I do not, under any circumstances, consider myself well-qualified to be a restaurant critic. Out of all the places that I have been to, most of them tend to be acceptable. Well-aware that I am obviously not Gordon Ramsey, I'm sure these places aren't the best in the world. For example, this seafood place in downtown Covington could've been much better - they had a very bland presentation for a home-cooking place and their shrimp were obviously injected with steroids to the point where you could see the veins. On the contrary, this shuttered seafood place in Dahlonega had the best po' boy I have eaten, along with a decent fried Twinkie and a nice approach to seafood. I think they're alright. Of course nothing's like Fuddruckers. I mean, if Ash's father can walk out of her Mass Effect 3 therapy session to get himself one-pound hamburgers, then I can too.
But Amy's Baking Company (ABC) Bistro in Scottsdale, Arizona is just....I mean, I don't know what to....is this even possible? Can anybody fuck up hospitality this bad? Of course there was the kid who pissed on his family's meal in Troll 2, but that's a movie. We're talking about real life here. Amy's Baking Company - it's something, alright. After witnessing their massive explosion on Facebook (and about most of my friends liking their page), I can safely say that regardless of how trollish Phil Fish is, at least he's not Amy and Samy. At least Phil has class and consistency. At least people like Fez. How can you like a pizza that's undercooked and raviolis that are far from fresh? How can you think that Gordon Ramsey, a man known for not taking shit from restauranteurs, will come into your restaurant and invalidate every negative Yelp review you got? Of course there are negative reviews - people always get them. Nobody is perfect. If you stopped considering yourself God's gift to the Scottsdale cuisine and maybe simplified your menu to cakes and coffee, then maybe people wouldn't criticize you all the time. But this - and especially your massive blow-up on Facebook this weekend - why do you do this? Why?
Okay, so this place became the hottest thing on the Internet a couple of weekends ago. The storm's died down - mostly as people have learned to not feed the narcissistic business with media attention - and other than a few qualms (Samy's in deportation battles; Amy and Samy are trying to get a reality show deal; Redditors went to the grand opening and confirmed Amy's controlling behavior despite acceptable food), it seems like the restaurant's just going through business as usual. However, I can't help but notice that the episode of Gordon Ramsey Screams At Restauranteurs: The American Editi-I mean, Kitchen Nightmares does play off similarly to the crazier aspects of a few meta-games I've played recently. Yeah, so much of that episode was obviously staged (props appear in and out; Amy's insults are obviously fine-tuned; camera angles up the ass; passionate British guy overreacts for American audiences), but since so much of Amy and Samy's behavior has been confirmed by Redditors, Yelp users, and even the waitress that was fired in the episode, one can't help but to notice that Gordon might've wanted to make a meta-episode: one that takes tropes from the British Kitchen Nightmares (earnestness; focus on the poor food quality; the drama comes from the food), the American edition (all the cliched music, the preplanned camera angles, the staged feeling), and mixes it together in an episode that knows it's obviously an episode.
There are two maps, each corresponding to Kitchen Nightmares variations, that are codified based on their tropes: the British map with its passion and its ability to show how much owning a business can tear a person apart; and the American map with its desire to reform every restaurant and turn them into Gordon Ramsey's personal testing grounds. Amy's Baking Company strays from those maps - while Amy does not have passion to change the restaurant, Gordon does. Gordon wants the restaurant to change. He, in a way, is the unwilling subject who's forced through this. He thinks this will be standard episode fodder - just go to the restaurant, try their most-likely-horrid food, observe their work ethic, and work on them with fixing the place through reforms, redecoration, and what-have-you. However, in prior episodes, both on the British and American maps, Gordon always visits restaurants that are far from clean. There's always something wrong in the kitchen, be it a chef without passion for his establishment or rats crawling all over the unpreserved raw meat or coleslaw so rancid that it makes Gordon vomit all over the streets of Atlanta. In Amy's Baking Company, kitchen protocol is observed correctly. Amy knows how to cook - she's just so overswamped due to her inability to trust employees with basic food service that she undercooks the food and forgets to fine-tune simple things like prog-rock burgers and over-sweet prosciutto pizza. The kitchen is clean as a whistle. The restaurant doesn't have tacky decor - Amy knows her way around interior design. The desserts, regardless of their origin (they're pre-made), are delicious and high-quality.
