“Did the dog just throw up on my plate?” – Gordon Ramsay
The Four Season Inn is a “dog friendly” hotel located in West Dover, Vermont. As a Long Island, New York native, I’d consider the location of West Dover, Vermont as between “super remote” and “way the hell up there” (it’s about a 90 drive east of Albany and a two-and-a-half-hour drive west of Boston, if that gives you a sense). But I suppose “it’s in the Green Mountains” is also accurate.
“Former construction worker Sandy MacDougal purchased the inn, which has 14 bedrooms and an adjacent kennel as the culmination of a lifelong dream,” Gordon Ramsay tells us.
Sandy comes across as a sincere, hard-working blue-collar guy, but we soon get a sense that the conditions at the Four Seasons Inn are dirty, exacerbated by furry little friends having their way with the place.
After two years of being the owner, Sandy tells us that the Four Seasons Inn is “hemorrhaging money.” To be more specific, MacDougal is a whopping $1.5 million in debt at the time that Hotel Hell pays him a visit.
The staff are currently living out of the inn currently in lieu of receiving a salary. Erin Robinson, the housekeeper and “hula-hoop teacher,” according to the caption, says of her employment, “It’s more volunteering since I don’t get paid. I wouldn’t call it a job.”
“The guests complain about dog hair everywhere, and it makes them feel disgusting,” she adds.
Around this time, we meet Sandy’s dog Layla, an English Setter who has the freedom to roam all over the hotel… including its restaurant kitchen area.
Bill Brennan, a cook, can be seen yelling, “I want my money!” in the kitchen as he works, as though vaguely channeling Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Rod Tidwell in Jerry Maguire yelling, “Show me the money!”
On a more serious note, Brennan tells the camera that he’s “maxed out on three cards and 14 dollars in my bank account.” He also notes that the Four Seasons Inn is “proper f—ed” if things don’t turn around soon.
Kevin Nowak, a dishwasher/prep cook, adds that “Sandy is generally a nice guy but staff does not get paid.”
So it’s not great, in short.
Into this mix, we get Gordon Ramsay entering the scene, and of course he pretends to be “excited” about staying somewhere as luxurious sounding as the “Four Seasons Inn.”
“I was hoping for a dream, but this place turns out to be another nightmare,” he says upon arrival.
And in fact, when Sandy shows Gordon to his room, it hasn’t even yet been cleaned or made up at all. Honestly, that would be a “turn around and get back in my car” moment for anyplace I was heading to for a nice holiday weekend.
This is soon followed by a conversation between Ramsay and Sandy that reminds me of the scene in Coming to America where we learn that the owner of McDowell’s and the McDonald’s corporation “got this little misunderstanding.”
In this case, we find out that Sandy believes he is all good calling his hotel “Four Seasons Inn” because the much better known, luxury hotel chain is known as The Four Seasons. Clear difference via our guy Sandy MacDougal.
(MacDougal, McDowell… hmm…).
All Ramsay can say is, “F— me.”
When Ramsay visits the inn’s restaurant, the voiceover work gets a little heavy handed and weird as we hear our guy say, “Where the hell is everybody?”
It’s not commented on, but we get to glance at the prices on the menu – which almost never happens on Hotel Hell or Kitchen Nightmares – and with many of the entrees in the $25 range in rural Vermont, that strikes me as very pricey (especially for a place that obviously not, let us say, high end).
When Ramsay’s ravioli dish arrives, he asks, “Did the dog just throw up on my plate?”
And Gwen Smith, the very sweet and mild-mannered server can only respond with, “I hope not.”
After he manages to taste it, the British chef throws in “weird” and “bizarre” and “undercooked.” And then, on the risotto: “what a pile of s—.”
Steve Dickson, a restaurant chef, is visibly emotional because he knows that he’s being asked to serve terrible food from a menu that Sandy selected and presides over
Meanwhile, Ramsay picks up from each employee of the Four Seasons Inn that no one is getting paid.
An increasingly irked Ramsay pulls Sandy aside for a one-on-one conversation.
Ramsay tells Sandy that the Four Seasons Inn is both “soulless” and “rudderless,” the latter because Sandy spends much of his time in the restaurant kitchen (serving terrible food) as opposed to managing the hotel part of the inn.
“Why would anyone stay here?” Ramsay asks him, his voice rising. “It’s like a house of madness.”
After Ramsay walks off in exasperation, Sandy disturbingly mutters, “I’m ready to burn the building down” in a way that you can imagine this Hotel Hell footage being introduced at a court trial at some later date.
Later, a calmer Ramsay takes a tour of the completely empty kennel area of the Inn.
“My marketing director sucks,” Sandy says of Richard Sedlack, and Ramsay doesn’t disagree.
