
• Humble Pie: Gordon attempts to invoke this in "La Parra de Burriana", where he takes Lawrence to a bullfighting ring for a practice bullfight. The intent was for Lawrence to drop his arrogance as he listens to the teacher's instructions, knowing how important they are to keeping him safe in the ring.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick:
  • Sous Chef Daniella from "Charlie's" is shown to be a better chef than Head Chef Casimiro. As demonstrated when Gordon has them cook a meatball, Daniella manages to do a good job while Casimiro does not.
  • Emma from "Morgan's", who is one of the few chefs to actually create something that Gordon Ramsay liked, which is something that Head Chef David couldn't.
• Hypocrite: The father in The Burger Kitchen states how horrible it is for how his father stabbed him in the back, all the while he stole his son's inheritance to open the restaurant.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In The Burger Kitchen visit, the owner criticized the chef's burger, saying that it was cooked medium rather than medium-rare. However, the amount of juice seen leaking from the burger that the owner made showed that his burger was rare, at best.
  • The episode at Barefoot Bob's has Gordon bemused by the presence of a fortune teller at the restaurant; initially mocking her, he proceeds to ask for a reading from the woman using her cards, and she predicts that the owners - who were a husband and wife pair struggling to keep their marriage afloat due to the restaurant's problems - will end up splitting apart. Not only does the show insert a sudden musical sting to make viewers take this entirely seriously, Gordon himself looks concerned by this.
• Hysterical Woman: Many females in this series show signs of this, be it wives, girlfriends, or owners. Even a female customer literally cries when her burger comes with sourdough bread rather than the regular burger bread the restaurant uses.

