“Can’t you shut the f— up? Tell him to get out of here.” – Irene
The first season of Kitchen Nightmares continues to dig through the worst restaurants on Long Island, New York – which by design involves people with even worse attitudes – and as a Long Island native this delights me to no end
This time we’re in Islip, on the south shore in Suffolk County, which I have never been to, but I heard had great high school football teams when I was growing up.
Anyway, we learn that the Seascape is “on the verge of collapse.”
It’s run by Irene and her son, Peter. When we meet Irene, we see her telling him, “Can’t you shut the f— up? Tell him to get out of here. Close the f—ing doors if you don’t like him.”
Peter tells us that the Seascape opened in 1962, and it thrived back in the day under the ownership of his father. Now? “It’s in a Dumpster now,” he says.
Doug the chef soon chimes in that the “sewage smell” is one reason why customers don’t “come back.” Sounds like a reasonable reason to never ever visit a restaurant for sure.
However, Peter places the blame on Chef Doug, who “won’t listen to a word I say.”
Doug for his part talks about how he went to the Culinary Institute of America and likes to “command” in the kitchen. And soon we learn that Ramsay’s coming arrival is “a slap in the face” for him.
When Gordon Ramsay shows up at the Seascape, it’s a classic opening moment for him when he observes, “What is that pile of s— there?” as he walks in, referring to truly odd construction crew signage that’s placed around the entrance to help people understand that the restaurant is open.
Peter describes the state of the restaurant as follows: “It’s the Titanic. It was a luxury liner, and it’s sinking.”
We then quickly get the idea that Irene is hypercritical of her son, though we haven’t seen enough to know how warranted the criticism is.
When Ramsay sits down to order he says, “There’s a really bad smell in here.”
“Sewage,” the server replies.
That right there… you’d think that would be the core problem for the Seascape to take care of before doing a single other thing, but then I’m just one mere TV recapper in the great digital din, I suppose.
When Ramsay tastes the crab cakes he observes, “It falls apart, just the like the décor,” referring to the peeling wallpaper nearby. “You touch it and it just disintegrates.”
“They’re not fresh,” he continues. “They’re not crab cakes, they’re crap cakes.”
Chef Doug, from the kitchen, when he learns that the British chef isn’t enjoying his food: “F— ‘em.”
Meanwhile, Ramsay on the salmon: “You can’t expect customers to come and pay for that s—.”
At dinner service that night, we see a bunch of tables complaining about their food and sending orders back. Chef Doug seems to have refined the art of deflection but not necessarily the culinary ones, it seems.
By the way, the restaurant’s clientele is pretty much all super old people. It’s not clear if these people remember the good old days of the Seascape and have “brand loyalty” or what.
A disgusted Ramsay shouts, “This is extraordinary,” at one point with regard to the lax attitudes he observes across the entire staff.
The next morning, Ramsay does an “investigation” of the cleanliness of the restaurant, and the results are truly hideous. Let’s put it this way: it seems like the bad smell at the Seascape is more than a “sewage” problem. There’s sludge and gook everywhere, and that’s before Gordon discovers that the pesto sauce that he sampled only the day before has mold in it.
Hilariously, we also see footage of Irene bragging about how clean the place is.
As Ramsay takes the owners and Doug on a tour of the rancid state of the kitchen, Peter looks defeated while Doug decides to simply act pissy about it.
There’s kind of a funny moment when Ramsay goes apoplectic when Peter insists that they clean the walls “every Tuesday.” Ramsay takes a spatula and scrapes it against the wall, causing greasy sludge to accumulate.
“Touch the wall, you dirty pig!” Ramsay cries, and for some reason I’m reminded of Logan Roy’s “boar on the floor!” from Succession.
Long story short: the lunch customers get kicked out and the Seascape Inn is shut down.
24 hours of cleaning later, you can tell the kitchen looks markedly improved. Ramsay takes Chef Doug and the staff through a lesson in seafood cooking, but Doug is still pissy to the point that he won’t even taste what Ramsay has cooked for everyone.
I’ve watched a lot of Kitchen Nightmares episodes, and this is one of the biggest examples of a lack of common courtesy I’ve seen yet.
“I don’t know if I even want to be here,” Chef Doug tells the camera despondently.
Later, Ramsay sits down with Irene and Peter and lays into the restaurant’s head chef: he’s “lazy, dirty, and he shouldn’t be anywhere near a kitchen,” he tells them. “He’s destroying your business quicker than you can f—ing realize.”
Occasionally, Ramsay will suggest that someone should get fired, but here he flat out challenges Peter to wake up and get rid of the “dead wood” that’s in the kitchen.
The short scene where Peter fires Chef Doug and his sous chef, Charles, is fascinating because of how realistic it is (versus the countless such scenes we’ve all seen play out on TV and in the movies).
Peter walks up to them and semi-mumbles, “Guys, off tomorrow.” Doug replies, “For good? You sure?” And from that they all understand what’s happened.
In another unusual move, Ramsay keeps the Seascape closed for another day so that he can take Peter for a boxing training session so that the restaurant owner can “release the tension.”
Peter really does let the tiger out of the cage, so to speak, as he both slams Ramsay’s training gloves and opens up to a surprising extent about how his deceased father never praised him and, further, that he was completely aware of how dirty the kitchen was but was too timid to do anything about it.
Dr. Ramsay’s Boxing Therapy & Tough Love was in full session, in other words.
Finally, we get to relaunch day, and the renovation of the Seascape Inn is a remarkable transformation, from dark and dingy to cozy and bright. As for the kitchen, Ramsay has managed to bring in a new head chef named Scott. The menu overhaul meanwhile is similar to the old ones, but with an emphasis on fresh ingredients.
Ramsay also brings in a consultant named Jean-Baptiste to help Peter with the finer points of running the front of the house. There’s a funny scene where Ramsay calls out Peter for “walking like an elephant” around the restaurant floor.
As relaunch night begins, Ramsay notes that it “smells like a restaurant,” so perhaps the sewage smell problem was mitigated, but who knows.
As the night picks up and the place gets packed, Ramsay calls out the staff for not being adept at working at a pace required when things are actually busy. Meanwhile, the communication in the kitchen is a mess, which I suppose is to be expected with a brand-new head chef and an overhauled menu. However, Peter does seem to be a part of the problem, as does Irene’s hypercritical ways.
Peter eventually finds his groove and service smooths out overall – with some help from the dapper Jean-Baptiste.
“Job well done,” Ramsay tells Peter and Irene that night. “You have to seriously continue running this business,” he then advises.
🍽 Want more? Check out Pop Thruster’s Kitchen Nightmares episode reviews (there’s a lot).
Some stats and info about Kitchen Nightmares, “Seascape”
TV SHOW – Kitchen Nightmares
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 1, Episode 3
AIRED ON – October 2nd, 2007
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
GENRE – Reality TV, Docuseries, Food Shows
CAST – Gordon Ramsay