“If Brian weren’t my son, I’d have fired him.” – Buddy Mazzio
“Finn McCool’s” takes Kitchen Nightmares back to Long Island, New York, which is always a pleasure for this Long Island native: the gruff, machismo attitudes you tend to find there always clash gloriously with Gordon Ramsay’s brash, extremely tough love formula for turning imploding restaurant businesses around.
Finn McCool’s is located in Westhampton, which is way out east on Long Island’s south shore, south of Riverhead. It’s a “family pub that’s lost its way,” according to Narrator Guy.
As Ramsay heads to the restaurant, he observes how empty and quiet The Hamptons are in the winter. The Showtime show called The Affair, beyond being pretty decent and watchable, does a good job of depicting this.
Finn McCool’s is an Irish pub owned by Andrew “Buddy” Mazzio, who is a retired police officer who worked for the Southampton town police department. I’m not trying to body shame our guy here, but it’s worth pointing out that Buddy has one of the largest double chins that I’ve ever seen on someone who is not that heavy overall.
Buddy’s two sons also work at Finn McCool’s: Jason and Brian. Jason is an affable bartender, while Brian is referred to as “an arrogant bastard” by his father(!), though it’s in a relatively good-natured fashion. Buddy also nicknamed his son Chef Shortcut, because “he just cuts corners” while working in the kitchen.
“This isn’t nursery school,” Brian says. “I don’t really give a s— about their feelings.”
It’s pretty clear that one son cares about the restaurant and his dad while the other is the “arrogant bastard” that his father says he is.
Now the restaurant is “floundering,” with the family hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Ramsay’s first impression of the restaurant exterior: “Bloody hell, it looks like a funeral parlor from the outside… It’s so grim.” And the British chef is spot on in this assessment.
With the team assembled inside, Carol the server assesses that, “We have problems with staff… we have problems with Brian. He’s a bit arrogant – a lot arrogant.”
The meeting quickly becomes a mini-intervention on how Jason won’t listen to anyone, including his own father (who is of course his boss and the owner of the restaurant).
When Ramsay sits down to order a sampling of dishes, he quickly learns that the clams are frozen as opposed to being freshly prepared. And meanwhile in the kitchen, Brian chugs a beer before cooking up Gordon’s order.
Buddy is very likable, I must point out. From the behind the bar, he says, “This is gonna be the longest half hour of my life,” in an affable way, and it becomes very hard not to root for him from there.
His son Brian is the opposite, and his arrogance shines (greases?) through in his food. “It’s just a ball of grease,” Ramsay says of the shepherd’s pie he samples. And in fact, a single bite of that dish sends him into the bathroom to retch.
When Ramsay finally emerges, he heads to the kitchen and tells Brian that “it tasted like cough mixture.”
To the camera, Brian’s attitude becomes clear: “Whatever he says to me, I don’t care.”
Every once in a while, Ramsay will head into the neighborhood to do some recon, and he visits the fire department here, run by Rick Scholtz we learn, to find out what the locals think about Finn McCool’s.
“A lot of fried food,” one fireman says. “Maybe a little too much on the fried food.”
Then it’s time for a kitchen investigation, which rarely goes well. And such is the case here, as rotting and rancid food is sitting all over the kitchen and food storage area. Further, cooked food sits next to raw food, something I didn’t know could even be a thing at a restaurant until I started watching Kitchen Nightmares.
Ramsay then calls a staff meeting to call Brian out again and to announce that the entire team needs to do a thorough cleaning of the kitchen and back of the house. Even Ramsay pitches in to help, which seems to even impress Brian a bit.
Finn McCool’s is crowded at dinner service, in part because Ramsay invited the crew of the local firehouse down. Entrees take forever to get served to diners, in part because Chef Shortcut is on his phone in between rounds of complaining about Ramsay hovering around watching what he’s up to.
After the firemen eat, Ramsay has them give their feedback directly to Brian, and predictably it’s not great: too cold, dry, not tasty, etc. Brian predictably couldn’t care less, telling the camera that he doesn’t take advice from people who “don’t do this for a living.” Of course, he conveniently skips over the part where Chef Gordon Ramsay has been telling him precisely the same things.