I

• Ignored Expert: Even though the owners of ailing restaurants are the ones who call Ramsay in for help, some of them dig their heels in and resist the changes he tells them they need. Once he's gone, a few of them even outright reverse the steps forward they'd taken under his tutelage. This never ends well.
• I'm Not Afraid of You: Due to Ramsay's caustic, confrontational approach, some chefs/owners (especially younger, and bigger, guys) will try to physically intimidate or even threaten Ramsay. This is invariably his response. He even tells them to go for it if they really want to. Gordon has a black belt in karate, however, so heaven help anyone who would genuinely try to engage in an actual fight with the man.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Many restaurants have actually been open for a long time and were successful, but then the owner died or retired, and the next owners (more often the kids of the previous one) ruin it and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy.
• Incompetence, Inc.: It's amazing how some of the restaurants were even open long enough to have Ramsay visit.
  • Dillons seemingly had no idea what they were doing. They served Gordon a "vegetarian" platter that included meat, then went on to serve him a "beef" bhuna that was actually an expired lamb bhuna, then were forced to serve a frozen salmon, one of Gordon's no-nos, because they didn't think to prepare for his arrival, and served old potatoes with it. Gordon ended up shutting the place down and hiring professional cleaners because the staff hadn't kept an eye on the state of the kitchen or food storage, and as a result their ingredients were hideous; one of the managers described the meat as "putrid", there were cockroaches and flies all over storage, and Gordon's breaking point was a freshly-cut rotten tomato, the other half of which had been served as a tomato rose.
  • Fiesta Sunrise. Every bit of food in the kitchen is so incredibly unfresh that Gordon lost his temper and shut the service down from how horrible the quality was. Plus the kitchen's infested with cockroaches that were all over everything, which disgusted Gordon and the manager's wife and stepdaughter.
  • Cafe Hon's owner clearly did not think things through, from what we see in the example service. Not only does she stop the service to complain about the artichokes—not after, but as everyone is working in the kitchen, bringing everything to a standstill and causing things to back up—but also pulled a dozen items off from the available menu (referred to as '86-ing.) It wasn't because they ran out, it was because there were one or two complaints—likely caused by the chefs not being able to keep track of their food because of her mid-service lecture. It was a disaster, needless to say.
  • P.J.'s Steakhouse. As one owner, Joe, constantly sat down at a bar to drink wine and watch television, the other owner, Madalyn, would be unnecessarily rude to customers that had complaints. At one point, she walks away from a customer, icily dismissing them.
  • Mangia Mangia. Holy crap, where do we begin? First of all the decor is still nearly identical from the fast food business, even including a drive-thru window — not carside takeout, a literal drive-thru. Next, microwaves were used to cook everything and none of the ingredients were fresh, so as to be expected, the food was terrible. The owner is in complete denial and every time Ramsay gave a valid criticism, she repeated "I think the food is good" without ever going into detail why. The head chef is a Jerkass with a drug problem who constantly talks back to the owner and even doesn't show up sometimes. The waitress — and owner's daughter — was just as much a Jerkass who made personal attacks towards the head chef, like saying that nobody loved him or cared about his existence and that he'd be better off dead, or insulting his intelligence for failing to make pasta from scratch on what was his first attempt ever. This might as well be the Trope Codifier.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: John, the owner of Sal's Pizzeria, has this reaction when a customer starts vomiting in his restaurant after eating rotten lobster, asking for a shot of vodka so he can cope with the stress.
• In Name Only: Zeke's, which was originally run by a man named Zeke who died in Hurricane Katrina. It was bought by a couple who kept most of the staff, as well as the name because they felt it was a good brand, but the staff noted how they'd changed almost everything due to being only concerned about the bottom line.
• Insistent Terminology: Sebastian's doesn't have a menu, it has a "concept."
• Interspecies Romance: Ramsay makes a few jokes about this when the owner of Mill Street Bistro introduces him to his pet goat, and remarks that said goat is "jealous" when it tries to headbutt Ramsay.
• It Came from the Fridge: Some restaurants routinely have boxes upon boxes of spoiled, moldy food that the appalled Chef Ramsay orders thrown out.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: From the "The Granary" episode:
  Ramsay: That's why you're in the shit, you fucking fat idiot!
  Nigel: Don't call me fat!
• It Tastes Like Feet: This is a very common way in which Ramsay insults food he doesn't like, possibly to the point of at least Once an Episode. Knowing Ramsay and his hatred of lying, he's probably eaten some nasty stuff in his days for the sake of knowing.
  • In one episode, he described certain food as tasting like "flypaper" and later on "It tastes like a leather belt."
  • Pantaleone's episode has a customer saying his meatballs "taste like cat food." When Gordon asks him how he knows what cat food tastes like, his response is "Long story."

J

• Jerkass:
  • Amy from Amy's Baking Company. She deliberately over-spices a complaining customer's meal while proudly hoping it would hurt him. She sacks a young waitress on the spot for asking a question and drives her to tears, and then asks her to come back so she can tell the girl off for talking back while reminding her she's still fired. And repeatedly insults and berates Gordon and her customers. Samy is little better.
  • Janelle, the daughter of the owner of Mangia Mangia. Verbally abuses the staff and especially Trevor, uses the fact he is a crystal meth addict to put him down and belittle him, tells him to his face that nobody loves him and that he would be better off dead, and when Trevor confesses the extent of his mental health issues and his drug addiction and is consequently let go, Janelle is seen smiling as he is reduced to tears and gleefully points out that the "cancer" of the restaurant is gone and that things will be better without him. Just a deeply unpleasant piece of work.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Gordon himself. He usually comes off as brash and loud, but shows genuine concern for the well-being of the restaurant and its staff, and in many cases, his jerkishness is understandable, as he frequently deals with owners and/or employees who stubbornly refuse to accept responsibility for their restaurant's failures.
  • Some owners/chefs have initially been abrasive towards Gordon and their own staff, but typically they come around and change their ways, becoming more polite/reliable/cooperative. Several have shown that it was a personal matter affecting their behavior, not an inherent personality trait.
  • One owner who butts heads with Gordon, originally appearing to be nothing but a jerk who's watched too much Sopranos, at first merely sullenly agrees when Gordon says he's there to help. However, when a rude bill collector insults Gordon, the owner has to be physically held back from attacking him. Afterwards he's almost in tears. "He shouldn't say that to you! Not with what you're doing for us!" Wow.
• Just Here for Godzilla: In-Universe; Dinnertime tends to be busy for any restaurant on day one of Ramsay's visit because everyone's heard he's there for an episode. Could overlap with Bile Fascination when you consider that he's only there because the restaurant is failing and they might either want to see if it's really that bad or just don't care either way. This works out well for Gordon since he can observe how well the kitchen functions under those conditions, and get opinions from the customers on the state of affairs.

