“Are we not in Florida?” – Gordon Ramsay
This is the first truly tropical edition of Hotel Hell that I can recall, as we head down to Fort Pierce, Florida – located halfway between Miami and Orlando on the Atlantic coast – to visit the Beachfront Inn & Inlet.
Brian Paul bought the Beachfront Inn “after running his family’s successful local fish market,” Gordon Ramsay tells us.
Liza, the hotel manager, frames her opinion of Brian like this: “I’m not exactly sure that he has any hotel experience.”
Gina, a server, has a strange way of getting to a point: “Brian as an owner is physical here sometimes. He just, like, kind of wanders around.”
As she says this, we see Brian kind of wandering about the hotel parking lot.
Joey, the sous chef, feels that Brian is way too hands off as a manager and should have his “eyes and hands in everything.” Later he says of Head Chef Ben: “I can’t really tell you what he does.”
Further, Liza feels that Brian’s decision to stock the staff with personal friends of his – Chef Ben among them – was a mistake as they tend to take advantage of him.
James, the restaurant manager, has yet another slant on things, blaming a lack of consistency with the food for adding to the business’ troubles.
Ben for his part thinks that the Beachfront Inn “lacks direction” and “tries to be too many things at once: a nightclub, a bar, a restaurant, a hotel, a wedding venue, a concert venue, a place to do your Christmas party at.”
And with all of that going on, the Beachfront Inn is the kind of spot where guests and staff get to “hooting and hollering” into the early AM hours, causing some hotel guests to complain, says Joey.
When Ramsay arrives and meets Liza at the reception desk – which looks like a little like a waiting room at a car wash – the British chef quickly notes that there are pieces of driftwood “dipped in varnish” that are on sale, one with a price tag of $22.
“Insane, no?” he says.
I’d say yes.
Also: none have ever been sold.
When Ramsay arrives in his guest room, located in the “Caribbean” wing of what turns out to be a motel-style set-up, his first comment is, “It stinks in here. There’s a very sort of damp, musty smell.” It’s also “filthy” and “disgusting.”
It’s always interesting to learn the price of the rooms we get to visit from afar on Hotel Hell and in this case the charge is $180, presumably almost entirely leaning on the fact there’s a moderately decent beach view from the back of the motel room.
When Ramsay meets Brian, Gordon calls the Beachfront Inn owner out on some of his initial findings and then heads to the restaurant to sample its food. Not surprisingly, Ramsay finds his chicken wings dry, the mac and cheese not “real” (as it uses penne pasta), and the tuna burger tastes “off” (he soon finds out that it is frozen tuna and not fresh).
It’s important to note that the restaurant menu advertises “fresh fish” on its menus as one of its featured offerings.
When Ramsay checks out the freezer, he also finds “frozen avocados.” This prompts him to ask Brian, “are we not in Florida?”
This is a totally non sequitur, but I must note that it’s around this point in the episode when I realized that Brian looks quite a bit like a young Kelsey Grammer.
As Ramsay digs further into the food storage situation, things get worse: potatoes being stored in a “slimy” bucket of water, moldy vegetables, tuna that has clearly seen better days, and a massive, covered container of pina colada.
“It’s festered, it’s off, it’s bubbling,” Ramsay stammers in reaction to opening the top of the large container.
Brian readily throws Chef Ben under the bus at this point. “Gordon, he’s the chef, he’s the executive chef,” he says.
And that’s before Ramsay finds what might be the thing that sets him off more than anything else: “raw chicken on top of cooked chicken.”
“I had them for lunch,” he adds, glaring at Brian.
Chef Ben then shows up and immediately lifts the bus that had just been sent at him by Brian. “I didn’t do it,” he says lamely. “I turn my back for a minute and this is the kind of s— that happens.”
“You now are running a restaurant that is cross-contaminated,” Ramsay tells them both. “You are heading for a massive disaster.”
As Ben returns to the kitchen, all he can say is, “It wasn’t me, somebody else did it.”
Separately, Ramsay tells Brian that Ben is a chef who has “given up and is going through the motions,” as another staffer, James, tells Ramsay that he advised Brian to fire Ben months earlier.
Ramsay soon tells Liza, “Ben’s checked out, Brian’s never checked in, and they’re all blaming each other.”
After we learn that Brian’s brother, Eric, has been bankrolling the Beachfront Inn and is weeks away from cutting him off, we reach the part of the episode where hotel guests confront the hotel owner with the terrible experiences they’ve had. One of the comedically unique ones here is one guy who semi-brags about how he knows how to work the hotel bar in such a way that he’s able to score lots of free drink every time he hits the place (which seems like it’s pretty frequently).
What’s honestly a little unsettling is that Brian starts increasingly repeating himself as he becomes rattled.
When the overnight renovation is revealed, the guest rooms vastly improved, cozy and warm whereas they had looked oppressive and dingy before. We then move to the overhauled menu, which is classed up measurably and includes dishes such as mahi-mahi, fresh chopped salad, and actually edible-looking chicken wings.
I’ll note that Brian is 33-years-old, and I mention that because it seems that Ramsay has a larger degree of personal dislike for the Beachfront Inn owner versus the central figures in the average Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares episode. I suspect that Ramsay naturally gives older people a natural extra degree of respect, and also that he feels aggrieved about owners who are clearly and vastly inexperienced for the role they’ve taken on.
Meanwhile, as relaunch night kicks off, Brian forgets the table that the Fort Pierce mayor is sitting at, causing a crisis in the restaurant kitchen.
Related to my note above, I’ve never before seen Ramsay grab someone by the wrist and pull him across a room as he does here. He seethes as tells Brian that he’s “about to get in my f—ing car and go home.”
And that’s before Brian tells Ramsay that the reason why a plate of chicken that was sent back to the kitchen was because it’s raw, while Ramsay can quickly and visually see that it’s actually overcooked and dry.
“That’s it, I’m done,” Ramsay says quietly. This is when I realized too that Ramsay’s frequent yelling and haranguing as a TV show host is done as a means of motivation, whereas the quiet voice is more for when he realizes the situation is literally hopeless.
After Ramsay leaves, it’s a combination of funny and pathetic as we see Brian continue to walk around the kitchen rather aimlessly, still holding the plate of raw/overcooked chicken, with a deer in the headlights look in his eyes.
Back in his room, we see Ramsay packing as he says, “I can’t give that guy anymore advice… I can’t keep telling him to make decisions.”
It seems to all boil down to this for Ramsay: “When you’re weak, you’ve got no chance of running a business.”
I’ve watched and recapped dozens of Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell episodes, and this is the first time I can recall Ramsay bailing out and not returning with some outcome of reconciliation and progress.
There’s an end of episode segment in which Ramsay, via voiceover, talks about how Brian is finally “stepping up” and acting more like a leader, which seems to be an attempt to end the visit to the Beachfront Inn on a slightly positive note.
Hotel Hell, “Beachfront Inn”: is it still open?
No! While the Beachfront Inn stayed open for another four years after the Hotel Hell visit, the hotel was sold in 2019 and eventually reopened under new owners as the Sunrise Sands Beach Resort (via Reality TV Updates).
Some stats and info about Hotel Hell, “Beachfront Inn”
TV SHOW – Hotel Hell
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 1
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
EPISODE DESCRIPTION – Gordon Ramsay visits a “Caribbean” style resort hotel in Fort Pierce, Florida where the young inexperienced owner, Brian is making guests’ time at the hotel miserable with filthy rooms, late night concerts and shocking service.
GENRE – Docuseries, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV, Reality TV
CAST – Gordon Ramsay