As dinner service begins, we also get a read that a room at the inn costs $275 a night, which might not be that expensive for a charming and well-kept inn in the countryside during the summer, but for this dump it does appear to be a total rip off.
To make things even worse (somehow), it turns out that the (unpaid) employee working the front desk charged guests the wrong amount – the room charge should have been $209.
Steve Dickson lays it out to Ramsay like this: “This is unorganized f—ing chaos is what this is.”
Back to dinner service: when Ramsay forces Sandy to head out into the dining room to ask the diners about their meals, it’s wall-to-wall negative reviews: terrible risotto, hard vegetables, and it takes forever to get served (awful) food.
A staff meeting in which Ramsay expresses his disbelief that no one is getting paid – and the staff is quite sizeable, I’ll add – quickly turns into an intervention of sorts for the deluded Sand.
“Stop the lies!” Richard shouts at Sandy, with relation to his opinion that the Four Seasons Inn had ever been operating well, even from the outset.
“We’ve hit every bump in the road,” Sandy says lamely at one point, before digging back at Richard about his poor marketing plans.
“Truth hurts… I guess I can be one big asshole, can’t I?” Sandy tells the camera.
And if that’s not enough, we’re forced to see Ramsay the next day try out the hot tub in his tiny bright blue speedo. Gordon actually enjoys it, though the nearby pool is completely unusable.
After that, Ramsay confronts Sandy with a group of hotel guests who tell the owner how bad their experience was staying at the hotel. Which then leads to Ramsay breaking out the black light… which never leads to good news on Hotel Hell.
Ramsay points out to one stain and explains that “it begins with S.” You don’t have to be an Oxford University English professor to figure out what that means, kids.
One guest announces that they’re so grossed out that they’re going to bailout, even though they’re supposed to stay at the Four Seasons Inn for another night.
Sandy separately tells the camera that he feels like he’s being “flogged in the town square.”
“I’m mortified,” he adds.
In another private chat with Sandy, Ramsay sees the biggest problem as being Sandy spending all his time in the kitchen instead of running the entire operation. Sandy readily agrees and says he’s open to making changes to turn things around.
The strange thing here is that even with Sandy focused on the kitchen, the restaurant service by all accounts is godawful, but maybe it’ll be addition by subtraction in letting the outspoken Steve take his proper role as head chef.
To reinforce the change, Ramsay ritualistically burns Sandy’s chef’s uniform in front of the staff, to their delight.
Overnight, the Four Seasons Inn goes through a full renovation… including a name renovation: it is rechristened as Layla’s Riverside Lodge. Sandy also cleaned himself up, shaved, and put on a suit and doesn’t look like a maintenance guy at a New England factory for the first time.
Inside the inn, new furniture and some paint make the place look far less dingy. And then the restaurant menu overhaul is a Gordon Ramsay special, with a smaller selection of fresh, local items. I’ll also point out that Ramsay always refers to his dishes as “stunning” multiple times at this point of the episode.
In the guest rooms, full steam cleaning, and $100,000 of new linens (which seems like a lot for linens, but then again I’m not a hotel owner) in addition to new décor make the place look far more attractive and comfortable.
And that’s all before we get to the kennel, which now actually looks like it can be used as housing for dogs that hotel guests can feel good about (though the trend these days seems to be hotels where you can keep your pets in your hotel room – perhaps driven by competition from AirBnb).
When Ramsay says goodbye to Sandy, the innkeeper reveals that he’s going to start putting the entire staff on payroll immediately. It’s really unclear why he’s “all of the sudden” able to start paying what seems to be a dozen or more employees, and it’s also unclear what the situation will be with regard to backpay.
This part of the episode is also unusual because we jump from the hotel renovation to Ramsay taking off without seeing much else going on in between. Ramsay simply tells Sandy that he’s glad he sees what “potential” there is at Layla’s Riverside Lodge.
Hotel Hell, “Four Seasons Inn”/Layla’s Riverside Lodge: is it still open?
No… though it seems Sandy MacDougal owned it for about eight years before selling in 2022.
It is currently known as the Sugar Maple Inn, and has a 4.5 star rating with 12 reviews on Tripadvisor.
Some stats and info about Hotel Hell, “Four Seasons Inn”
TV SHOW – Hotel Hell
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 2, Episode 4
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
EPISODE DESCRIPTION – Gordon visits West Dover in Vermont, to try to save a dog-friendly hotel that’s desperately in need of help. Sandy MacDougall, the owner, runs the hotel like a hostel with unpaid staff staying in the rooms instead of paying guests.
GENRE – Docuseries, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV, Reality TV
CAST – Gordon Ramsay