K

• Kayfabe:
  • Gordon is falsely accused of this in the Blackberry's episode when he found a dead mouse at the restaurant's door — the manager James blew up at him for "planting it" right before talking behind his back about one they found before. Gordon took the accusation about as well as you might expect.
  • This is, in fact, part of Gordon's schtick. Or at least, he wants you to think so, whether it is or not. Much like a drill sergeant, those on the receiving ends of his tirades are never quite sure how much of his yelling is raw seething rage over the listener's screwups and how much is bluster played up for the audience. And much like the poor hapless recruit, it generally behooves the listener to assume the worst and act accordingly.
• Knife-Throwing Act: One of the intros for the American show had Gordon standing in front of a target while dozens of knives were tossed at it, him catching one of the knives thrown at his head, and throwing it back to sender.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Many of the owners come across like this, but the most notorious are:
  • Sebastian, the owner of the eponymous pizza place.
  • David, one of the three co-owners of the Black Pearl. His only incentive was to trash Gordon and the changes he made to improve the restaurant, only for the restaurant to shutter shortly thereafter.

L

• Language Fluency Denial: The Mexican kitchen crew at Fiesta Sunrise pretend not to understand English when Gordon tries to instruct them. He sees through it immediately.
  Gordon: They speak English, they're just being clever by ignoring me, yes?
  Vic: Yeah.
• Large Ham: Gordon Ramsay definitely likes to ham it up, especially when he first steps into a restaurant or when he receives weird-looking food.
• Lethal Chef:
  • Gordon runs into a few of these, and got food poisoning at least once. The first incident of this was in the pilot, where he flat-out said that Bonaparte's scallops could've killed him.
  • Some, such as Erick from Casa Roma, Damon from Oceana, and Casimiro from Charlie's, even had to be fired during the episode because Gordon and the owners saw the restaurant couldn't move on with them. Pinto from Cafe 36 at least managed to stay until the end of the episode, but never improved as a chef even under Gordon's tuition, and quit the day after the final dinner service anyway.
  • Mama Maria's had a chef cook a lobster that was rotten and serve it to one customer, who then got extremely ill from it. The customer had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital and the restaurant closed early to prevent any more people from becoming sick. Gordon plainly pointed out that the food could have killed someone.
• Lethal Eatery: In conjunction with Lethal Chef.
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: Joe from the two-parter episode of "Mill Street Bistro" is an example of this, alongside outright denial. When Amy tells Joe that the Elk Medallion is too tough to even chew for Ramsay, and they charge an outrageous $35.00 for the elk on top of that, Joe eats it himself and says "[Ramsay] is dead wrong, elk is gonna have a bite, gonna have a chew, it's characteristic of it, it's never gonna change. That is a tender piece of elk." In fact, Joe said, that at his expense, he would go to one of Ramsay's restaurants that serve elk and he'd demand instructions on how elk should be made.
• Liquid Courage: The manager of Jack's Waterfront downs a big shot of ouzo to steady his nerves before speaking to Ramsay, who spotted him doing it and tears him a new asshole for it.
• Literal-Minded: Nino, in a bout of Snark-to-Snark Combat with Gordon:
  Gordon: I am shitting myself.
  Nino: Then you need to wear diapers.
• Locked in a Freezer: Played for laughs in "Prohibition Grille" when he saw the belly dancers and wanted to stay there until it's done.
• Long Speech Tea Time: Whenever Gordon bruised his ego, Joe Nagy of the Mill Street Bistro would go on lengthy rants to staff and customers alike as if they were his psychiatrists about how he's so much better than Ramsay, with no one being particularly interested in his prattling.
• Loveable Rogue: The employee who constantly steals food and wine from the kitchen in Lela's tries to play one (other staff even call him 'Buzzard') but Gordon's having none of it, pointing out that stealing from a financially hard-up restaurant is really not cool. Once he's caught on camera, the owner soon fires him.