“You want to tell them to shut up,” Brian concludes.
Melissa, a server and Jason’s wife, correctly predicts that the firemen won’t be coming back to dine at Finn McCool’s anytime soon.
Then something unbelievable happens: Ramsay catches Frances, an assistant cook, pick dropped meat off of the floor and drop it right back into the dish he’s preparing.
Here’s Frances’ explanation after being caught in the act: “Well… the fryer is gonna… take anything that come of the floor and clean it.”
This right here is as good of an example as any to treasure eateries where you can trust the cleanliness and overall competence of the operation.
When Frances explains to Buddy what happened, the change in Buddy’s facial expression reminds me of Chris Farley in the iconic Saturday Night Live commercial parody where he’s informed that that the coffee he’s been drinking is instant.
On a more serious note, we learn that Finn McCool’s is losing money at a rate of between $4,000 to $5,000 per week. That alone makes all of Brian’s sneering and cavalier incompetence all the more striking. Further, while Buddy still makes payroll thanks to a lone from a friend, he hasn’t once paid himself.
So much is also packed into this sentence from Buddy: “If Brian weren’t my son, I’d have fired him.”
Next up: Ramsay gives Brian a lesson in making “a proper shepherd’s pie.” Instead of appreciating the opportunity, however, Brian is resentful and taciturn. And in fact he tells the camera he’s “tremendously poised off.” This is immediately followed by Brian pounding beers at the bar with his friends.
When Buddy pretty mildly asks Brian to stay in the kitchen and get back to work, Brian flips out and tells his father to “f— off” before storming out of the restaurant.
After Buddy struggles through managing the kitchen without its head chef, Brian returns to work the next day. Ramsay shows Brian a surprising amount of empathy during a one-on-one chat, telling him that he’s got a tremendous amount of weight on shoulders and that he needs to handle his stress in a different way.
The renovation team does a great job of making Finn McCool’s interior feel far more spacious and lighter, while the exterior gets a very impressive sign heralding the “family restaurant and Irish pub.”
The menu overhaul meanwhile includes “lighter” and more contemporary pub dishes such as a Guinness pub burger and the new recipe for shepherd’s pie. What’s axed from the menu: many of the fried dishes. Tableside service is also to be introduced, such as for the carving of roasted chicken.
Finn McCool’s is crowded for relaunch night and the staff is energized, including a newly reinvigorated Brian. Service starts off extremely slowly, with diners waiting over an hour to get their dishes, and even the fire chief is left stranded for a long time waiting to get seated. The food critic even starts getting snarky with Jason about how long she’s been waiting.
Typically, at this point in a Kitchen Nightmares episode, things smooth out eventually, but this seems like an extreme case. The fire chief eventually talks about how he regrets encouraging his firemen to come back to Finn McCool’s, and he takes off in disgust.
Two and half hours into dinner service, entrees start firing out of the kitchen. The food critic is mollified by how good the shepherd’s pie turns out, so a small victory is achieved there. The dinner service eventually ends successfully, as Narrator Guy tells us.
Surprisingly, Brian gets emotional in talking about how Ramsay helped instill in him a desire to cook again.
🍽 Want more? Check out Pop Thruster’s Kitchen Nightmares episode reviews (there’s a lot).
Kitchen Nightmares, “Finn McCool’s”: is it still open?
Unfortunately, Finn McCool’s closed in 2009, a few years after being featured on Kitchen Nightmares. And sadly, Buddy Mazzio passed away in 2023 at the age of 69.
Some stats and info about Kitchen Nightmares, “Finn McCool’s”
TV SHOW – Kitchen Nightmares
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
GENRE – Reality TV, Docuseries, Food Shows
EPISODE DESCRIPTION – Chef Ramsay visits the family-run Finn McCool’s in Westhampton, New York and faces an obnoxious head chef who happens to be the owner’s son.
CAST – Gordon Ramsay