A majority of the episode focuses on Gordon's first working day at the restaurant, from when he tries their subpar food to when he orders Amy and Samy to reconvene the following morning. Other episodes of Kitchen Nightmares would focus mainly on the rehabilitation and relegate Gordon's first working day to a ten-minute slot. The episode only focuses on what Gordon notices - it lets you know that something's not right about the place. For about 20 minutes, the episode focuses on Gordon observing Amy getting swamped with work and realizing that she cannot, under any circumstance, take criticism. He observes the waitstaff getting swamped with orders as Samy rushes through them and skips over basic appetizers - and Amy eventually firing an employee because she took the simple phrase "are you sure?" as criticism. He observes a restaurant getting fed up with subpar service and subpar food because of the lack of employment at the restaurant. He observes Amy's reluctance at hiring a secondary chef who can assist her with lower-priority orders. Everything on the first day is scrutinized, from Samy's somewhat-illegal-but-somewhat-not hoarding of tips that should go to the waitstaff (depends on how much the waitstaff is paid on an hourly basis) to Amy's technique to what exactly is in the freezer. And the next day is just him arguing with the owners - both of them talking about how they want to go on with the episode. Gordon notes that an average episode of Kitchen Nightmares is enervating and should not be treated lightly, but Amy only views it lightly. With that, Gordon leaves the show, the camera crew pack up, and the audience finally notice that he drives around America in an SUV.
There's no way Gordon, if he set out on making a regular episode of American-map Kitchen Nightmares, would've used the footage he and his crew filmed at the restaurant. This is the basic formula for a failed episode - and I'm sure there are plenty in the FOX and BBC vaults where Gordon has to leave the place. But why organize the footage from Amy's Baking Company into an episode? Why present a massive failure of Gordon's on international television? Why present it like the episode knows that it's an episode of a show? And why edit it like a reality TV show? Why has it gotten so much press? Restaurants featured on the show don't get that much press - and yet Amy's Baking Company is continually spilling news nugget after nugget. Why? I personally believe that Gordon wanted to make a meta-episode of his series that shows that he is human - that he can get too sure of himself and make terrible judgments as far as restaurant reform is concerned. I also believe that he wanted to make an episode that was self-aware of its own manipulation. Basically, it's as if Gordon recently discovered metafictional works and decided to edit a scrapped episode like that.
From Amy and Samy's reactions to the episode (and about everybody else's), they thought that Gordon wasn't going to air a massive failure on television. To them, it was just a tough three days. However, Gordon needed to get out a message: that Kitchen Nightmares isn't just a show. It's not something he does to get himself known. "It's a job," he states at the near end of the episode. It becomes obvious that despite how obvious Kitchen Nightmares is staged, it's still a job for those involved. Reality TV is tough work. Remember the trials and tribulations that Terry Zwigoff went through just to make Crumb? He could've given up when he found out R. Crumb was a total misogynist who shamelessly objectifies women just because he can. He could've given up when he found out that Crumb was about as mentally unstable as his brothers. But no - he had done too much work to make this documentary. He even threatened to kill himself just to get Crumb's permission. He had to finish the job. To me, that's what Kitchen Nightmares is: Gordon doing a job. He could easily give up on a restaurant, but he won't. Unless if the owners are so resistant that he has no other choice, Gordon will never give up. All the alternate takes, the exaggerated reactions, the temporary Gordon-designed menu, the sometimes unnecessary cosmetic changes to the dining room, the manipulated drama - it's taxing on everybody. However, Amy and Samy refused to consider Kitchen Nightmares as a job. It was just a show to them. It was optional. They didn't have to do it. Amy could sit in obscurity, "beating up" Yelpers who dared give her critique on a restaurant. Gordon tried to inform her that reality TV was a tiring job, but she wouldn't listen.