M

• Manchild:
  • Jim and Jeff, the twin brothers who own and operate Capri. Both of them alternate between acting childishly petulant when Gordon tries to help them to bursting into tears at the slightest provocation.
  • John of Mama Maria's also qualifies. He's not necessarily lazy or careless, he just won't abandon the pizza-making post, the job he had as a child. Ramsay convinces him it's long past due for him to become adult and take charge of things.
  • Bobby from Bask 46 is not the ideal chef. He's abrasive towards customers, threatens them regularly, is taking advantage of the owner for a $100,000 a year paycheck, which most chefs would kill for, and accuses Gordon Ramsay of having a Teeny Weenie for having valid criticism.
• Man in a Kilt: In the La Riviera episode, Gordon put the entire male staff of a restaurant in kilts and wore one himself for the first dinner service of the restaurant after redesigning it.
• Manly Tears: Expect them at least once an episode, usually when the owner sees the remodeled restaurant and when the owner realizes that the restaurant is either saved or screwed at the end.
• Master of None:
  • Many restaurant managers on the show make the mistake of incorporating too many items on the menu, oftentimes disregarding their synergy with the cuisine of choice. Gordon precludes his lunch at Oscar's with this quote:
    "A good restaurant does one sort of food brilliantly. A bad one does fifty badly."
  • One establishment, Mangia Mangia, attempted to combine a casual sit-down Italian restaurant with a drive-thru. All this did was rush the food-making process and stress out the staff.
  • The Sandgate Hotel attempted to run four different restaurants from one kitchen, with predictably disastrous results. Ramsay pinpoints this problem to bad management: in addition to there being more restaurants than the hotel needs, the chefs are either overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or otherwise mismatched with the cuisine they're assigned to.
• Medal of Dishonor:
  • Ramsay has named Piccolo Teatro owner Rachel as the worst owner he met in the UK version, and Amy's Baking Company owners Amy and Samy as the worst owners from the US version. Rachel, because unlike nearly all the other owners seen in the UK version, she didn't even try to make the restaurant a success after he left— on top of not caring what happened to her father ^note Who had accrued a massive debt trying to save it, only for her to deliberately destroy it herself afterward. and chef ^note Who had moved from Scotland to Paris to work there, and was now unemployed and stranded abroad. as a result of her own laziness and arrogance, and petulantly trying to blame Ramsay to his face for her own failure. As for Amy and Samy? Well, the fact that an entire separate page is dedicated to the Amy's Baking Company episode alone should tell you everything you need to know.
  • Gordon has gotten some of the most stubborn people imaginable to mend their ways, so in general you need to be a special kind of terrible to get him to give up on you completely. In addition to the aforementioned Bouzaglos, this very small category includes Head Chef Erick from Casa Roma, who in addition to being terrible at his job regarded the restaurant's woes as a source of Black Comedy for himself, and a line cook at Lela's nicknamed (and only ever identified as) "Buzzard" due to the fact that he constantly steals from the restaurant.
• Medieval Stasis: Gordon considers The Priory "stuck in a time warp, turning out old-fashioned carvery every day for the past twenty years." The fact that it's situated in a re-appropriated chapel doesn't help.
• The Millstone: In "Peter's," Gordon outright tells the man himself to his face that the restaurant would run better without him.
  • Sebastian from "Sebastian's" is another dead ringer. Given that he has absolutely no idea how to run a restaurant, has absolutely NO idea how to even cook basic items, and is so far up his own ass about his "Concept" that the thinks is going to make him a famous star that he can't see anything else.
• Misblamed: invoked
