“I feel like Donna Summer’s gonna come through the door.” – Gordon Ramsay
Welcome to Blackberry’s, a soul food restaurant in Plainfield, New Jersey run by a former caterer named Shelly Winters with help from her mother, Mary Winters, and a tight knit team.
Sounds ideal, right? Well, this is Kitchen Nightmares so not so much.
Chef Mateen gives the lowdown immediately: “Shelly is in denial.” He goes on to say that she believes that Blackberry’s is perfect and the “food tastes spectacular… but the food is suffering, the customers are suffering, and the restaurant is suffering.” Later, Mateen says that the collard greens, which should be a delicious soul food staple, taste like “peppered soil.”
We then see a diner saying, “The macaroni looks like vomit” while laughing.
So that’s not great.
Portia the chef then chimes in that Shelly is a bit of a dictator in the kitchen, and Mateen corroborates that she’s a “control freak.” A montage of Shelly people ordering people to do all kinds of things seems to confirm this.
And meanwhile, the place is empty and Shelly is $200,000 in debt.
When Gordon Ramsay shows up at Blackberry’s, he asks the host if there’s a party going on because there are vinyl records hung from the ceiling and adorning the walls. “I feel like Donna Summer’s gonna come through the door,” he adds.
Upon meeting Ramsay, Shelly is very friendly and even flirty, asking if she can give him a kiss. We then soon learn that Shelly is engaged to the “baby faced” general manager.
When Ramsay’s order of pork chop, macaroni and cheese, and collard greens comes out so that he can sample the cuisine, his reaction is, “Looks like someone shat on my plate.” Dry and unseasoned are his other opinions.
There’s a truly funny moment when Ramsay expresses that he wants to pray that the chitlins that he’s about to eat won’t be awful, and a server named Eloise blesses him “in Jesus’ name” that he’ll be fine as we hear organ music in the background.
The upshot: Gordon says “oh my god,” but not in a good way, upon tasting the chitlins. And then he actually heads off to the bathroom to retch – which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen happen on Kitchen Nightmares before. Upon learning about this, Shelly simply laughs.
The one thing that Ramsay enjoyed? Gordon deems the red velvet cake that Mother Mary prepared to be delightful.
When Ramsay returns to Blackberry’s later that day for dinner service, he finds a dead mouse by the front entrance and then, for reasons that can’t be explained, he decides to pick it up with his bare hands.
Mother Mary at least has the presence of mind to say, “We just had the exterminator!” the general manager then accuses Ramsay of bringing in the dead mouse from “outside,” and it’s hard to tell if this scene is “real” or set up by the producers without telling Gordon Ramsay first or with telling Gordon Ramsay first, or some combination thereof.
What’s kind of interesting in a “breaking the fourth wall” way is that even the general manager muses that the Mouse Incident may have been a set-up.
By the time Shelly hears about it, she immediately refers to it as “the mouse that you planted” to Gordon. At this Gordon threatens to leave, but Shelly immediately one-ups him with a you’re not out of here I’M out of here move.
At that point, my thought bubble read and now this Kitchen Nightmares episode has taken a strange turn…
At this point, Mother Mary tells everyone to shut the hell up, pleads for calm, and asks Ramsay nicely to stick around. The general manager sort of apologizes, Ramsay sort of accepts, and things roll forward to dinner service.
The first bit of drama that goes down: Ramsay calls out Shelly for cooking soul food in a massive wok, and Mateen readily agrees. In fact, it seems like a ton of things are getting cooked wok-style. “We’re not a Chinese soul food restaurant,” Mateen says.
Though to be honest, I’d be curious to check out that fusion style cuisine if it was done right – sounds kind of fascinating, no?
But oh yes, that’s right: some other stuff gets cooked in a pizza oven, so there’s all kinds of things going down at Blackberry’s.
Meanwhile, Shelly’s authoritarian style (“just make it send it!”) still produces a massive hold up in the kitchen, leaving diners waiting to eat for an hour of a half.
Mateen cuts to the chase: “this is going to the s—s.”
The next day, Ramsay convenes a staff meeting, which quickly becomes a forum for everyone – including Mother Mary – venting about how while Shelly is a control freak, it’s translating into total failure for Blackberry’s. Then things go off the rails when Shelly tells Dwayne that he “talks too much” and eventually she storms out for a little bit.
Mother Mary is the most levelheaded of the group, telling her daughter that unless there’s drastic change from the top on down, the doors will close. But even still, Shelly insists that she’s been “open minded all along.”
Morale is soon raised when the staff learns that Ramsay’s friend, Kelly Quip, has installed a new oven and fryers in the kitchen. And even in the Chinese woks are gone, delighting everyone except Shelly. “This is just so wonderful,” Mary says, tearing up.
Next up: a new system of organization to straighten out the horrendous process that Blackberry’s seems to have in preparing, cooking, and getting dishes to customers.
The next day, the rest of Blackberry’s has been renovated, and it’s one of the better ones that Kitchen Nightmares has performed. The weirdo, oppressive vinyl albums décor has been replaced with a modern, soulful vibe.
The menu has been modernized, including black eyed pea fritters, which looks pretty interesting. Then there’s fried chicken and waffles that looks really interesting, and also barbeque pork sliders.
On relaunch night, Chef Mateen starts off successfully with the new organizational system and menu. The pain point? Shelly, surprise surprise, who is engaged on the phone with her dad instead of picking up her end of the cooking line. And soon after, Shelly starts inserting herself into the cooking process, eventually prompting a screaming match in the kitchen.
After Shelly storms off in a huff, the rest of the team pulls together to complete dinner service successfully. And even after dinner, she refuses to participate in a staff meeting or even talk to Ramsay privately. Mary eventually tells her daughter that she’s “ashamed” and she might as well close Blackberry’s if she’s going to act this way.
And in fact, Shelly continues to refuse to talk to Ramsay after multiple tries. So the episode ends on a super unusual note, where there’s not some kind of hopeful little talk between Chef Gordon Ramsay and the restaurant owners.
However, in the little post-episode segment, the Narrator Guy says that things went well for Blackberry’s in the weeks following, with Shelly “surprisingly” embracing the changes that Ramsay helped to put into place.
🍽 Want more? Check out Pop Thruster’s Kitchen Nightmares episode reviews (there’s a lot).
Kitchen Nightmares, “Blackberry’s”: is it still open?
After all of that, Blackberry’s “closed in March, 2013, less than two years after the episode aired.”(!)
In a weirdly worded statement, Shelly wrote at the time: “I want to say we just no longer saw room for growth. We were so stagnant. We were maintaining, barely, but not able to generate the clientele we wanted.”
Some stats and info about Kitchen Nightmares, “Blackberry’s”
TV SHOW – Kitchen Nightmares
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 5, Episode 1
AIRED ON – November 11th, 2011
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
GENRE – Reality TV, Food Shows, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV, Docuseries
CAST – Gordon Ramsay