This is why the episode exists.
But Amy's Baking Company (ABC) Bistro in Scottsdale, Arizona is just....I mean, I don't know what to....is this even possible? Can anybody fuck up hospitality this bad? Of course there was the kid who pissed on his family's meal in Troll 2, but that's a movie. We're talking about real life here. Amy's Baking Company - it's something, alright. After witnessing their massive explosion on Facebook (and about most of my friends liking their page), I can safely say that regardless of how trollish Phil Fish is, at least he's not Amy and Samy. At least Phil has class and consistency. At least people like Fez. How can you like a pizza that's undercooked and raviolis that are far from fresh? How can you think that Gordon Ramsey, a man known for not taking shit from restauranteurs, will come into your restaurant and invalidate every negative Yelp review you got? Of course there are negative reviews - people always get them. Nobody is perfect. If you stopped considering yourself God's gift to the Scottsdale cuisine and maybe simplified your menu to cakes and coffee, then maybe people wouldn't criticize you all the time. But this - and especially your massive blow-up on Facebook this weekend - why do you do this? Why?
Okay, so this place became the hottest thing on the Internet a couple of weekends ago. The storm's died down - mostly as people have learned to not feed the narcissistic business with media attention - and other than a few qualms (Samy's in deportation battles; Amy and Samy are trying to get a reality show deal; Redditors went to the grand opening and confirmed Amy's controlling behavior despite acceptable food), it seems like the restaurant's just going through business as usual. However, I can't help but notice that the episode of Gordon Ramsey Screams At Restauranteurs: The American Editi-I mean, Kitchen Nightmares does play off similarly to the crazier aspects of a few meta-games I've played recently. Yeah, so much of that episode was obviously staged (props appear in and out; Amy's insults are obviously fine-tuned; camera angles up the ass; passionate British guy overreacts for American audiences), but since so much of Amy and Samy's behavior has been confirmed by Redditors, Yelp users, and even the waitress that was fired in the episode, one can't help but to notice that Gordon might've wanted to make a meta-episode: one that takes tropes from the British Kitchen Nightmares (earnestness; focus on the poor food quality; the drama comes from the food), the American edition (all the cliched music, the preplanned camera angles, the staged feeling), and mixes it together in an episode that knows it's obviously an episode.
There are two maps, each corresponding to Kitchen Nightmares variations, that are codified based on their tropes: the British map with its passion and its ability to show how much owning a business can tear a person apart; and the American map with its desire to reform every restaurant and turn them into Gordon Ramsey's personal testing grounds. Amy's Baking Company strays from those maps - while Amy does not have passion to change the restaurant, Gordon does. Gordon wants the restaurant to change. He, in a way, is the unwilling subject who's forced through this. He thinks this will be standard episode fodder - just go to the restaurant, try their most-likely-horrid food, observe their work ethic, and work on them with fixing the place through reforms, redecoration, and what-have-you. However, in prior episodes, both on the British and American maps, Gordon always visits restaurants that are far from clean. There's always something wrong in the kitchen, be it a chef without passion for his establishment or rats crawling all over the unpreserved raw meat or coleslaw so rancid that it makes Gordon vomit all over the streets of Atlanta. In Amy's Baking Company, kitchen protocol is observed correctly. Amy knows how to cook - she's just so overswamped due to her inability to trust employees with basic food service that she undercooks the food and forgets to fine-tune simple things like prog-rock burgers and over-sweet prosciutto pizza. The kitchen is clean as a whistle. The restaurant doesn't have tacky decor - Amy knows her way around interior design. The desserts, regardless of their origin (they're pre-made), are delicious and high-quality.