  • The UK episode "Bonaparte's" had the owner threaten to sue Gordon after her restaurant failed, despite her inexperience at owning a restaurant and the incompetence of her head chef Tim. It got to the point where she claimed in a newspaper that Tim, her utter liability of a head chef, was actually an actor who duped her into hiring him, then deliberately did as bad a job as possible for the sake of making some good television, resulting in Ramsay successfully suing the newspaper that printed the article.
  • The manager of Black Berry's tried to blame Gordon for the dead mouse that was discovered, claiming that it had been planted by the camera crew to make the show more dramatic. This almost ended the episode, as Gordon came within a hair of shutting down the whole thing rather than be called a liar.
  • In "Burger Kitchen", Ramsay blames Chef David for the horrible food, to which the latter tells him that he would be kicked out if he doesn't follow the recipes he used. This prompts Ramsay to give out a Big "WHAT?!" and turn towards the owners.
  • The owner/chef at La Parra de Burriana tried to blame Gordon's new menu for the chaos of the relaunch night, claiming that the grill chef couldn't handle the changeover. Gordon was quick to point out that the owner had switched menus when the confusion was at its worst, rather than when the chaos started, as they had agreed, and these two things caused disaster.
  • At D-Place, Gordon tried to blame the executive chef for the service mixups, and while the chef's slow output certainly didn't help things, the owner said the responsibility was ultimately the restaurant manager's, not the chefs', and Gordon admitted he was right.
  • The owner of Piccolo Teatro blamed Ramsay for her business failing, despite the fact that Ramsay was shown doing everything possible to save the place and, at one point, even opened the restaurant for a lunch service without her to demonstrate what she was doing wrong. When the restaurant closed down, she was shown to be completely unconcerned with the serious debt her father had incurred trying to save the place (to Ramsay's outrage), as well as with the fate of the chef she had hired (the lady had moved from Scotland to Paris only to suddenly find herself unemployed until Ramsay stepped in and hired her, impressed by her skills).
  • The owner of Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack actually came to Ramsay's defense when people were blaming him for her restaurant closing. She said that it was because of economic issues, and Ramsay was the only reason she lasted as long as she did. Seeing as Gordon cleaned his plate and licked his utensils when he first got there, the food wasn't the problem for once.
• Momma's Boy: Gordon is very close to his own mother, and several episodes (e.g., Blackberry's, Leone's) show him bonding almost instantly with the mothers of the restaurant's owners. This is definitely not the case, though, whenever the mother in question is a factor in the restaurant's troubles, as in the Burger Kitchen two-parter.
• Mood Whiplash: After supervising the dinner service, Ramsay always leaves the restaurant with a polite good night, regardless of how angry or disappointed he is. This is probably due to the editing, but it is often amusing to hear him sign off with something like, "You don't see that the reason this restaurant is fucked is because none of you give a shit! All right, g'night."
• Mr. Fanservice: Chef Ramsay himself is considered extremely attractive by many of the women he meets, and many episodes give him a Shirtless Scene as he changes from his casual clothes to his chef's attire.
  • One of the waitresses uses Gordon's visit to make it clear that she likes blond men, and would love to "get her hands on Gordon" with a big Cheshire Cat Grin.
• Mundane Object Amazement: When Ramsay learns that the owners of Barefoot Bob's don't even know their own finances, he brings in an accountant to help. One owner becomes absolutely giddy and even remarks that she's probably the only person ever to get excited about seeing an accountant.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Lisa, the owner of Lido di Manhattan Beach, had never paid attention to her staff's behavior until Gordon's intervention, assuming that by hiring the right people, everything would fall into place. When she actually steps into the kitchen and sees how the place is actually being run and the how the food is actually being cooked, she becomes disgusted. Realizing this was the result of her own neglect, she resolves to leading more actively and does a 180 in her priorities.

