“Goddamn it Afni, why didn’t you get to that?” – Brent Macdonald
The Lakeview Hotel is located in Chelan, Washington, roughly halfway between Seattle to the west and Spokane to the east.
Married couple Brent and Afni Macdonald bought the Lakeview Hotel – in addition to B.C. Macdonald’s restaurant – in 2000, some 15 years prior to Hotel Hell’s visit. Brent tells the camera that he and his wife faced resistance to their owning a business in the small town, and he also feels that the Lakeview Hotel is the nicest one in the state of Washington.
Afni meanwhile explains that their business is “easily” losing $30,000 a month, which runs to a rate of $360,000 per year. Brent attributes the hard times to recent wildfires in the area and its presumed impact on tourism in the region.
However, Teddy the manager is out front in stating that he feels the problem is “Brent and Afni’s reputation.” Shelli, a server, imitates Afni being rude to customers (while also giving a go at imitating her accent, it should be noted). Example: “I training! You go sit down! I be with you in a minute!”
Afni for her part feels she’s the “best employer in town” and that she’s “easy to work with.” And Brent agrees that “people are lucky to work for us.”
We then cut to Brent encouraging his employee Chelsea, a server, to “get out there” and “do a little pole dance” for the customers. It’s hard to tell what the context is, but it doesn’t seem to be great, shall we say.
Into this mix enters our guy Gordon Ramsay. Upon first meeting Brent and Afni in the hotel lobby, he immediately notices how dusty and grimy the ceiling is. And in fact, there are so many cobwebs about that it almost looks like Halloween decorating going on. When the British chef bats at the ceiling with his coat to indicate how dirty it is, Brent observes, “Well, now you’ve made everything dusty.”
“This is like a cobweb on steroids,” Ramsay says at one point.
Under prolonged questioning, Brent offers up that “we’re living in a dusty environment here.”
“That’s bulls—,” Ramsay quickly fires back.
Brent soon glares at his wife and says, “Goddamn it Afni, why didn’t you get to that?”
And then moments later, to Ramsay: “You’ve got a good eye, you know that?”
So the Lakeview Hotel co-owner is determined to hit all angles of deflection within the first few minutes of the episode, it seems.
While all of this is going on, we learn something truly strange that doesn’t really have anything to do with Hotel Hell but therefore makes it all the more interesting: it turns out that a standard thing that Brent does is that he goes off on vacation for a week to relax – Mexico most recently – and only during the second week is wife Afni allowed to come and join him.
As Brent takes Ramsay to his guest room, he tells him that it’s the best room for people who haven’t been “laid” in a while. Ramsay meanwhile is intent on pointing out how dusty the ceilings are throughout the Lakeview Hotel.
Down at the restaurant, Ramsay quickly notes that there are no local wines on the menu, while meanwhile he learns that multiple items listed – such as pizza and steak – are not available. When his appetizer, minestrone soup, arrives, Ramsay notes right away that it’s not homemade.
Oh, and the Angus hamburger? Made from frozen. There’s also a teriyaki chicken sandwich that is branded as “nearly famous” that Ramsay of course mocks multiple times.
When Ramsay confronts Brent and Afni about his terrible restaurant experience, one interesting if lame bit of background comes out with relation to the wine list: Brent explains that because the local wineries in the area have all opened their own restaurants, he doesn’t want to support his “competition” by having local wines on offer at the Lakeview Hotel.
You can kind of tell when Gordon Ramsay has particular disdain for the business owners he deals with, and this is one of those episodes. You can tell he has real non-reality TV-style condescension toward Brent when the latter attempts to explain that because he allows the frozen beef patties he serves to thaw out before they are cooked, that they are actually not “frozen.”
“It comes in frozen,” Brent (sort of) explains.
If it’s not clear, this is a truly hilarious moment of reality television.
This incident prompts Ramsay to question multiple groups of customers about whether they would prefer fresh or frozen burgers, and it’s a cringe-humor delight to watch Brent squirm while this is going on.
Finally, Ramsay has had it and tells Brent, “You’ve been making up bulls— all day.” Then the British chef lays out his findings about him in questioning his staff, and the responses turned up include:
- Passive aggressive
- Condescending
- Inappropriate
- Stubborn
So not great in other words.
After Brent denies all of this, Ramsay pulls him aside and asks, “Is this a joke to you? Are you f—ing around?”
And then Ramsay lays out the core problems: “Delusional, stubborn, old fashioned, and f—ing pompous.”
“Anything else?” Brent replies weakly.
“Next time I’ll know to do a little dusting,” he adds sarcastically, clearly indicating that he has in no way taken Ramsay seriously in the slightest.