A majority of the episode focuses on Gordon's first working day at the restaurant, from when he tries their subpar food to when he orders Amy and Samy to reconvene the following morning. Other episodes of Kitchen Nightmares would focus mainly on the rehabilitation and relegate Gordon's first working day to a ten-minute slot. The episode only focuses on what Gordon notices - it lets you know that something's not right about the place. For about 20 minutes, the episode focuses on Gordon observing Amy getting swamped with work and realizing that she cannot, under any circumstance, take criticism. He observes the waitstaff getting swamped with orders as Samy rushes through them and skips over basic appetizers - and Amy eventually firing an employee because she took the simple phrase "are you sure?" as criticism. He observes a restaurant getting fed up with subpar service and subpar food because of the lack of employment at the restaurant. He observes Amy's reluctance at hiring a secondary chef who can assist her with lower-priority orders. Everything on the first day is scrutinized, from Samy's somewhat-illegal-but-somewhat-not hoarding of tips that should go to the waitstaff (depends on how much the waitstaff is paid on an hourly basis) to Amy's technique to what exactly is in the freezer. And the next day is just him arguing with the owners - both of them talking about how they want to go on with the episode. Gordon notes that an average episode of Kitchen Nightmares is enervating and should not be treated lightly, but Amy only views it lightly. With that, Gordon leaves the show, the camera crew pack up, and the audience finally notice that he drives around America in an SUV.
There's no way Gordon, if he set out on making a regular episode of American-map Kitchen Nightmares, would've used the footage he and his crew filmed at the restaurant. This is the basic formula for a failed episode - and I'm sure there are plenty in the FOX and BBC vaults where Gordon has to leave the place. But why organize the footage from Amy's Baking Company into an episode? Why present a massive failure of Gordon's on international television? Why present it like the episode knows that it's an episode of a show? And why edit it like a reality TV show? Why has it gotten so much press? Restaurants featured on the show don't get that much press - and yet Amy's Baking Company is continually spilling news nugget after nugget. Why? I personally believe that Gordon wanted to make a meta-episode of his series that shows that he is human - that he can get too sure of himself and make terrible judgments as far as restaurant reform is concerned. I also believe that he wanted to make an episode that was self-aware of its own manipulation. Basically, it's as if Gordon recently discovered metafictional works and decided to edit a scrapped episode like that.
From Amy and Samy's reactions to the episode (and about everybody else's), they thought that Gordon wasn't going to air a massive failure on television. To them, it was just a tough three days. However, Gordon needed to get out a message: that Kitchen Nightmares isn't just a show. It's not something he does to get himself known. "It's a job," he states at the near end of the episode. It becomes obvious that despite how obvious Kitchen Nightmares is staged, it's still a job for those involved. Reality TV is tough work. Remember the trials and tribulations that Terry Zwigoff went through just to make Crumb? He could've given up when he found out R. Crumb was a total misogynist who shamelessly objectifies women just because he can. He could've given up when he found out that Crumb was about as mentally unstable as his brothers. But no - he had done too much work to make this documentary. He even threatened to kill himself just to get Crumb's permission. He had to finish the job. To me, that's what Kitchen Nightmares is: Gordon doing a job. He could easily give up on a restaurant, but he won't. Unless if the owners are so resistant that he has no other choice, Gordon will never give up. All the alternate takes, the exaggerated reactions, the temporary Gordon-designed menu, the sometimes unnecessary cosmetic changes to the dining room, the manipulated drama - it's taxing on everybody. However, Amy and Samy refused to consider Kitchen Nightmares as a job. It was just a show to them. It was optional. They didn't have to do it. Amy could sit in obscurity, "beating up" Yelpers who dared give her critique on a restaurant. Gordon tried to inform her that reality TV was a tiring job, but she wouldn't listen.
This is why the episode exists.