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• Never My Fault: Frequently, Gordon will meet delusional owners, egotistical chefs, lazy managers or the like who refuse to see what they're doing is wrong or pass the blame on to either the diners or the people who are clearly suffering for their actions. This has unfortunately remained true for the restaurants that fail. Some will accept what they did was wrong and move on with their lives, others will blame Gordon for their closure rather than admit they went back to their old ways as soon as he left.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • The trailer for Ramsay's visit to the Curry Lounge in the UK version heavily implied that the restaurant's problem was an incompetent head chef who was past his best. In the actual episode, though, Ramsay quickly proclaimed the chef in question to be one of the best curry chefs he'd ever met, and quickly identified the real problem as being the gimmicky, ridiculous menu the owner had designed.
  • A particularly egregious instance of this happened in the US episode featuring the Flamango's restaurant, the trailer of which implied that the restaurant burnt down during the episode, which the "coming up" segments prior to the commercials also implied. Needless to say, this didn't actually happen; all that was going on was that they were burning the restaurant's horrible, tacky décor on a bonfire. The building itself was untouched.
  • Another episode had a preview which showed the restaurant boarded up and apparently foreclosed on. Frustrated with the lack of care from the owners, Gordon had put up boards with sentences and phrases such as "We Quit" in an attempt to make the owners care about saving their restaurant (this happens a couple times throughout the series and is called "shock therapy" according to the show). In a subversion, the restaurant in question actually did close — albeit not in the manner shown in the trailer — as revealed by the epilogue.
  • Sante La Brea's seemed to indicate that the owner, Dean, would be arrested. It was actually Gordon having the owner handcuffed as part of an exercise to show him how well the restaurant ran without his constant interference.
  • Blackberry's seemed to suggest that the owner was going to throw in the towel and shut the restaurant down. In actuality, those scenes came from a moment where she got fed up with arguing with Gordon and walked out on him.
  • A clip of the revisit to Café Hon had a clip out of context with a local DJ saying Denise was not sincere about apologizing regarding trademarking a local slang term. It turned out to be the DJ speaking of critics whom he felt were unfair towards her.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Season 1 Episode 8 LeLa's, Gordon isn't too impressed with head chef Ricky. He blindfolds both Ricky and sous chef Lex and runs both through a simple taste test of two meats- Lex identifies both correctly but Ricky fails (they were chicken and steak). On this basis, Gordon makes Lex the new head chef for relaunch night and demotes Ricky to sous chef. For some reason, one would think that someone as experienced at this as Gordon Ramsay would consider kitchen experience as a factor rather than a taste test, because Lex proved unable to run the kitchen, to get any food out (to make things worse, the town's mayor was in the restaurant) and lacked any real experience, and eventually walked out due to the stress. Ricky decides to take charge and get the kitchen back into order, because he's actually run a kitchen before, and somehow saves the reopening night. Lex did return but was demoted. Even Gordon later admitted that he'd screwed up.
• Nice to the Waiter: Gordon is nice to the staff that doesn't deserve to be yelled at. A good example is the Oceania episode, where he's almost apologetic to have to send the waitress back with the food. Additionally, one of the things that really sets him off is owners mistreating or abusing their waitstaff.
• Noodle Incident: In the "Pantaleone's" episode, a customer tells Gordon his meatball sandwich tastes like cat food. When Gordon asks him when he's ever eaten cat food, the customer just replies "Long story."
• No Name Given: In the Pantaleone's episode, Gordon organizes a public taste test of Pantaleone's previous pizza, a frozen pizza, and pizza from "one of the best restaurants in town". Said restaurant is never named, presumably because the owners didn't want to get in trouble with Pete or didn't want to be associated with Kitchen Nightmares.

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