Therefore, Ramsay decides to go next level, and by next level I mean he busts out the black light. This easily spotlights for the Lakeview Hotel owners the blood… and other fluid stains splattered all over an example guest room.
This precipitates a screaming match over exactly when the last time the room was thoroughly cleaned, punctuated by Ramsay shouting, “This is from years!” And: “Stop lying!”
The arguing continues as Ramsay brings customers into the room to further humiliate Brent (and the much quieter Afni). Brent gets super salty at this point, pointing his finger at Ramsay and saying, “I have not said one f—ing lie to you.”
After a while of this, Brent finally concedes, “I can see that, Gordon,” with relation to how nasty the cleanliness of his hotel is and walks out of the room dejectedly.
Ramsay then has a chat with Afni about the couple’s son, who apparently had been fired from the hotel amidst having a drinking problem of some kind. Ramsay had already implied a few times during the episode that Brent had given up on his son without really trying to help him, but it’s really hard for we as the audience to know more about the situation than that based on what we’re allowed to see.
When Ramsay meets with Brent the next day, another layer of the onion is peeled back: Brent had gone through a messy divorce, and his now ex-wife married another guy the very day that their divorce was finalized. And meanwhile, his relationship with his daughter is so poor that he was not invited to her wedding.
“I didn’t even know she got married,” Brent tells the British chef.
Also: Brent has a few grandchildren that he hasn’t been allowed to meet.
When Brent tells Gordon that his “stubbornness” has caused him to wait until his children are ready to thaw the relationship, Ramsay uses this as a segue to advise Brent that he must be much more “generous” in both his personal and professional life if he wants to see things turn around.
Next up: an attempt to rehabilitate Brent and Afni’s poor reputation in the local community. Ramsay gathers local business leaders to find out what they think of the Lakeview Hotel owners, while Brent and Afni watch the proceedings from afar on a video feed. The highlight is when one woman calls Brent an “undertaker” in terms of his demeanor. But overall, everyone sees the couple as not helping one another in the local community. It’s clear overall that Brent and Afni are seen as both outsiders and black sheep in the Chelan business community.
Finally, the couple is trotted out, and they both apologize for their poor decisions and attitude, and vow to change. Sometimes you need “a slap in the face,” is how Afni frames it.
With positive momentum now finally taking place, the renovation to the Lakeview Hotel is revealed: most importantly, it’s spotless for once, but overall it looks like a marked improvement – at least in terms of the short scene in the lobby that we’re shown. The menu has also been overhauled in the restaurant, but again it’s a lightning quick scene so we are not given any details. We are told that the restaurant now offers local wines now, which seems to be a no brainer.
Brent does push back on Ramsay’s repeated criticism that children are not allowed to stay at the Lakeview Hotel, maintaining that he’s inflexible on this point.
“There’s an amazing guy underneath all those layers,” Ramsay tells Brent in saying goodbye to the couple.
In the episode’s closing segment, Ramsay says via voiceover that Brent has “quickly reverted to his old ways, distancing himself from the locals.” Even worse: “Much of the staff have left or been fired, and the hotel’s reputation within the town has only gotten worse.”
That’s one of the sourest notes that I’ve ever seen an episode of Hotel Hell or Kitchen Nightmares end on!
Hotel Hell, “Lakeview Hotel”: is it still open?
Not surprisingly, the Lakeview Hotel is closed. Via Wikipedia, “The hotel was sold to new owners in summer 2021 and renamed The Landing,” but was subsequently closed.
Via Yelp, the Lakeview Hotel has a purely awful 2.4 out of 5 stars rating on 37 reviews.
Chase P. has a pretty damning take: “Wouldn’t even give these guys 1 star. Racist owners. First started when I booked through Expedia. The owner was acting like I couldn’t afford to pay for my room as if I didn’t book the whole stay already though Expedia. Accused me of smoking weed from the moment I walked in and saw I was a young black man to the time I left and the tried to charge my chard $750 after I left. They tried to charge my card $750 because I left the room dirty?…. if they weren’t so short staffed they wouldn’t be mad. I called to see why they tried to charge my card and was cussed out by both owner. Don’t spend your money here because it won’t be appreciated. Literally tried to charge my card $750 cause I didn’t leave the room clean… isn’t that what housekeeping is for?
HORRIBLE SERVICE”
Some stats and info about Hotel Hell, “Lakeview Hotel”
TV SHOW – Hotel Hell
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 7
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
EPISODE DESCRIPTION – Gordon Ramsay checks in to the luxury Lakeview Hotel in Lake Chelan, Washington. Owner Brent is at a loss, as he watches his dreams of being a success fail miserably.
GENRE – Docuseries, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV, Reality TV
CAST – Gordon Ramsay